Free Article from our Fall 2020 issue: The GROW Project
By Sarah Keyes and Anne Munier
“Things like the GROW Project will change the world. This is where we need to put our energy.” – GROW Project teacher
“I learned that all salads begin with a plant” – Grade 5 GROW student
“I can’t believe I actually like kale!” – Grade 6 GROW student
Every year, hundreds of elementary students in Kingston, Ontario learn about good food, their community, collaboration, and environmental stewardship through Loving Spoonful’s GROW Project.
GROW provides a full year of active, curriculum-connected learning opportunities in classrooms and school gardens, using food as an entryway to teaching about social justice, food systems, healthy eating, culture, ecology, and climate change. We love to get out of our seats and “learn by doing” through activities like preparing healthy snacks, meeting composting worms, examining the barriers to food security, and role-playing to bring garden ecology to life. And of course, planting a school garden!
Each spring, students design, plant, and care for a 12- x 24-foot school garden, learning about collaboration and responsibility in the process. “Salad Bar Celebrations” in June recognize students’ hard work as they harvest, prepare, and devour (truly) a tasty salad together. School-grown produce is also donated to local social service agencies, helping students understand the importance of contributing to their community by donating hundreds of pounds of fresh food each year.
The GROW Project is informed by place-based education, which connects students to place to develop the social and environmental ethics required to act responsibly in their communities. Every year we hear students saying things like, “Wow, this salad is actually good! I guess I can’t say I hate salad anymore”; “I feel connected to nature when I’m in the garden”; and, “It feels good to be growing food for ourselves and our community.” By helping students foster healthy, eco-literate, and community-oriented behaviors, we aim to support their long-term wellbeing.
Why? We believe that one of the best ways to build strong communities is to focus on the wellbeing of young people. Garden-based education is shown to improve students’ food habits, including attitudes towards and consumption of fruits & vegetables[1] [2], reducing sedentary behaviours2, and increasing students’ desire to learn and academic achievement1,[3]. Gardens offer opportunities for a connection to nature[4], and promote psychosocial development such as critical thinking, empathy, teamwork, and other important interpersonal skills[5]. They also provide points of connection between schools and neighbourhoods, and are visible models of urban agriculture.
Communities are increasingly recognizing — and wanting to tackle — the critical issues of food security, environmental sustainability, and community health[6], and some are establishing school gardens to help address these complex and multifaceted problems[7]. Their prevalence in the U.S. has been growing: 31% of schools hosted a garden in 2014, compared to 12% in 2006[8]. Meanwhile in Canada, it is suggested that only 15% of schools offer gardening activities[9]. Knowing the value in garden-based education, Loving Spoonful set out to build a comprehensive program that could be a model both regionally and across Canada.
Since 2017, we have expanded the GROW Project from seven to 21 elementary schools in the Kingston region thanks to partnerships with the Limestone District School Board and the Algonquin Lakeshore Catholic School Board. A three-year grant from a provincial granting agency, the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF), for over $500,000 has kept the program growing until this year, with other grants and local supporters contributing to the expansion as well.
During this time, we’ve been able to reach almost 2,000 urban and rural students while further developing and refining our program. Working with Grade 4th– to 8th-grade students, we offer a series of seven curriculum-connected workshops that pair learning about big picture food system and environmental issues with hands-on activities that allow students to build life skills. From “Salsa and Social Justice” to “Garlic & the Food System” to “Food, Climate Change & Garden Planting”, we’re tackling important issues in compelling and engaging ways. Since food production is directly linked to environmental sustainability, it’s a natural “in” to teach about making thoughtful choices about both nature and food; these lessons are further reinforced with students while gardening each spring.
As new school gardens are built, students engage in fence-mural projects that see them design and paint their garden fences with the help of a local artist. This is a chance for them to explore what their school community consists of and to communicate this visually to the wider community. In addition to gardens, OTF funding also allowed students to enjoy two field trips — to a local farm and a conservation area — each year.
Among the many benefits that food and garden education offer, we focus our intended outcomes on improving students’ knowledge, interest, and skills in food literacy, community, and the environment. Throughout our GROW expansion, we have worked with a professional evaluator to assess the program and to maximize its benefits. The feedback we received demonstrated that we are well on our way to achieving our outcomes: students are showing an increased interest in making healthy and nutritious food choices, understanding that their choices impact the environment and learning what it means to be part of a diverse community.
We were in the midst of verifying these outcomes in our 2019–2020 student focus groups, but were cut short from being able to fully show our impact as school closures due to COVID-19 halted the final stage of our summative evaluation.
Results in the COVID-19 context point to food literacy outcomes being achieved most strongly. (This is unsurprising, as the workshops that we missed in Spring 2020 focus more strongly on ecology, climate change, and environmental stewardship.) Our final report indicates “GROW workshops had a notable impact on students’ ability to articulate the concept of healthy eating beyond the individual, including increased understanding of the food system, food equity, food access, and food as an aspect of culture. Participants also improved food skills and shared how their food attitudes changed — including having the desire to choose and prepare healthy food, and an openness to trying new foods.”
Although our professional evaluation was incomplete, the impact of the program on students has been seen by GROW staff, teachers, administrators, and volunteers for years. In evaluation responses from 2019, teachers indicated, “The children are much more in tune to their environment and where the food comes from”, “Students are developing an interest and more knowledge about the social justice aspect of growing food locally”, and, “For some kids it is an opportunity to be hands on, to do something real. They are fully engaged with it, where they are not engaged in a lot of things. But then I have some other kids in the group where it is an enrichment opportunity for them. They are getting to be a leader”. Coupled with feedback from students captured in this video and collected every year, we know we are having a positive impact on students’ wellbeing.
Having a community organization like ours offer such a comprehensive program, provided largely without a cost to schools, has huge benefits for the school community and the Kingston region. Hands-on learning is encouraged but not embedded in the provincial curriculum. Despite the critical need for students to have experiential learning opportunities, many teachers and schools are generally unable to regularly offer them due to lack of funding, time, expertise, resources, and logistical constraints. Kingston now hosts one of the largest school garden programs in Ontario, with a model that has real potential for replication in other regions. This benefits the city in terms of their climate and sustainability goals and puts Kingston on the map for being a leader in school-garden programming.
OTF funding to support the Loving Spoonful team, including 2.5 full-time equivalent staff members, as well as project evaluation have been instrumental in building GROW to what it is today. We have learned lots of lessons along the way that can be translated to school-garden programs both large and small.
When considering a food-education program, some key lessons we have learned centre on collaboration, communication, guidelines, curriculum-connection, adaptive learning, recognizing the limits of scope, and project ownership.
One of our strongest recommendations is to build partnerships. Whether it be finding a champion at the School Board or within schools to promote your program and gain legitimacy or linking up with local farmers and artists to engage kids in the garden and classroom, relying on the strength of the people and groups in your community allows you to build a program that is collaborative and impactful.
Collaboration is vital because hands-on food activities take a lot of people power. GROW wouldn’t be possible without hundreds of volunteer hours in classrooms and gardens each year. Community volunteers help to ensure that students are using knives safely, seeds are planted where they are meant to go, and gardens are looked after during the summer. An ongoing challenge has been getting enough volunteers as we’ve grown our program, as the daytime availability required for in-school workshops is difficult for many. Ideally, establishing a team of volunteers in each school would provide the best support, although in our experience, that was difficult to do. Fortunately, we could rely on volunteers from the broader Loving Spoonful pool to help out when needed.
At all stages of establishing GROW, communication has been key to our success. As GROW expanded from a grassroots initiative to a bigger and more formal program, mounting priorities for the school boards included risk management, regulations, and safety protocol development. We managed this by meeting with several school board representatives to work through roles & responsibilities, procedures, timelines, and project expectations. Similar topics are discussed at each GROW school in September every year, when we meet with school administration, custodians, parent council reps, and GROW teachers to ensure that we’re all on the same page from the outset. This approach has helped build positive relationships with school communities and streamline the process for installing new school gardens.
The Limestone District School Board’s “School Garden Guidelines” (2014) also helped set the stage for expanding the GROW Project so more gardens could be established on school grounds. Outside of GROW, it also gave schools a framework to work with and logistics to consider for the planning, design, and maintenance phases required for garden success. During our expansion, we updated the garden guidelines to be GROW-specific. While both of these guidelines have since been changed due to new accessibility requirements, they could still be a useful starting point for other Boards to consider.
Turning to program content development, connecting our lessons to the curriculum was important to both the school boards and schools, as it gave the program credibility and created buy-in. The curriculum connections make it easy for teachers to integrate our program into their yearly lesson plans without it feeling like an “add-on.” They also make GROW more attractive to teachers or administrators who are new to the program. As one teacher told us, “GROW ticks all the boxes.” The curriculum links were made by a retired teacher/principal in our case, but could also be a good project for local B.Ed. students — again, partnerships are key!
When developing our program, we also make sure our lessons are both age-appropriate and evidence-based. There’s SO much to teach about when it comes to food, and so many directions to take conversations. We’ve learned over the years to focus our workshops on content that kids can understand, and to deliver it in ways that are engaging. Getting ideas and resources from trusted sources is crucial; we check facts and sources to make sure what we teach is in-line with research and best practices.
Another crucial component to new and experiential programing is the ability to be both nimble and adaptive. Luckily, our grant has allowed us the support and space to evaluate what was working well and not so well, and to change our program implementation as a result. Integrating a feedback mechanism to gauge how the program is working for teachers and students is important. We started by developing a logic model to understand how our activities would lead to our desired outcomes, then distributed annual surveys and held focus groups to learn what we could improve and to determine whether we were reaching our intended goals.
One of the things that we heard time and again from students through our evaluation process was how much they liked, and learned from, hands-on activities, confirming the value of experiential learning. We continuously look for ways to turn even more of our lessons from listening to doing, knowing that learning through activities is both memorable and fun. We think we’ve found a good medium: 10 to 15 minutes maximum of interactive discussion (a.k.a. “talking”) before we get students out of their seats to make lessons come to life. This is important for teachers as well, as one recently told us, “GROW is the perfect balance of academic and hands-on experiential learning. It’s great for all types of learners.”
On the big-picture side, we’ve learned a lot about project scope through the course of our three-year grant. Originally, we promised a lot: from family engagement workshops at each school, to offering teacher trainings, to hiring youth interns for summer garden maintenance. What we learned by including all these elements is that we were trying to do too much. One of our biggest lessons is that if the program is meant to affect students, that is where our efforts should lie. Rather than doing it all, we recommend using the program’s limited resources to simplify and deepen programming, making it more impactful (and more sustainable) for those involved.
For us, this meant cutting out parts that were not as relevant and attracted less uptake, including those mentioned above. Low participation from school communities in garden maintenance in July–August also led us to limit the number of “summer gardens” we planted and to simplify their design or to limit them to cover crops.
Moving forward, another way we’re going to simplify and deepen our program is to increase its ownership at the school level. We’re making videos and compiling our lessons and activities so that teachers are equipped to offer the program without us having to be at each workshop. Doing so will allow us to operate the program with less capacity and prioritize being present for the parts of the program that are harder to do without support, including food preparation and gardening.
To increase garden and program ownership at the outset, we also suggest establishing ways that garden maintenance can be shared. Are there ways to embed the garden into the school routine, either through school volunteers, custodians, or teachers? The garden piece of a school-garden program can become quite onerous if the work is not shared! Looking for ways to connect the garden into the culture of the school so that all classrooms contribute to its success makes logistical sense.
Thinking about sustainability is imperative when creating any experiential learning program. What you create must align with how much time, volunteer effort, and resources you have access to. Planning with this in mind will ensure your program is in line with your capacity. Once you develop your plan, be sure you can “sell it” to demonstrate the value your program brings to the school. We did this by linking what we do to the Ministry of Education’s and school board’s strategic health and wellness priorities.
With our OTF grant funding coming to a close in the fall of 2020, we are exploring ways to maintain our program, likely with less staff capacity moving forward. We’re busy looking for funding sources and developing a sustainability plan, knowing that our unique program needs to be supported by our region to remain impactful. Garden program sustainability and stakeholder involvement is in fact an area that scholars indicate is ripe for future research7.
Local school boards are keen for the GROW Project to continue. “We know the value this well-developed program brings to our students, schools, and community,” says Dan Hendry, Sustainable Initiatives Coordinator at the Limestone District School Board. “This is the kind of intervention that has real impacts on long-term health and wellbeing. I want to make sure GROW is around for years to come so that as many students as possible can benefit from it.”
While nothing beats being in the gardens with kids, the school closures due to COVID-19 did allow us some space to come up with ideas and resources to offer our program digitally, which will help with the sustainability issue. Additionally, GROW will not require as much staff time once these resources are complete. The “GROW@Home” content and materials that we developed for the Spring 2020 session were enthusiastically received by GROW teachers and families. We are in the process of developing more videos, lessons, and Teacher Exploration Kits for our Fall workshop series, which will be shared with our 21 partner schools. The kits will include all the materials and background information for our GROW teachers to facilitate the hands-on components of our lessons, should Loving Spoonful staff be unable to visit classes this year. Importantly, the Exploration Kits will be made available to all Kingston & Area schools, allowing more schools to benefit from GROW Project programming than ever before.
We believe that similar to School Nutrition programs, hands-on food literacy education should be funded and supported by the government, as this kind of healthy living intervention can lead to improved long-term health and wellbeing. We have attempted to move this agenda forward through our local Food Policy Council, and while this has not yet led to success, it remains an objective we work towards knowing that this kind of preventative, skill-building programing needs to be available to all students.
In the meantime, we hope you find value in the lessons we’ve learned on our ongoing experiential journey and wish you luck as you develop a garden program of your own!
ABOUT LOVING SPOONFUL
Loving Spoonful has been connecting people with good food since 2008. We do this by increasing access to fresh food (Over $1.9 million of fresh food has been donated to date); building food knowledge and skills (Thousands of adults, teens, and children have been part of school- and community-based programs in “Community Kitchens” and “The GROW Project.”); tackling life’s challenges by offering targeted programs for vulnerable community members; working for systematic change by collaborating with our local Food Policy Council and other partners to advocate for food and income security; and helping to build a vibrant, healthy local food system by partnering and promoting local farmers and chefs in events and programs. To find out more, visit www.lovingspoonful.org.
Sarah Keyes is the Program Manager at Loving Spoonful in Kingston, Ontario. She oversees the organization’s food literacy programs, including the GROW Project and Community Kitchens, helping create hands-on learning opportunities that build skills, health, and community connections. Sarah grew up on the east coast of Canada and completed her Masters of Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University before moving to Ontario. She also loves adventuring, dancing, and yoga.
Anne Munier coordinates the GROW Project with Loving Spoonful. With a background in ecology, public education, climate change research, and social justice, she is excited to focus on how food brings all these critical issues together. Anne has lived, worked, and gardened on Canada’s east and west coasts, northern Canada, and Latin America.
Endnotes:
[1] Berezowitz, C.K., Bontrager Yoder, A.B. & Schoeller, D.A. (2015). School gardens enhance academic performance and dietary outcomes in children. Journal of School Health, 85, p. 508-518. Doi: 10.1111/josh.12278
[2] Ratcliffe, M.M., Merrigan, K.A., Rogers, B.L. & Goldberg, J.P. (2011). The effects of school garden experiences on middle school-aged students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours associated with vegetable consumption. Health Promotion Practice, 12, p. 36-43. Doi: 10.1177/1524839909349182
[3] Williams, D.R. & Dixon, P.S. (2013). Impact of garden-based learning on academic outcomes in schools: Synthesis of research between 1990 and 2010. Review of Educational Research, 83, p. 211-235. Doi: 10.3102/0034654313475824
[4] Upitis, R., Hughes, S & Peterson, A. (2013). Promoting Environmental Stewardship through gardens: A case study of children’s views of an urban school garden program. Journal for the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 11, p. 92-135. Retrieved March 28, 2018, from https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/36544/33591
[5] Hirschi, J. (2015). The Origins and Benefits of School Gardening. In Ripe for Change (pp. 18-23). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
[6] Rojas, A., Black, J.L., Orrego, E., Chapman, G. & Valley, W. (2017). Insights from the Think&EatGREEN@School project: How a community-based action research project contributed to healthy and sustainable school food systems in Vancouver. Canadian Food Studies, 4, p. 25-46. Doi: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v4i2.225
[7] Gerhardt-Strachan, K. (2018). Executive Summary: School Gardens Literature Review, prepared for Loving Spoonful.
[8] Turner, L., Eliason, M., Sandoval, A. & Chaloupka, F.J. (2016). Increasing prevalence of US elementary school gardens, but disparities reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students. Journal of School Health, 86, p. 906-912. Doi: 10.1111/josh.12460.
[9] Black, J.L., Velazquez, C.E., Ahmadi, N., Chapman, G.E., Carten, S., Edward, J., Shulhan, S., Stephens, T. & Rojas, A. (2015). Sustainability and public health nutrition at school: Assessing the integration of health and environmentally sustainable food initiatives in Vancouver schools. Public Health Nutrition, 18, p. 2379-2391. Doi: 10.1017/S1368980015000531
