Staff Stories: Marceline Jones

Dear Growing Hope Community,

August 8th marked the last day of our eight-week Summer Teen Leadership Program! Over the past eight weeks, 12 Ypsilanti teens joined us as part of our farm staff for an intensive summer program of farm work and workshops on food justice, community organizing, social identity, and cooking lessons. The teens worked hard this summer caring for their Oasis Garden and the Sharing Garden, harvesting food for our CSA program and free produce cooler, and partnering with local organizations to deepen their knowledge about the Washtenaw County food system.

Last summer, the teens established The Oasis Garden, a section of the farm where they are responsible for crop planning, planting seeds, and tending from start to finish! The Oasis is identified by its colorful garden beds and welcoming energy- it is a part of the farm built for the community to visit and enjoy. This summer, the teen program took over the stewardship of the Growing Hope Sharing Garden! The Sharing Garden is the first part of the farm you see when visiting Growing Hope and it is open to the public to harvest their own food to take home. The teens worked hard to make the Sharing Garden another welcoming and inviting space by adding signs and colorful murals on the garden beds and planting abundant, easy-to-harvest crops!

The Teen Leadership Program is an integral part of Growing Hope, and we are so proud of and grateful for this incredible group of young people! This Summer, three of our teens, Marceline Jones, Cecelia Johnson, and Jackson Prevedel, graduated High School and will be moving on from the Teen Leadership Program. We are so proud of their work at Growing Hope and wish them all the best in their future endeavors! Marceline wanted to share a few words about their time in the Growing Hope Teen Leadership Program below!

Hello everyone!

My name is Marceline, and I have been in the Teen Leadership Program for two years. This fall, I plan to attend Michigan State University and major in Criminal Justice. I hope to specialize in missing person cases with the goal of giving closure to many families and friends who need answers. I know how scary it can be to have someone you love abruptly disappear. This is close to me as an Indigenous black queer person because there is a high percentage of people in minority communities who go missing every day and many cases that go unrecognized. While I am not going into agriculture, I plan to continue my passion for gardening at MSU and fight for food justice.

When I first started at Growing Hope, I was in a dark place. I was recently placed in foster care at 15 years old. I had issues with my health, and I didn’t have many friends at the time. While working on the farm, gardening and cooking became good coping strategies for my mental health. I was surprised that I could take a single seed and make it grow into something so beautiful, like a flower or a corn stalk, by having patience and love for the plant to grow tall.

In the afterschool program, I would usually come to the farm 2-3 hours early before work. I enjoyed walking around the farm, admiring the plants, and studying for school. This place became a home for me. Before I knew it, I realized that my coworkers and staff at Growing Hope had been giving me the same patience and love to grow as we would do for our seedlings. All for me to Blossom into the beautiful person I am today. If I had never joined Growing Hope, I don’t know where I would be. In the end, Growing Hope saved my life. All I needed was a push to be the leader I was meant to be and to smile for the next kid who doesn’t know where they fit in.

When Growing Hope hires each year for the Teen Leadership Program, we never truly know who the new teens are or where they come from, until we all come together to work and have discussions. As always, we just have to love them, have patience, and listen to them no matter what. I will forever be grateful to Growing Hope for believing in me, when many others didn’t.

Together, we can make a change for our community and youth!

-Marceline Jones

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When Food Is Weaponized

By Julius Buzzard • July 24, 2025

Standing for Krystal Clark and the Right to Eat

The wisest plans aren't drawn, they're grown.

By Julius Buzzard • July 1, 2025

Beloved Community, The solstice has turned, and with it, so have we; from spring’s promise to summer’s abundance. Here at Growing Hope, the gardens are bursting. Our new produce stand is packed to the brim, feeding our people. The Ypsilanti Farmers Market is an eruption of flavor, fragrance, and connection with lettuces that fan open like green flames and strawberries glistening red and warm from the sun. Inside the incubator kitchen, the hum of creativity rises. Local makers prepping for pop-ups across the county, building micro-enterprises from ancestral memory and modern hustle. And our Teen Leadership Program? Alive and electric. Twelve young visionaries are learning, leading, and laboring with heart. The farm pulses with their energy. As the land leans fully into the heat of summer, I find myself reflecting, not just on the harvest, but on the moment. The landscape around us is shifting fast. This moment has been described in many different ways, but we know the truth: this is a time of hope and possibility. Hope is not naïve. It’s an act of defiance. Of imagination. Of sovereignty. In complex times, the wisest plans aren't drawn, they're grown. Last month, I had the honor of testifying before the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Agriculture . I shared what you already know: Growing Hope doesn’t just run programs. We grow possibility. We practice emergence. We tend a living ecosystem of relationships. I told them: Each year, Growing Hope supports hundreds of backyard growers through our Home Vegetable Garden program. We provide raised beds, rich soil, seedlings, and the knowledge to grow a harvest that feeds families. These aren’t symbolic plots—they’re productive, generative, and abundant. And from them, we are witnessing the reweaving of a community food web—a quiet, powerful economy of mutual aid. Tomatoes for cucumbers. Collards on porches. Elders teaching youth to save seed. These gardens offer more than food. They offer belonging. They offer resilience. They offer infrastructure—the kind that actually holds when the shocks come. This isn’t charity. This is solidarity. It’s sovereignty. It’s survival. Together, we carry resilience. Together, we cultivate hope. Together, we are growing a hyper-local, sovereign, joyful food system; one garden, one porch, one plate at a time. In solidarity and soil, Julius P.S. The future of food assistance is uncertain ; we’re collecting stories to highlight the essential role that SNAP and other food assistance programs play in the Washtenaw County local food system. Keep an eye on our blog to learn more.

Innovating for Inclusion: Lessons from Old City Acres on Digital SNAP Access

By Julius Buzzard • June 27, 2025

Old City Acres, a Ypsilanti urban farm and food hub, is one of the only farms in the region individually accredited to accept SNAP. The farm is owned and run by Alex Ball, who has lived and farmed along the Huron River his entire life. Growing up in Southeast Michigan during The Great Recession, Alex knows that people’s financial and food security can be changed overnight, and has always understood the importance of SNAP programs for community food security. Old City Acres is primarily an e-grocer–they offer home delivery and multiple in-town pickup locations for produce, but all of the produce is purchased through their online portal. When they first started taking SNAP, the intent was to integrate more SNAP users into online CSA boxes and other produce sales. Alex worked with Taste the Local Difference, a Michigan-based local food marketing organization, to generally expand e-access for local food. However, they found that there is very little demand for online SNAP sales, largely because of a lack of awareness and training on the customer side. Despite his best efforts, Alex wasn’t able to break through that barrier for e-grocery SNAP use. Despite 20% of his sales being SNAP pre-pandemic, there was such little demand after moving online that he eventually stopped advertising about e-grocery SNAP and isn’t accepting new SNAP customers (though long-term customers are still able to use SNAP). Old City Acres spends more on just maintaining their SNAP infrastructure (the Bridge card reader) than they make in profit from SNAP sales, but have decided to keep their infrastructure because when they do have their pop-up, in-person, farm stand, there is still high demand for SNAP. Because of the struggle to transfer in-person SNAP use into the e-grocery space, Old City Acres has their own internal food access programs. They offer credit packages, where investing $75 or more into the farm gives you a bonus on each dollar you spend. They also offer no-interest payment plans on all of the credit packages, and there has been a surge in demand for this option over the past year. Finally, Old City Acres also offers a $10/week for an as-much-as-you-want option geared towards students and older community members, which people can access regardless of their official SNAP eligibility. These options help fill the gap left by a lack of e-grocery SNAP use, but they also put Old City Acres in a constant battle to maintain profitability, since they’re bearing the food assistance costs internally. The farm used to be much more access-focused, but according to Alex they have been left with no choice but to raise certain prices, which is difficult in an area where the customer base is so susceptible to even small price changes (about ⅓ of the customer base makes less than 50k in household income). This has left Old City Acres in the position of having to make tough decisions, not all of which help with community food access. The lack of SNAP awareness and use in small-scale e-grocery spaces highlights one of the limitations of current food assistance programs. This post is part of a series by Emma Rose Hardy, a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan and the Rackham Local Food Systems Intern at Growing Hope. The series aims to highlight the essential role that SNAP and other food assistance programs play in the Washtenaw County local food system.

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