Thank you for your interest in our Spring Equinox fundraising series and for being a supporter of Garden Kitchen Lab! We hope you find amongst our four virtual sessions one or more ways to shake off the winter doldrums, welcome the new growing season and do you good while doing good yourself. The general idea for our fundraiser is to serve as an awakening of sorts, a way for each of us to prepare ourselves for spring, much like our gardens are preparing for the new season.
Garden Kitchen Lab is a backyard-to-table, science-based, hands-on educational experience for children in NYC's underserved communities. We have programs in Brooklyn (Crown Heights, Sunset Park, Greenpoint), the Bronx (Fordham Manor and soon Hunt's Point) and Manhattan (Inwood). Our program was specifically designed for children, combining urban agriculture, culinary and STEAM disciplines. The curriculum has been shaped over the last 5 years with feedback from the children and educators’ transformative experiences. They tell us that the ‘magic’ of Garden Kitchen Lab instills a love of nature and healthy food, as children experience working with the garden and its produce throughout the seasons.
The curriculum themes are extremely diverse: horticulture and cooking are the obvious components, but many other areas are explored as well, including:
- Anthropology and the role of food in various cultures;
- Biology and the cycle of life and death as illustrated through composting in the garden;
- Chemistry and the composition and transformation of cells as explored through microscopes in the lab;
- Physics and what happens at a molecular level when food transforms in fermentation, when one mixes it or makes a reduction (molecular gastronomy); and
- Advocacy and how to talk about healthy eating in media and in your own video-stories and stop-motion videos.
The diversity of topics in the program makes it appealing to a wide variety of children: some revel in the science, others in cooking and making things from the garden, others in eating. While the curriculum is scientifically “correct”, it has also been specially developed to capture the attention of all children, and to empower them through important roles (such as sous-chef or documentary photographer). This intricate mix of science and whimsy is what makes Garden Kitchen Lab a unique and powerful program for engaging children and their communities
We're fundraising in order to jump-start our 2021 programming after a dormant 2020 when our sites weren't able to operate live because of the pandemic. While we maintained some of the gardens throughout the 2020 growing season, dabbled in virtual programming and distributed some produce to families, we now need to repair the beds, fund new gardening materials and kitchen supplies and set up new locations that we are preparing for 2022.
