SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS

Broadmor Learning Patch (Fall 2020)

AZSA began working at the Broadmor Learning Patch in cooperation with the Garden Committee, PTA, and Broadmor faculty and staff to coordinate garden workdays with AZSA volunteers through our Help-A-Farm program; recruit, train, supervise, and evaluate AZSA interns from Arizona State University to assist with garden maintenance and garden-based learning; and coordinate schedules and train garden volunteer educators to facilitate DIG IT! Outdoors garden curriculum with Broadmor classes.

Food Tech for the Future: Growing Digital Farmers Program
The Food Tech For the Future: Growing Digital Farmers Program introduces students, teachers, volunteers and the community to the world of food computers. The innovative nature of this project will inspire local engagement from tech industries, and also global support from giants like Google. This program will be highly interactive and students will have the chance to build their own food computer, conduct plant growth experiments, share the data globally and learn about biology, genetics, technology and robotics through first-hand experience.

Students will continue studying food technology in college and continue on to ensure that global food needs are being met. This program is meant to educate, engage, and inspire young adults into thinking critically about sustainability issues and creating solutions based on well founded science, research and technology.

Sow It Forward: Vertical Garden Program
This is an expansion of the vertical garden projects. The goal of the program is to create opportunities to expand access to healthy foods beyond the classrooms that have vertical gardens. This will be done through creation of farmers markets within the schools and increased vertical gardens within individual schools.  Check out our Sow it Forward Resource Guide for step by step guidance on how to start a vertical garden program in your school

Help-A-Farm
AZSA hopes to not only support local farms, but to also strengthen the local food culture, and therefore economy, in Maricopa County. The overall goals for this project include:

• Helping one farm a month for the first months with farm productions labor
• Learning more about what type of help AZSA is able to provide to farms
• Create relationships with local farms to build on in future projects
• Connect our community to local farms and gardens to strengthen local food culture

This project aims to strengthen our local food community through farm support. We will not only be providing support to farms in the form of labor, but we will also be providing an experience to volunteers, who will be able to learn about the farms, food, and the process it takes to grow it. We hope that we can engage people from our community to take part in the program and learn more about their local food system.

By connecting our community with local farms, and teaching people more about what it takes to grow food, we hope we can create a greater perceived value of locally grown food among our volunteers. This will ideally inspire volunteers to source more of their produce from local farms, in support of all the work that they do.