Community Works RI’s Youth Garden Club Celebrates Partnership with Local 121 Restaurant

(Providence, RI September 28, 2009)

Community Works Rhode Island’s Youth Garden Club will celebrate its partnership with Local 121 restaurant, with an onsite cooking demonstration by Executive Chef Dave Johnson. The event will take place on Tuesday September 29th from 5:00-7:00 pm at the community garden at 75 Laura Street in Providence’s Elmwood neighborhood

A dozen Elmwood neighborhood youth ages 9-14 participate in CWRI’s Garden Club under the supervision of teacher Gregg DeMaria. The children grow produce for their families and also sell vegetables and herbs to Local 121 restaurant in downtown Providence. Chef Dave Johnson will tour the garden and demonstrate how simple cooking techniques can bring vegetables straight from the garden to the dinner plate. This event will mark the end of the growing season for the Garden Club. Local families and other community members will join the club in celebrating their successes and enjoying expertly-prepared garden-fresh foods.

The Elmwood Youth Garden Club is made up of young residents of Community Works Rhode Island housing. For the last five years, the youth have been beautifying the neighborhood and producing bushels of fresh vegetables on two Laura Street gardens. In 2008, the gardeners began visiting Dave Johnson in his kitchen at Local 121 to learn about how professional kitchens work and to show off their produce. Their visits soon turned into weekly sales, generating hundreds of dollars a season to support the youth program and providing Local 121 with tomatoes, salad greens, herbs, cucumbers and other vegetables grown by the youth in their own neighborhood.

Carrie Marsh, Executive Director of Community Works said, “The Garden Club provides an opportunity for youth to engage in an enjoyable and rewarding activity, learn stewardship over their plots of land, and feel pride in their accomplishment – easily measured by their smiles as they show off their prize cucumbers. They are rewarded with the fun of the experience, the fruits of their labor, and also with the business partnership that they have with Local 121. We are grateful for this connection to Local 121, which understands the value of sustainable community-based agriculture – in this case raised by children in the heart of an urban neighborhood.”