North Country Junior Iron Chef competition

Farm to School Webinars coming up

USDA’s 2015 Farm to School webinar series is scheduled, and available for viewing: http://www.fns.usda.gov/farmtoschool/videos-and-webinars. While originally designed for USDA grantees, these trainings are open to the public this year. Please feel free to join any of the sessions that might be of interest to you, and also feel free to share this series with your networks.

1. Farm to School Planning and Building a Team, January 15, 2:00 pm 
2. Setting Goals and Establishing an Evaluation Baseline, January 28, 2:00 pm
3. Finding and Buying Local Foods, February 5, 2:00 pm
4. Farm to School Menu Planning, February 19, 2:00 pm
5. Food Safety, March 5, 2:00 pm
6. Promoting Your Farm to School Program, March 19, 2:00 pm
7. School Gardening, April 2, 2:00 pm
8. Curriculum Integration, April 16, 2:00 pm
9. Program Sustainability, April 30, 2:00 pm
10. Evaluating Your Program, May 13, 2:00 pm
11. Tying it All Together and Digging In, May 28, 2:00 pm

Webinar this week for staff or farmer training programs

The National Incubator Farm Training Initiative (NIFTI) invites you to participate in a webinar for the staff of land-based beginning farmer training programs. This webinar will focus on record keeping for incubator farms and farmers. Learn what other projects are tracking and how they're tracking it, and get insight into why gathering data on the farm is somehow never as easy as we think it'll be. We will have presentations from Stephen Paddock at the Vermont Small Business Development Center and Nikki Seibert at Lowcountry Local First. There will be ample time at the end for questions.

To find out more and register for this event, click here: http://nesfp.org/nifti/Webinar11

Title: Recordkeeping for Incubator Farms and Farmers

Date: Thursday, January 8, 2015

Time: 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM EST

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing important information about joining the Webinar. Please read this information carefully!

Quick registration link: https://tufts.webex.com/tufts/j.php?RGID=rdb190300de7647b397f26219c1775677

The National Incubator Farm Training Initiative is a program of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which has been training successful new farmers since 1998.

Garden project grant deadline this week

Sow It Forward is the grants and partnership program of Kitchen Gardeners International. The grant is for nonprofit causes or organizations interested in starting or expanding food garden projects that are of general benefit to their community.  Past grantees include school gardens, community gardens, food bank gardens, library gardens, senior gardens, prison gardens and homeless shelter gardens among others.

For our 2015 round of giving, we expect to offer 100 full grants and roughly 60 partial grants. A full grant has a value $500 and normally consists of a cash grant of $300-400 with the remaining $100-$200 taking the form of seeds and gift certificates for garden supplies and KGI's online garden planner. The partial grant normally has a value of $325 and consists of a $300 cash grant and $25 one-year subscription to KGI'sonline garden planner. There are no geographic limitations on what types of food garden projects will be considered.  Past grantees included projects from Portland, Oregon to Pakistan and many places in between. Because of trade restrictions and international shipping fees, garden projects from outside the US will only be eligible for partial grants. 

Deadline is this week!  January 9!  Go here for more information.

Retail workers dilemma this holiday season

For many low-income workers, the holiday season means extra hours and extra income, but that can also mean that they get cut off from SNAP or other public benefits that are helping their families survive, even though the extra income goes away right after the holidays.

One woman said, "I was on my way to my job when my food stamps were cut off. They had called me to work there overtime for one day and I thought to myself, 'Well, if I go down there this one day, are they going to cut my food stamps off? I really didn't know what to do. I don't think it's fair for us to get reprimanded for doing something positive.'"

Read more about the effects of the SNAP cliff in a new report from Children's health Watch. And find some options for action in their recent blog post.

Gloria

Saying goodbye to friends and coworkers in Connecticut

It's been a long season of last this and last that for me in Connecticut.  And Friday was my last Foodshare staff holiday party.  I was afraid it would make me cry, but in true Foodshare fashion, they made me laugh until I cried!

To mark my departure from Foodshare, we played a game of Foodshare Feud, with questions about my new home in Canton, NY and my new job at GardenShare. Former Foodshare staffer, Ernie Pitti, joined us as our very nattily dressed MC! Amazingly, though the questions were all about me, the staff won the game!

But I'm the one who received a prize! Unbeknownst to me, the staff at Foodshare had been collecting old t-shirts and memorabilia from past Foodshare events and our own talented Paula turned them into a quilt! A practical gift for someone headed to the North Country in January! They even managed to work in a couple of old logo shirts that had my name embroidered on them!

I will miss this amazing team of people in Hartford, but am also excited about getting to Canton soon and working with all of the amazing people working to further GardenShare's mission of a food secure North Country.

I'll be seeing you all in person soon!

Gloria

Real Food Media Contest

Another contest!

This contest is the project of the Real Food Media Project, a collaborative initiative using online movies and a web-based action center along with grassroots events around the country to spread the stories of sustainable food and farming.

The Project is especially excited to partner with School Ambassadors who are helping us connect with students who may be interested in participating in the Contest. Ambassadors are also welcome to screen the winning films on campus at the end of the Contest. If you are interested in becoming an Ambassador, please email the project .

New this year, there will be cash prizes for student films and underreported issues. Winning films also get a ton of exposure through distribution networks and Pop-Up Film Festivals (now happening around the world!). In addition, another several dozen new films will live on the website in our Film Library.

For more information and to enter the contest, visit the Real Food Media website. Deadline is January 5.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this one, also!

Gloria