volume 2, number 7
July 2009
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of The Root of the Matter. We have so many talented new staff members, volunteers and interns working with us this summer that we have decided to designate June and July issues as our “People” issues. Read below to learn about some of the new faces behind Collective Roots.
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THE PEOPLE OF COLLECTIVE ROOTS

Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project Team
Collective Roots is currently dedicated to implementing the Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project. This project entails the use of the Healthy Development Measurement Tool (HDMT) in order to assess community indicators that impact the health of East Palo Alto. After identifying the health needs of the community, the City of East Palo Alto will develop programs to try to alleviate these disparities. The health data will ultimately be published and made readily accessible to all East Palo Alto residents.

Collective Roots has devised a team dedicated the Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project: a Public Health Project Manager (Mayra Betancourt), two full time Public Health Fellows (Rylan Rosario and Ginille Lazaro), thanks to support from Health Career Connection, and one full-time Youth Health Advocate (Aaminah Khan), who was hired thanks to a partnership with Job Train. Click here to read more about the HDMT, the team’s work, the partnerships they are forming, and the challenges they face.

Photo left to right: Rylan, Mayra, Ginille, Aaminah.

Meet the Food Justice Leaders
Click on each of the photos to the right to learn more about the six Food Justice Leaders who are working for Collective Roots this summer. You can also click here to read news about the group’s recent field trips and what they have learned so far about food, food access, health and gardening. What is the Food Justice Leadership program? Click here to read a full description on our East Palo Alto Community Farmer's Market website.

As the summer progresses, the Food Justice Leaders will develop their own blogs, and will continue to report on the interesting projects they are involved with.
Update on Summer Interns
Last month we introduced you to our five new summer interns. Now Ginille Lazaro has joined the group. Ginille is a recent graduate with a double major in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Human Biology—click on her photo to the left to read more about her interests and what she brings to her job as a Public Health Fellows on the Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project Team.

The interns have all jumped right into their new roles at our organization. Click here to read reports from several of them on the work they have been doing so far this summer.
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SUPPORT COLLECTIVE ROOTS
Progress At The Center for Urban Agriculture
Collective Root's new headquarters, a half-acre property donated by PageMill Properties, is now known as the Center for Urban Agriculture. The Center is located on the west side of Highway 101, in the most densely populated neighborhood of East Palo Alto. There are no parks in the area, so we hope the Center will soon serve as a destination point for neighborhood residents.

Collective Roots plans to develop the land with community plots and demonstration gardens that will be sized according to the size of average plots in East Palo Alto (driveways, backyards, etc.), in order to teach residents how to grow food on small pieces of urban land. We hope to gather data from these experimental plots about realistic scenarios for food production in urban areas.

We will also have a kitchen that will be open for community cooking classes, and we will ultimately convert the small barn on the property into an arts center. We are still soliciting donations to help us turn our new space into the community resource that it is intended to be. Please click here if you think you can help.

Funding Announcements
Collective Roots was recently awarded a “Safety Net” grant of $15,000 by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the County of San Mateo. The funds will support the distribution of East Palo Alto (EPA) Fresh Checks.

Thanks to this new funding, each person who purchases $5 of produce at the East Palo Alto Community Farmer's Market using an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card (food stamps), or who pays with WIC or Senior Farmer's Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) checks, will receive one matching $5 EPA Fresh Check to purchase additional produce. Click here to learn more about EPA’s Fresh Checks program and how CR is helping food-insecure households in San Mateo County.

We are also pleased to announce the grant of $20,000 by the Kaiser Permanente Community Grants program to Collective Roots to support the development and implementation of the Healthy Development Measurement Tool in East Palo Alto.
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FARMERS MARKET

east palo alto charter schoolThe EPA Community Farmer’s Market is Now Open
The EPA Community Farmer's Market, now located at EPA City Hall, is off and running—check it out every Saturday between 2 and 5 PM. CR’s Market Director David Kane is doing a great job of setting up a variety of food and flower vendors each week: sweet strawberries from Bay Fresh Producer, cut flowers and fresh eggs from Contreras Farm, organic produce from Tu Universo, stone fruit from Zamudio Farms, hummus and pita bread, as well as desserts such as baklava and nut/berry paste from Miraks Food, and Asian vegetables from C & M Farm. Maria Fuentes was the lucky raffle winner who took home a basket filled with fresh fruits and vegetables from all the vendors.

Visit http://www.epafarmersmarket.org/event to find out about upcoming activities and special market guests, or view photos from past market days here. If you would like to receive regular updates about the Market (sent every Thursday by email), simply click here to sign up.




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MONTHLY GARDEN WORKDAY

Join Us In The Garden On July 25th
Our next Garden Workday at EPACS will be held Saturday, July 25th, from 8 AM – noon. The garden is in full bloom with sunflowers and other summer flowers and vegetables--it is a lovely time to be in the garden! With our new irrigation system in place for all our new fruit trees, the summer weeds are going strong!

We look forward to hosting a group of Global Health Corps fellows at the workday, but we can still use more hands to help weed, mulch, harvest, and prepare beds. Click here to RSVP and for directions to the garden.

PROGRAMS
Girls to Women
The program at Girls to Women has continued through the summer with a number of new faces participating. In the past month, we have seen our heirloom tomato plants grow at a rapid pace and are enjoying the sweet, pop-in-your-mouth cherry tomatoes. The girls planted corn, beets, carrots, edible flowers, and collard greens in the last few weeks. This week, we are doing a field trip to the 1-acre garden at EPACS to do some fun gardening and cooking activities. The girls anticipate making something delicious from garden-grown fruits and vegetables for the final class celebration next week. After a short break, we will look forward to the start of the 2009-2010 school year at Girls to Women.

Clifford Elementary School
Collective Roots has partnered with Clifford Elementary in Redwood City for the 2009-2010 school year. We will teach garden-based lessons for the 3rd grade, and will connect these lessons to the FOSS Science curriculum being taught in the classroom. In addition, Collective Roots will teach a weekly after-school class and will also work weekly with 8th grade students to help maintain the school garden.

The Clifford garden space is amazing; there are 5 individual beds in addition to one long bed, which provide sufficient space for an abundant garden. This past week, the beds were planted in preparation for the garden-based lessons planned for the fall. A few of the beds have themes: a Three Sisters Bed (squash, corn and beans), a Pizza Bed (tomatoes, basil, oregano and peppers), as well as an herb garden. We also planted pumpkins, edible flowers, corn, lettuce and celery. We are so excited to have this opportunity to work with Clifford and looking forward to the coming school year.
UPCOMING EVENTS

Come to Collective Roots' Jam Session!
You can enjoy the sweetness of summer fruit all year round by learning to make homemade jam! Every participant will go home with a jar!

Who: Open to any EPA or Belle Haven residents
What: A fun, interactive jam-making workshop!
When: Thursday, July 30th, 6:30-8:30PM
Where: Collective Root's new office at 1785 Woodland Ave.
Cost: $7-10 sliding scale to cover materials.
To sign up, please email emilyviggiano@gmail.com or call (650) 324-2769.

Getting Ready for Chickens
In other garden news, the new Collective Roots Chicken Coop, located in the garden at the East Palo Alto Charter School, is coming along beautifully thanks to David Vasquez from Whole House Building Supply in East Palo Alto!  In the near future we plan to welcome a brood of 6 – 8 egg-laying chickens into the garden!

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PAST EVENTS
June EPACS Garden Workday
Volunteers harvested garlic, weeded, mulched, and prepared beds at last month’s Garden Workday on June 27th. Many thanks to everyone who came out during the heat wave to help in the garden! We are also appreciative to those volunteers who found us on VolunteerMatch.
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WHAT'S GROWING

Supersized Summer Squash!
The garden is full of summer squash including enormous zucchinis. Our corn stalks our growing taller by the day, and the beans planted right next to them in the Three Sister bed will soon wrap themselves around the tall, beautiful yellow stalks.

This is also the season for tomatoes!! We have a variety of tomatoes growing in the garden, many of them of heirloom varieties. It is always a fun surprise to see the variety of color, shapes and flavors that each plant provides, and to imagine that taste test we have to look forward to!! Each day there is a new sunflower bringing joy and beauty to the garden. We look forward to daily surprises in our Summer garden! Click here for a wonderful tabbouleh recipe with fresh tomatoes!

NOTE: This newsletter employs hyperlinks that act as shortcuts to related documents or web pages. Click on the green underlined words in the articles above to find out more information. If someone forwarded you this newsletter, please click here to add your name to our mailing list.

To read past newsletters, go to http://collectiveroots.org/news/newsletters
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