Nurturing Food — and Character

On a farm in suburban Massachusetts and in a Boston neighborhood known more for its problems than

its potatoes, the Food Project is growing organic produce for people with little access to such bounty — and giving youngsters an agrarian experience in the process.

Half of the 200,000 pounds of carrots, sweet corn, raspberries, rutabagas, and other crops that are grown each year on 21 acres in Lincoln and on two lots in urban Roxbury 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 farms in return for a weekly supply of produce.

Children and adults work in the Food Project’s fields, preparing the soil, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, and cleaning up.

Every summer, in a program designed to build character as much as farm skills, 60 Boston-area teenagers join the Food Project for seven weeks. Some come from homeless shelters, while others attend expensive private schools. All participants receive a weekly stipend of $156 for the time they spend working the land, selling the food they grow, and learning culinary skills from top restaurant chefs.

But the opportunities for young people are not limited to the warm months; the Food Project offers graduates of its summer program more experience in the food business through an academic-year program that gets them on the farm several days a week.

The organization also links participants with internships and jobs. This year, the group started bringing elementary-school students to its farms to teach them how fruits and vegetables grow and to show them how to turn the produce that emerges from the soil into delicious food in the kitchen.

Increasingly, Food Project alumni are interested in staying on at the farms, and a number have continued their agricultural work elsewhere.

“Small farms are so economically challenged that they are going out of existence,” says Patricia Donahue Gray, the organization’s executive director. “Luckily, there are some new young people who are interested in taking up farming.”

In addition to the participants in its organized programs, more than 1,000 volunteers, mostly young people, flock to the farms to volunteer their time, and businesses send employees to give them a new perspective in working together. The Food Project has raised around $15,000 by charging companies to hold team volunteer sessions at the farms.

The budget for the organization, which was founded in 1991, has been rising steadily in recent years and reached $1.3-million in 2001.

Foundations make up the largest group of contributors, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which awarded the project a five-year grant in 1998 for $615,000 to see if its programs could be copied in other locations.

Several groups have asked the Food Project for help setting up a similar project, and some community leaders have said they would like the Food Project itself to start programs in their cities and towns, says Ms. Gray, who notes that new programs modeled on hers will begin elsewhere soon.

In addition, the group has published a curriculum to help others connect young people to the land through indoor and outdoor lessons.

The farms all use organic methods, and that emphasis on finding a healthy balance between nature and the dietary needs of human beings creates an opportunity to explore issues well beyond agriculture, says Ms. Gray. She explains: “It really creates a great philosophical base to talk about everything in the human community as well.”