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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Urban ambassadors program gives Somerville residents lessons in urban farming

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The 2015 class of the City of Somerville-sponsored Urban Agriculture Ambassador Program (UAAP) will admit 20 new participants this March, Program Coordinator Kim Schmidt said.

According to SchmidtUAAP makes up a segment of the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Initiative, which focuses primarily on imparting residents with the basic skills central to growing food in urban areas.

Green City Growers, a Somerville-based business, shares its expertise with the 20 people who are admitted into the UAAP through a four-week-long series of all-day classes held on Saturdays. In return, urban agriculture ambassadors are expected to invest 30 volunteer hours back into the community by donating their services to local non-profit organizations and programs related to urban agriculture.

Training is intended to begin during the last week of April and carry through the first three weeks of May.

“This is its third year in existence … and it is mostly about educating residents about how to safely grow their own food in an urban environment,” Schmidt said. “Somerville was the first city in New England with an urban [agriculture] ordinance … so this all sort of works together with supporting the city. The city is paying for this program.”

Schmidt explained that some of the issues discussed by Green City Growers during instructional periods include overcoming gardening hurdles inherent to city-spaces, such as limited space and light, as well as highlighting and addressing concerns that are associated with urban farms, such a lead content in soil.

“[Our goals include] keeping residents healthy [and] educating them about food sources," Schmidt said. "Last year, [ambassadors] worked at different mobile farmers markets, getting fresh local produce to local residents. [Within the city services, this is] a lot of overlapping and working together.”

UAAP goes along with the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Initiative, which aims to act as an impetus for the wider implementation of local agriculture in order to ultimately promote a healthier community.

According to first-year student Kinsey Drake, who is the secretary of the on-campus organization Balance Your Life, there is potential for collaboration between UAAP and Balance Your Life. Balance Your Life aims to "improve nutrition, increase physical activity, and improve overall well-being of Tufts undergrads," according to its website.

“I could see members individually becoming ambassadors based on the common interests of the club," Drake said. "It could be a great way to connect our goal to promote a healthy lifestyle with the origins of our food ... In the summer and fall months, I could definitely see the club volunteering to work on a weekend or for a similar event.”

Shape Up Somerville, another of the city's programs and a predecessor to UAAP, stems from the similar goal to promote a healthier community in which differences in socioeconomic background do not translate into disparities in the attainability of balanced lifestyles.

According to Shape Up Somerville Coordinator Erica Satin-Hernandez, the program came to fruition 15 years ago through funding from Tufts University. She explained that while the scope of the program was initially narrowly focused on childhood obesity prevention in local students in the first through third grades, the lens of the organization broadened with time, as did its aspirations for the greater community.

“A lot of the focus was individualized … but this was different," Satin-Hernandez said. "This was the first study at the time that showed how community-based environmental changes can have a huge impact on obesity rates. Now our scope has broadened a great deal, and we’re looking at the social determinants of health as well as … physical activity, nutrition and things that take place outside of the doctor’s office.”

Satin-Hernandez explained that the city is trying to better understand and manage the roles that social factors such as poverty and racism play in health-related issues. Their mission, she explained, is put into action through three primary programs that have been instituted for longer periods of time, as well as smaller programs that occur on a year-to-year basis.

Through ‘Systems Change’ programs under Shape Up Somerville, the city works to engage individuals from all corners of the community to facilitate city-wide policy changes.

One of the more enduring of these projects undertaken by Shape Up Somerville is its work with Somerville Public Schools, according to Satin-Hernandez.

“I’ve been working closely with food and nutrition services looking at healthy options that they can have at the cafeterias and making sure students can get the amount of food they need,” Satin-Hernandez said. “Somerville public schools are nationally recognized for having healthful and really good school lunches … [we are able to be] healthy and tasty on a budget.”

Satin-Hernandez also mentioned the mobile farmers market run by the City of Somerville.

“[The market] stops in four different locations across the city … and what is unique about our market is that we offer half off for anyone using food assistance programs, and 80 percent of our customers use this program. [The] goal of this market is to increase affordability and accessibility of fresh produce and food in types of areas where it is really hard to get that type of fresh food,” Satin-Hernandez explained.

Ultimately, Satin-Hernandez emphasized that both programs share the common goal of empowering the local community to make sound health decisions and place citizens in the unique position of ownership and leadership when it comes to their well-being.