In this interview for Food Farmer Earth, I talk with Mia Bartlett, program director of Supa Fresh Youth Farm, about how she came up with the idea to use an abandoned plot of land as a tool to teach her young clients about responsibility and healthy habits.
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Mia Bartlett (on right in photo at left), a career specialist with YouthSource, a program of the
Oregon Human Development Corp., was walking her dog one day near Tigard. It wandered off, and she found it in what looked like an overgrown garden full of blackberries and rotting trees behind Durham Elementary School. She was struck by the thought that the small quarter-acre plot would be an ideal place for her teenage clients to start a garden.
In 2010, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the donation of the land from the Tigard School District and additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor's WorkSystems, Inc., the Supa Fresh Youth Farm was off and running. Its stated purpose is to train underserved teens in workforce skills, entrepreneurship, organic sustainable agriculture, nutrition and life skills.
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