 Hi, my name is Tracy Barclay, I'm the Director of Solar Grady Farm. And I am lucky enough to be a recipient of a SARE Grants Award through the Youth Educator Program to help support our work with the Champaign Park District and the Champaign County Farm Bureau and Prosperity Garden and Common Ground Food Co-op on a community garden here in Douglas Park where we're teaching kids how to grow their own food. So we work with school age kids, age K through 5, through the after-school program we're teaching them all about how plants grow, what types of the, what parts of the plant you eat, how to start seeds, what plants need to grow, how to harvest, how to cook. We have access to a Douglas Park branch library which is right next to the garden. There's a certified kitchen in there and the Douglas Park Community Center. So the first year that we worked on this there about 30 kids in the after-school program and we met with them every couple of weeks to on the program both inside and out. That was during the school year in the summertime we had it's a girls day camp program that changes so it's probably about 60 girls K through 5 that worked on this garden in the summertime. The second year we had a different crop of kids a few a few that we had been here before. That's more like 12 to 15 that we're working with every couple of weeks and then we have high school youth through Prosperity Gardens Garden Club program that are coming and working in the garden and then our local food co-op is also doing some program using the garden for some of their programming. So I would say in the two years that we've been working on this maybe over a hundred kids. The first year was really about you know soil health and insects and composting and the crops and you know all the different you know the ecology all the different parts that are involved with growing food. But what we've done this second year is also incorporated some arts and some music and into it also so making sure that you know that there there's some beautiful things about the garden so like building the teepees could have been done with just bamboo stakes and twine but we use some beautiful yarn so that it was creative and beautiful. We made God's eyes to help protect the garden. We made trellises that are both functional and unique. So I think there are things that are appealing to some other kids that maybe aren't as interested in just the straight gardening but like unifying it as well and making it attractive to other people. We talked about pollination. We planted a lot of flowers to help attract bees so that things like their pumpkins and melons and summer squash would be healthy because of the pollination with the bees. A lot of the kids that are working here in part of the after school program live in the neighborhood and this is their neighborhood park. So behind this community center is a park. There's a baseball diamond. There's playgrounds. There's a splash park and so now it's a have food that they've been working on planting and weeding and harvesting and growing in their community garden. That shows another use for the park. It's another place to visit. All the neighbors here see that this is a fertile spot for growing food. It's education. It's recreation. It's nourishment. It's beauty and just another activity that people can be involved in. There's also a lot of hunger in this community. So the fact that most of this produce is going to help people in need is teaching these kids that they're capable of doing something and helping others and then it's directly helping the recipients of the food. The kids are coming to it for different reasons and are learning a lot in the process and are realizing that they're very capable of producing food for themselves. And the other part that comes along with this is they get to come to our farm. So a grassy farm for field trips. So they get to see then what a big vegetable farm looks like and they get to work in our greenhouse and plant some seeds and see on a larger scale what growing vegetables looks like. And that's been really fun too.