Volume 1, Issue 4, Fall 2008

About HEAT: The Health and Environ-mental Awareness Training Center, HEAT, provides youth ages 14-18 with edu-cation and training in garden-ing, landscaping, nutrition, and the culinary arts. By providing a job, youth are drawn into the BYA family to then participate in all of our wrap-around services. We are dedicated to supporting the innate strength and po-tential in each of our youth. Youth interns are hired to work after school each day and during the summer to do landscape maintenance in two Berkeley city parks and maintain a half acre of or-ganic vegetable gardens which feed BYA and the West Berkeley community.

Berkeley Youth Alternatives Health & Environmental Awareness Training Center

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Lately here at B.Y.A. we’ve been striving to give back to our communities a little bit more. Every month on the 2nd Thursday we have a food giveaway where we distribute bags of groceries to families in need who have applied. The HEAT Center plays a huge part in the food giveaways because we provide all the fresh produce from our garden, and it also gives us the opportunity to do some bragging about all our hard work. Since the fall we’ve distributed bags to an estimate of 300 families and had various types of produce for the giveaway, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, squash, tomatillos, carrots, chard, kale, collards, basil, pars-ley, rosemary, sage, and beans. We normally have around 40 families in the average giveaway, but during the holi-days (such as Thanksgiving and X-mas) we have two food giveaways per month because families tend to be even more in need during these times. Beyond the monthly food giveaways, we’ve even taken it upon ourselves to give back to our community. For example we’ve connected with a woman from the neighborhood who loves purple collard greens, and one day we decided we’d go surprise her with a couple bunches after discovering that she had be-

FEEDING OUR COMMUNITY

By Seaquins Young, Youth Intern

Youth Intern Brianna Thompson helps to build a new harvest table for our garden. Thanks to volunteer Grace Lee for her leadership in this project.

(“Feeding” cont. on p. 3)

Beets and Rinds: Page 2 Te l l Me When to Grow

Living in This World by Brianna Thompson We are living in this world, Working, sleeping, going to school, Everyday life, But sometimes you can’t sleep at night. You wonder why? Why are we here? What do we do, To get through This world. We work for money, go to school to work, go to school for education, but education costs money. Circle of life, It’s like knife stabbing you in the back. You must pull it out, in order to live. Either you fail or you pass, Living in this world, You either make or you don’t. We are living in this world, Working, sleeping, going to school, Everyday life, But sometimes you can’t sleep at night.

The Future Has Begun by DeAndre Foster Obama is more than an inspiration

Soon you will see very little segregation More people loving each other together No more lies hold your head up high You may hear your ancestors’ cries But it’s not cries of fear It is cries of happiness and hope This is bigger than what you can imagine The future has come and shines brighter Than a medallion Some people may have feared for what will happen

Just believe we can help the change. Bring home our troops now, right now captain America will put the past aside We will have more beliefs and pride Bush may have made us feel hopeless But Obama’s the man that will keep us focused He loves America as much as we do Everyone can help the cause. America it is true.

By M

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Youth art and po-

By Michael Madison

The HEAT Center is important because it helps us plan for our futures, promotes better eating habits, and provides us with a safe place to hang out. It also gives us knowledge about garden work. Some other benefits provided by HEAT are that it is a paid internship for youth, food for low-income families and counseling. HEAT also teaches us about landscaping, cooking and helps us with our school and homework. We also learn about financial planning and most importantly, we have a safe place to be instead of hanging out on the street..

HEAT from the Youth Perspective. . . By DeAndre Foster and DeJanae Russell

Getting Your Voice Heard with Other Bay Area Youth by Spencetta Davila

During the summer some of us went to the Rooted in Community national youth conference. October 11, we had a reunion of all the organizations from the Bay. At first we just talked with the people we hadn’t seen in a while. Then we played human bingo. The second thing we did after eating was watch a video about getting your voice heard; that was made by Kim (Garden Program Manager). As always we played “All my Friends and Neighbors” to get everyone more comfortable with each other. After, we talked about world problems and what we thought was the biggest to us. We talked about what we can do to help our communities. Inspired by that conversation, we’ve started creating a health survey for people who attend the food giveaway. There were three afternoon workshops to teach us skills to get our voices heard: one on screen-printing, one on writing, one on creating a blog. After everything was all said and done, we said goodbye, ‘til we meet again.

come ill. That made me feel really good because we were able to get direct feedback on how much our actions were appreciated, and also we picked up on some awesome facts about how collards are packed with all sorts of vitamins and stuff that are good for cancer patients and various types of illnesses. I’m very glad to see that people are thankful for what we do, and that slowly but surely the food justice movement is coming into action in our urban communities.

(“Feeding” cont. from p. 1)

Recipe: Cornbread Stuffing with Turkey Sausage from the HEAT kitchen

Ingredients:

12 oz. Cornbread Stuffing Mix or any crumbled cornbread

1/3 pound turkey Italian sausage

1/2 bunch of celery

1 carrot

1 onion

5 large garlic cloves

½ cup fresh parsley

2 tablespoons fresh oregano, thyme, or marjoram

1 can chicken broth

1 egg

2 oz butter

Salt and Pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sautee sausage, celery, carrots, onions, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper in butter until the sausage is fully cooked.

Remove from heat. Beat together chicken broth and egg. Put the dry stuffing in a bowl and combine the sausage and veggie mix. Mix well. Add the chicken broth/egg mixture and combine until all ingredients are mixed together. Put in a baking dish and cover with foil. Cook for 45 minutes. Re-move foil and cook until the top is browned.

ENJOY!

Shercee, Michael, and AnnaRae making sage smudge sticks in preparation for the upcoming holiday craft faire on December 20, 2008.

Landscaping—About that. . . Laquon Walker: “Well First we come and clock in. Then we make our way to the cafeteria and then we eat. We make our way to the back of the room. Then we get our tools. We go and sweep the park and around the creek. We sweep for hecka long. We work from 4-6. Sometimes we go to study hall on Tuesday and Thursday.” Daniel Harvey: “I have learned that BYA is a great place to work and if you keep it clean people respect BYA more and give great comments to you and tell you how well you are working.”

The HEAT Center recently hired Askia Antar, Owner & CEO of At-mosphere,Landscaping and Garden, to be the BYA Landscape Program Assistant. Askia brings much horti-culture experience and life perspec-tive to this position, and we are very excited about the Landscape Pro-gram unfolding in new ways. Interview with Askia Antar:

I came into this work nine years ago, when I was introduced to Catherine Sneed, Founder and Director of the Garden Program in the San Bruno County Jail. This program focuses on giving inmates, former inmates and at-risk youth opportunities to get job training & skills in horticulture. I visited the program and was deeply impressed by Catherine’s commit-ment to the community. I took a job with her as crew supervisor, and even though I had no previous land-scape or garden skills I was immedi-ately drawn into it. I like working outdoors, and all of the science be-hind horticulture is really interesting to me. I stayed with the Garden Project for 6 years, then ventured out on my own to start Atmosphere Landscaping & Garden, which pro-vides high quality services through-out the Bay Area.

I chose to come to BYA and work with young people because there are not a lot of opportunities out there for young people, and not enough male role models for youth, espe-cially teen boys. They don’t have enough positive men in their lives who share their background, who speak their language, and who are willing to put time into teaching them things. My philosophy is to truly educate the youth, and by this I don’t mean just putting information into their heads. I want to cultivate their hidden talents and abilities by challenging them and being strict in holding them to their full potential, while also introducing them to horti-culture. I want to show the youth on the Landscape Crew that they too can have sustainable careers in the field of Landscape Gardening, and can own their own businesses. I used to live in the BYA neighborhood years ago, and I want to give back to the community that in a lot of ways helped raise me. On the Landscape Crew we maintain two City Parks: Strawberry Creek Park, and Grove Street Park. In most communities the park is a special

place; our youth are definitely show-ing pride in keeping this place clean for their friends and families and for anyone coming in from the outside to appreciate. This is building rela-tionships with people who might not normally have conversations with our youth. Now conversations are beginning to happen between older residents and BYA youth. Berkeley residents who use the parks are com-plimenting the youth on their hard work. Our vision for the BYA Land-scape Program is to become a platform for Green Collar job training, and to expand the skills and hard work of our youth into side landscape jobs throughout the community. We will con-tinue to update the progress of our programs in the next HEAT Newsletter!

Green Jobs, Youth Training, and Giving Back in the West Berkeley Community By Becca Prager

Page 5 Te l l Me When to Grow

What’s Grow-ing Now in

BYA Gardens Carrots

Beets

Collards

Tree collards

Mustard greens

Parsley

Peas

Kale

Flowers

Chard

Lettuce

Onions

Garlic

Fava Beans

Cover crop mix

What’s Growing On… In the Garden: Fall work involves lots of clearing of summer crops and planting of cover crops, which help to protect and replenish the soil.

We have started multiple build-ing projects: a new harvest table with two sinks and a shade structure for sum-mer propagation and post-harvest han-dling. Weekly, we attend Waterside Workshop learning woodworking skills. So far, we have built an owl box and a bat house for the garden. We’ve also been preparing garden crafts to partici-pate in the Holiday Crafts Fair sponsored by the Ecology Center. Visit us at our booth on December 20th at MLK Jr. Civic Center Park at Center Street at MLK Jr. Way. Wares include wreaths, sage bun-dles, and soap.

Two college student interns,

Camille Bishop and Jack Halperin, con-tinue to host BYA afterschool children in the garden.

Visitors this fall: apprentices from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, UC Berkeley Agroecology and Urban Ag classes, Berkeley Project Volunteers, Japanese students from the English Studies Institute.

In the Parks: Landscape interns have been cleaning up for winter: raking leaves, picking up trash, trimming weeds, and sweeping the paths and sidewalks. We continue to maintain the BYA entrance, Strawberry Creek Park, and Grove Street Park removing debris and doing all-around beautification.

Through our work we have been working to master some important job skills like

starting and completing tasks, having a positive attitude at work, being punctual, and taking initiative.

In the Kitchen: Under the leadership of Garden Program Assistant Annarae Grab-stein, all HEAT interns have been learn-ing to cook healthy and delicious meals using ingredients from the garden. Each cooking day is supplemented with a nu-trition lesson that correlates with the food being prepared.

The youth have learned to cook Thanksgiving staples including corn-bread stuffing, mushroom gravy, collard greens, baked butternut squash, mashed potatoes and apple pie. The youth have also showed a willingness to try unfamiliar foods including most re-cently, tofu! Look for a recipe from the HEAT cooking program on page 3.

This fall the HEAT Center is proud to honor Andranee Nabors and Shercee Barrett as interns of the month. These exceptional youth have had perfect attendance in their internships and at Study Hall and have exhib-ited a positive attitude in the Garden program. Andranee is a natural leader with an extremely strong work ethic. She has hopes to become a lawyer one day and in the meantime is playing freshman basketball at Berkeley High School. We will miss Andranee during the Basketball season but love to see her doing what she loves. Shercee is a joy to have in the garden. She shows passion and curiosity about the work she does with the plants—always asking questions and wanting to learn more. After High School Shercee plans on attending a Historic Black College where her intellectual curiosity will take her far. Our hats off to you both!

INTERNS

OF THE

MONTH:

Andranee Nabors (Sept, Oct, Nov)

Shercee Barrett (November) Congratulations!

1255 Allston Way Berkeley, California 94702

Main Office: 510-845-9010, administration@byaonline.org HEAT Phone: 510-647-0709 Fax: 510-849-1421 E-mail: urbanyouth@byaonline.org, garden@byaonline.org Web address: www.byaonline.org

Berkeley Youth Alternatives

How to support HEAT: VOLUNTEER: Drop-in garden volunteer work hours every Friday 10-1, or by appointment. work in the garden, work alongside youth interns in the after-noon, do repairs, tutor, and more. For garden volun-teering, contact Kim Allen, Garden Program Manager, at (510)647-0709, garden@byaonline.org and for other BYA opportunities, contact Nick Wright, Volun-teer, Mentoring, and Academics Coordinator, at (510)647-0712 volunteer@byaonline.org

DONATE: bamboo, fruit trees, digging forks, prun-ing shears, money, and more—make checks out to “Berkeley Youth Alternatives” with “HEAT” in the memo line. All donations are tax-deductible. Please call first to donate non-monetary items.

Berkeley Youth Alternatives is a community based non-profit or-ganization. Our vision is to provide a secure and nurturing environment for all the children, youth, and families of our community. We desire to promote, to their fullest potential, the freedom to develop individual skills and visions of the world.

Our mission is to help children, youth, and their families address issues and problems via Prevention by reaching youth before their problems become crises, and via Intervention through the provision of support services to youth entangled in the juvenile justice system. BYA helps to build capacity within individuals to reach their innate potential.

Thank you for your generous contributions this quarter!

Regular Volunteers: Camille Bishop, Jack Halperin, Grace Lee, Frank Gallant, Steve Moros

Waterside Workshops Urban Ore

Brower Youth Awards UC Berkeley Urban Agriculture and Agroecology classes

The Berkeley Project The Jonas Family Foundation

Farm Fresh Choice The Ecology Center

Berkeley Community Garden Collaborative City of Berkeley Parks Department

Alameda County Probation Department Alameda County Office of Education

What I would change in my community. . .

“I would give all the homeless people a place to stay and a job. Try to get a system for people in jail to get out and make this life better.” “I would change housing cost so everyone in California has a home. I would save energy for better living and future not a waste. I would cease the violence on every street.” –Shercee Barrett “If I could change one thing I would have it so money wasn’t an object. Because right now the economy is bad. And if everyone just had everything they needed for free the world wouldn’t be so bad. I think that everything that isn’t needed like fancy furniture, and sculptures and jewelry and stuff like that should be paid for by the peo-ple that want it. But stuff like gas, clothes, food, and all of the basic needs of people should be free, that way we wouldn’t have so many problems.” –Andranee Nabors

HEAT intern Seaquins Young, teaches students from UC Berkeley Urban Agriculture class about post-harvest handling of produce.