October Fun

Our cameras were in the garden afterschool with the YMCA Beacon Kids who come twice a week. The lesson was worms and composting. Collecting worms and sifting compost. It was a most exciting time!




Then all of a sudden.... it was Halloween. We roasted marshmellows for s'mores at Hayes Valley South with the neighborhood groups and families. Lots of fun and great costumes!

New Herb Garden

Thanks to the dreams of Nora, Barbara and Arif, and the hard work of contractor Peter van der Sterre, we now have a beautiful seating area where our herb garden is planted. The seating is large enough to accommodate a class of John Muir School students and is in the sunniest part of the garden. This is especially good during the cold winter months. Thank you so much Peter, Lalo and Harold for all your great work on this major achievement to our garden!

NORA'S BACK!!

We are SO HAPPY to have Nora Brereton back in the garden and totally recovered from her hiking accident three months ago. WELCOME BACK! We really missed you! She is the brains behind our Programs and does an amazing job networking and building community. One of her first orders of business was to have a meeting with the Koshland Park community gardeners on September 19, 2009.













We have two new Garden Coordinators.
Zela Rowlands will be coordinating the gardeners who already have plots in the Koshland Garden.
























Arif Husain will be coordinating the potential gardeners on the waiting list for a plot in Koshland Garden.

August and September Events:


District 5 Clean Up in Koshland Park on August 8, 2009 with Ashley Young, Camilla Dawkins, Soumeya Kerrar, Corrine Law, and Tammia Hubbard. Camilla is the Liaison to our community from the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services, and Tammia was an intern in that office this summer. Ashley and Soumeya are teens who often come to work in Koshland garden. Corrine was our Compost Queen this summer!

Volunteers from the GAP helped us in the garden on August 20, 2009, weeding, planting and composting. Thank you so much for your help! Great volunteers!

Tenth graders from the San Francisco Bay School spend the morning in Koshland Garden on August 28, 2009 learning about the environment.

Koshland Park Workday on September 19th sponsored by Kaiser Permanente. David van Dralen Wetters and Lisa Sandles from Kaiser. Thank you!

Summer 2009 Highlights

• Our May Celebration,announcing our new name, mission and great award from GreatNonProfits was a hugh success. Our CommunityGrows board joined us with YMCA folks and Val Brown from Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's office. Also our wonderful long-time friend, Sissy Geballe and her grandson Dan and his wife Linda joined us. A terrific day!



• First ever Movie Night in the Koshland Garden: 5/30/09 presented by Pamela Jean Smith, a neighbor who works at the Pacific Film Archives. At 9:00 PM thirty-five people braved a cool summer night to watch old films from the archives on gardening and growing food. The garden performance stage held the screen and a projector shot the reels provided. Nora and Barbara served hot cider to everyone, including two police officers who came to watch from the Northern Station. A great night was had by all!

• The challenging new for June was that our Programs Manager, Nora Brereton had a hiking accident in Big Sur which landed her in the hospital for three months with broken bones and internal injuries. Being the young, strong and determined person that she is, she recovered fully and was back to work with the start of the Fall 2009 school year. WELCOME BACK NORA!



• Corrine Law, a graduate of the Get-Up Program from the Garden for the Environment, joined us during the summer to turn our compost. She became the Compost Queen and everyone was in awe of her.








• Summer Programs began in June, first with the LetUsGrow Summer Camp. We had a terrific intern from Global Exchange, Luz Gomez,


who lead the program with the assistance of Markos Major, garden educator.

Breakfast every morning at Kate's Kitchen on Haight Street:

Growing beautiful carrots:

Going to Green Gulch Farm:

Working at the Civic Center Farmers Market:


• Our Seed-to-Mouth Cooking classes started in June every Wednesday from 3:30-5:30 PM in Hayes Valley South Community Room. Our leader was Ms. Saewon Oh, a former teacher's aide at John Muir School this past year.


Every week at least 20 youth and their families harvested produce from the garden and made delicious meals together, including Stone Soup, Mexican and Italian dishes, and strawberry jam. Umm!

Spring Celebration in Koshland Park

Join us this Saturday, May 30th, 2009 for a day of garden work and play, and to celebrate the Hayes Valley Neighborhood PARKS Group's transformation: A new name (Community Grows!) and a Great NonProfits Award!

Garden Workday 10-1 PM
Celebration/BBQ 1-3 PM
Movies in the Park 8:30 PM
Location: Koshland Park (corner of Page and Buchanan Streets, San Francisco)
Cost: Free

Bring a potluck dish to share for the BBQ. Grills and local bands are welcome (contact us if you have one!!)

This event is sponsored by the Western Addition Beacon Center, CommunityGrows, and Kaiser Permanente! For more information, contact: Nora Brereton, Programs Manager, at 415-424-5770 or nora@communitygrows.org.

Hayes Valley Neighborhood Parks Group Declared Winner!!!

Grassroots Environmental Nonprofits, Not Large, Well-Known Groups, Get Highest Ratings
Green Choice Awards Publishes First Ever List of Best Environmental Nonprofits

Menlo Park, Calif. — April 30, 2009 —Grassroots organizations get top votes for best environmental nonprofits, according to GreatNonprofits’ 2009 Green Choice Awards. The contest, held during Earth Month in April, asked people to submit reviews and ratings about environmental nonprofits. The results provide surprising insights into the kinds of organizations that are considered effective by volunteers, donors and stakeholders.

Over the course of Earth Month, more than 26,000 people visited the GreatNonprofits Web site, and 835 reviews were posted about more than one hundred environmental organizations.

“It’s wonderful to see the expression of positive comments on the GreatNonprofits Web site, and we are motivated to do even more to deserve this praise,” says Charles Higgins, executive director of Slide Ranch, which won for best environmental organization with an annual budget between $250,000 and $1 million. Barbara Wenger runs the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Parks Group, the winner among organizations with budgets of $250,000 or less. She says, “We are so honored to be selected, and more importantly to be reviewed so highly by people. I am shocked and thrilled. Even if we didn't win, just reading all of those wonderful reviews is so amazing.”

While big organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were available for review, those groups didn’t see the kinds of results that their leaner counterparts did. For example, the reviews for the NRDC totaled 5, while the tiny Hayes Valley Neighborhood Parks Group garnered 44.

“There are so many great nonprofits who don’t have an advertising budget and are not household names. Similar to what Yelp has done for small restaurants, we enable grassroots nonprofits to gain recognition,” says Perla Ni, CEO and founder of GreatNonprofits. “Now there’s an even playing field through the genuine testimonials and reviews of people who have seen the work of a nonprofit first-hand. Donors and volunteers now have a source of information for which nonprofits are accountable and effective.”

To read our reviews, go to <http://www.greatnonprofits.org/reviews/hayes-valley-neighborhood-parks-group>. To see the winner's page, go to <http://www.greatnonprofits.org/green>. Thank you everyone!!!

BEET Ranger Graduation!

Today we said farewell to the BEET Rangers! It was bittersweet, of course. We will miss them, but we are so proud to see them complete this program and move on to new and exciting paths in their lives!

Modern Tea hosted us for a celebration dessert buffet, with cakes, cookies, sparkling apple cider and local lemonade. Everyone received a diploma and made a speech, and were sent home with beautiful BEET Ranger photo books that Executive Director Barbara Wenger had put together of the amazing photographs she has taken of the BEET Rangers through the program!

We hope to have a few of the BEET Rangers come back and teach with us for the next round of the program, starting in March. There is definitely interest from some of them, and their expertise, great advice, and valuable teaching skills would make the program much stronger next year. In my opinion, youth-led programming is the key to success, and I am looking forward to working with the graduates as co-teachers and co-facilitators. In the meantime, I will miss them as we take a break until next year. They bring so much inspiration and necessary challenge to my life, to keep me an active and critical thinker.

Thank you BEETS!

Harvest Festival!

Harvest Festival this year was a great success, all planned and run by the BEET Rangers! In the morning, the BEET Rangers helped move mulch and compost, take out and harvest winter squash, and prepped beds to plant carrot and radishes for the fall. We harvested some cute little winter squashies to decorate for halloween!

We spread a lot of the compost into our perennial beds and fed our trees their fall compost, giving them deep fertilizing as we move into the new season. A few of the BEET Rangers also painted signs to leave a lasting impression on the garden, making it more beautiful for future groups who come to enjoy the garden.

After our hard work, we went down to Hayes Valley Playground to celebrate with the rest of the neighborhood. The BEET Rangers ran a table about our organization, and helped people plant peas to take home in pots they could decorate themselves. Other BEET Rangers, especially Krystal, Karen, and Jessica, did face painting on lots of little kids. There was a delicious barbeque, and lots of bikes to ride around, including bikes that were welded together so you could ride side by side! It was a great time, and a sweet last event to celebrate with the community and our soon to graduate BEET Rangers
!

BEET Rangers Job Search

Today with the BEET Rangers we made a trip to Safe Haven, a community space in the Hayes Valley South residence. Safe Haven is an after-school drop in spot for youth in the neighborhood to come do homework, hang out, be with friends. They let us use their computers to work on resumes and job applications for the BEET Rangers to explore other employment opportunities for when they graduate the BEET Ranger program.

Here are a couple of resources for youth looking for jobs:

SF Youthline
Run by and for youth, 12noon-10pm every day
1-888-977-3399
http://www.youthlinesf.org/jobs/

SF Kids
http://www.sfkids.org/

JOBS TO APPLY TO:

Juma Ventures
www.juma.org

SF Youthworks
www.sfyouthworks.org

I-YEL
www.crissycorkboard.info/iyel/index.htm

Literacy for Environmental Justice
www.lejyouth.org