Creative Partnerships – Growing connections

The Global Food Project is a partnership between Brockhill Park Performing Arts College, which is a Creative Partnerships Kent School near Folkestone, and the Food Project in Boston, USA. As part of their Citizenship programme, a group of 13-year-olds are using video conferencing to talk regularly to American teenagers about growing their own healthy food.

The USA version of the Food Project is an exciting and innovative scheme that has developed over a period of 13 years in Boston to enable young people to grow organic crops for the benefit of their community. Brockhill Park staff visited a farm in suburban Massachusetts and a Boston neighbourhood known more for its problems than its potatoes. The Food Project there is growing organic produce for people who normally have little access to such foods ? and gives the young people an agrarian experience in the process. Half of the two million pounds weight of carrots, sweet corn, raspberries and other crops are donated to soup kitchens and shelters. The rest is sold at Farmers? Markets in low income areas and to families in suburban Boston who buy a seasonal share in the farm for a weekly supply of produce. The scheme provides a rich springboard for learning ? science, citizenship, communication, enterprise and nutrition.

Brockhill Park is using the Boston enterprise as a model and has started its own Global Food Project. All the Year 8 students are working on the project in their Citizenship lessons which include Science and Enterprise. Anthony Lyng, Headteacher at Brockhill Park comments, ?What could be better? Brockhill Park is in a prime position to offer such opportunities, having a neighbouring farm and surrounding land. This is a unique way to teach young people the value of healthy eating and lifestyle, as well as making them aware of those people in the community less fortunate than themselves.? Brockhill Park hopes to mirror the Boston Food Project with their own Farmers? Market selling the produce grown and harvested by the students, and each of the nine groups of students is planning how they will use the profits made.