Youth Gardening Program Toolkit

Challenge

Community food insecurity and school food quality are daily challenges for newcomer youth. In response, the International Rescue Committee developed the New Roots "Youth Food Justice" program in partnership with schools, focusing mainly on high school age children, to engage them as leaders in addressing their community food needs. 

Youth Food Justice program staff drafted and piloted a suite of lesson plans designed to help schools and youth programs across the country build their own community gardening and food justice programs for newcomer youth.

Solution

Youth Food Justice teams in four US locations collaborated to develop the Cultivating Youth Food Justice Programs Toolkit. It features facilitation guides for 18 lessons that develop knowledge and skills about gardening, nutrition, and food. The toolkit also includes best practices and lessons learned from a youth-led Photo-Voice community research project, as well as a Farm-to-School Procurement handbook.

In this project, I took on a general project management role in addition to instructional design, graphic design, and editing. I worked to coordinate the efforts of several teams of contributors. I also served as an instructional design consultant on the gardening and cooking lesson plans, and filled in content gaps by contributing additional lesson plans for the teams to pilot. I also contributed editing and graphic design for the entire toolkit.

View and download the full toolkit from the International Rescue Committee.