Educational Programs

The Greensgrow Philadelphia Project sponsors a regular series of workshops and master classes on Sustainability Issues.

Utilizing Greensgrow Farms unique facilities and the Kensington Community Kitchen, the Philadelphia Project  welcomes local "green" experts -  such as Michael Haas, Director of USDA alternative biomass plant material, Matt Steiman, sustainability program Director at Dickinson College, and Greensgrow staff specialists, Peace Corp volunteer Erik Kintzel - to lead our Sustainability Series.

The series comprises weekly hands-on workshops, lectures, and master classes, focusing on four main areas:

• Current Environmental Issues
• Food and Nutrition
• Home Gardening
• Green Construction

For upcoming Sustainability Series workshops, please check our online calendar.

Located in a former heavy manufacturing section of Philadelphia, and on a US EPA Superfund site, Greensgrow Farm has been addressing the environmental and food access issues of this economically and environmentally challenged community for over ten years. Our farm site(s) and farm life offer an exceptional opportunity for the local undeserved community to have daily access to food, lessons of seasonality, sustainability, and pragmatic hands-on replicable exercises. Our sustainability series is free to the general public, bringing lessons directly into the communities that are unfortunately , usually the last served on the sustainability chain. Our central location and proximity to many Philadelphia neighborhoods makes access to us through public or private transportation easy. During the series, participants will learn valuable skills and knowledge that they can take home, allowing them to immediately improve their own personal lives and their community by sharing the skills and experience with family and friends; the true definition of sustainability.

One of the main goals for the Sustainability Series is to reach a diverse number of community members with weekly participation totaling, on average, 75 individuals. The success of the sustainability series however, will not lie solely with the participation rate, but also with how interesting and provoking, mentally and physically, participants view each topic. Therefore, post-lesson interviews are a cornerstone to the vitality and success of the sustainability series. By compiling a database of interviews, we are able to better meet the needs and demands that the community views as pertinent to their lives, not just for this year but for the subsequent years. The results from the conducted interviews will be published on our website where a section will be dedicated to sharing the needs of underserved communities with other NPO's both locally and nationally. In addition, our in house videotaping capability, allows us to capture the WSS (as we have with our previous lectures on biodiesel, bee keeping, and hydroponics) for future access, via our web-site, Facebook, You-tube and our Greensgrow Lending Library, thereby affording a much larger audience the opportunity to learn the skills and lessons at home, in classrooms or in community centers.

Lectures and workshops will be held in our greenhouse, hoophouses, and community kitchen. Individuals will be asked to pay small fees for certain workshops due to the cost of items they would be leaving with, i.e., worms and worm bins, jars and canning materials.

People come to Greensgrow for a variety of reasons: To buy starter vegetable plants in the spring, as members of our City Supported Agriculture, to pick up firewood in the winter, to bring their first grade class to meet the bees and see the worms, to pick up brooms and bags for neighborhood clean ups, for community fund raising events, and now , for community workshops.

The community has responded to our mission and together we have worked to make this community nicer, greener (there are literally over a 200 more trees now in the community), safer, and more environmentally sensitive .

We set out to transform a vacant Super Fund site into a functioning urban farm. Ten years later the results have exceeded our and the communities expectations. One farm operation however, is not enough. More people and more communities deserve our attention. Our Summer Sustainability Series, which is currently running through November, has taught us many lessons that we believe will bolster the success of our winter series. Philadelphia, like much of our nation, has developed into a multiracial and multilingual community. Therefore, we will seek out individuals to help us translate workshops and lessons into different languages. In addition, hoping to broaden our base of attendees and make our series more inclusive and relevant we are developing future subject matter based on active input from our surrounding audience. A request through a local Latina community organization and the local Spanish language newspaper may bring in some different topics, highlighting the needs of that growing community, outreach to the African American community may highlight somewhat different needs for that demographic. Word of mouth, mails (currently, we have an e-mail list totaling over 2,500 people), Facebook, and other social media will only take us into some people's awareness. We recognize that many in our expanded community do not have access to internet technology. We are putting the finishing touches on our winter sustainability series poster and postcards that will be widely distributed to local community organizations, places of worships, restaurants, businesses and more. The core base of support is there, but more work needs to be done in order to meet our number one goal: building better communities for us all.

We welcome our local Philadelphia area community and others beyond our region to join us for this sustainable educational experience. We hope we all can sustainably make a difference in all our communities across the United States.

For upcoming Sustainability Series workshops, please check our online calendar.