Archive for September, 2010

Posted by Bonnie Kwon | September 30th, 2010

The Employment Justice Center (EJC) and the Restaurant Opportunities Center of DC (ROC-DC) are partnering to launch DC’s first ever Carrotmob!!!!!

What is a Carrotmob? Carrotmob is a method of activism that enables consumers to use their collective buying power to reward businesses that will make socially and environmentally responsible improvements. Instead of avoiding a business with bad practices, Carrotmob attracts customers to a company with good ones. It’s reverse boycott. In a boycott everyone loses. In a carrotmob everyone wins!

What is being planned for the 1st ever DC Carrotmob? November 13th DC community members will celebrate the 2nd year anniversary for the DC Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act by rewarding a restaurant committed to providing paid sick days for all DC restaurant workers with a Carrotmob! We will use our $ as consumers that day to reward a responsible business and fill up their reservations.

Why Paid Sick Days? While the DC Accrued Sick  Act provided paid sick days for many DC workers, it left tipped restaurant workers out. This means that your server, waitress, waiter, and bartending are working and serving you while they are sick because they can’t afford to take a day off. Our stomachs got queasy thinking about someone sneezing into our food especially going into flu season.

How can you participate?

1. Attend a planning meeting at the EJC office to help blog, tweet, facebook, deliver business letters, paper mache a giant carrot, and plan the big day!!! Tuesday, October 5th 9AM at 727 15th Street NW Please RSVP tobonnie@rocunited.org.

2. Join our email list by clicking here: DC Carrotmob

3. Sign on as an organization, get the word out to your coworkers & members, and we can put your name and logo on publicity materials. The more the merrier to show that we are conscientious consumers who support healthy people serving food! Please email bonnie@rocunited.org with any questions.

Posted by Shannon Curry | September 29th, 2010

Next Sunday October 10^th, Bread for the City is where it’s all going down. So what does 10/10 look like at DC’s premiere food bank and urban garden? To start with, Roadside Organics and Hip Hop Caucus are hosting a Green the Block Local Food Block Party event from 12-4:30. Featuring music, cooking demonstrations, and a general atmosphere of fun, the event will help fund Bread for the City’s green roof project.

Immediately following the block party, Live Green and A Well-Fed World are hosting a massive, veg friendly potluck. The potluck will include local, sustainable food, great speakers, and information about local environmental organizations. They are currently seeking volunteers to help set up before to the event, bring veg friendly food for the potluck, and tidy up afterwards (We hear you get first dibs on leftovers if you help!). RSVP on Facebook with what you’re bringing.

Both parties are in celebration of 350.org’s Global Work Party Day. On 10/10 citizens all over the world will take to the streets to plant trees, install solar panels, anything and everything to green their communities and spread the word about climate change! So dig out your work clothes and favorite vegan recipes and come spend the day at Bread for the City!

Posted by Greg Bloom | September 24th, 2010

On October 10th, 2010, 350.org is calling upon people across the world to take actions that will make their communities more sustainable.

So on 10.10.10, 350 is organizing mass actions at the White House and the Washington Monument, designed to send messages to the White House and Congress, urging them to take the lead on stopping climate change.

Meanwhile, here in the District of Columbia, we are getting to work. Members of the DC Food For All are convening workdays at community garden sites across the city.

Then we’ll all join together at Bread for the City Northwest to celebrate with the Hip Hop Caucus, Roadside Organics, and Live Green. Local chefs preparing local food with local hip hop acts in the early afternoon, and a community potluck of sustainable food in the evening. Sneak previews of Bread for the City’s new facility, complete with green roof-top garden.

See the Kickstarter page for the Sustainable Food Block Party here. The event is free, but donations will go to help build Bread for the City’s new rooftop community garden.

With that announced, sign up for one of the events below!

Groundwork Anacostia invites you to the Mayfair Community Center (3744 1/2 Hayes Street N.E.), a new community garden site, where volunteers will help build build raised beds, lay soil, and learn about community gardening techniques and strategies. They need 15-20 volunteers to get down and dirty. The action will be from 9am-12pm, followed by rides back to Bread for the City NW for the Sustainable Food Block Party. Contact Dennis Chestnut of Groundwork Anacostia or email dcfoodforall@gmail.com.

The Farm at Walker Jones needs 5 to 10 volunteers to help building a new compost bin. Come see our 3/4 acre farm in the middle of the city, check out our composting system and our large worm farm. 9-noon on 10/10/10. The Farm at Walker Jones is located at the corner of NJ and K Streets NW. Contact sidraforman@gmail.com for more information.

The Virginia Avenue Park Community Garden (corner of L St & 9th St SE) invites you to a fall harvest gathering! From 12-4pm, bring friends and family to learn how-to plant your own food, care for it, and harvest it. Get gardening tips and tricks and try them out in our garden! Volunteers will be needed before and at the event, for planting, harvesting, and compost-turning. Before the event, volunteers can help make, print, and hand-out flyers. Email Karin Edgett and check out their Facebook Page.

There will also be a big bike tour, sponsored by WABA, of most of these sites and more! Email DCFoodForAll@gmail.com for more info. And stay tuned…

Posted by Kacie Warner | September 21st, 2010

As a part of the fourth annual DC School Garden Week, held this year in conjunction with DC Farm to School Week, join us for the third annual DC School Gardens Bike Tour. We’ll visit five school gardens – a mix of public schools, charter schools, new gardens, established gardens, from the Southeast to the [...]

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | September 14th, 2010

Last month, Northwest Current correspondent Teke Wiggen followed Vince Hill, Jeffery Wankel and 30 volunteers into the heat of the fields of Parker Farms in Colonial Beach, Virginia to learn about our Glean for the City program.

Now in its second year, Glean for the City has become an essential part of our food pantry — enabling us to provide free, fresh produce to nearly 5,000 households each month. In fact, it’s been packing our pantry pretty much to the brim — and yet there’s still acres of food left untouched out there. (See our recent photos here.)

So we’re trying to figure out how to rescue even more. That starts by just giving it away more quickly. So now our NW food pantry is putting out a variety of freshly picked produce for anyone to take home–even if they don’t participate in our food program. Seriously, these bins are just set out there, and people can come and pick their fill. All we ask is that they promise to eat what they take — and enjoy.

Since the Northwest Current is only in PDF form, we’re sharing the full text of the article with you below.

Gleaning Crews Aim to Feed the Hungry
By Teke Wiggin, NW Current, August 11 2010

“Go deep!” yells a girl in a white tank top as she chucks three ears of corn in rapid succession toward a man stooped over a crate behind a row of stalks. The man springs upright, deftly grabbing each ear as it hurtles through the air. Laughing to himself, he snaps off the stalk butts and peels the thick outer husks. He begins to drop the ears into a crate lying at his feet but pauses and turns his head toward the girl. “You’re not checking these, Ashley!” he shouts. Ashley shakes her head and prepares to launch another salvo, scooping up ears from the tilled soil and snapping off others from trimmed stalks. On a sweltering Saturday, the two volunteers, along with about 30 others, are scouring Parker Farms cornfields in Oak Grove, Va., to harvest leftover crops for the food-salvaging program known as Glean for the City.

Posted by Liz Whitehurst | September 13th, 2010

“One of the goals of the Neighborhood Farm Initiative is to provide an educational resource for gardening and small scale organic food production for DC-area residents. It is in this same vein that we’re sponsoring this skillshare with some local home brewers,” said NFI Co-Founder and Program Director, Bea Trickett.

NFI and Mamie D. Lee Community Garden are teaming up to host a home brew contest and how-to workshop on Saturday, September 18th at La Casa Community Center in Mount Pleasant from 7-10pm.

Posted by shannonbshea | September 10th, 2010

Ecolocity DC, a local Transition Towns and community sustainability group, is hosting a “Building a Tumbling Composter” workshop next Saturday, September 18. The workshop will be held at 3 PM at the Emergence Community Arts Collective, 733 Euclid Street Northwest, Washington, DC. Composting is a great way to ensure that the nutrients in organic waste from food preparation are not lost and instead are returned to the soil to grow more food.

This workshop will focusing on learning by doing, as we will be building a tumbling composter for use in the Emergence Community Arts Center’s teaching garden. Tumbling composters are perfect for people with limited space or limited compostable goods, as they can create compost more quickly than traditional composting bins. They can also be put on a patio or balcony where traditional bins just aren’t practical. Although many tumbling composters are expensive, we’ll be building ours with mostly recycled materials. We’ll distribute instructions so that you can then take what you’ve learned and bring it home. If you’re a complete beginner, we’ll also have a bit of an introduction to composting.

This is the second in a series of composting workshops sponsored by Washington Parks and People. For information on this workshops or any of Ecolocity DC’s events, please email us at ecolocitydc@gmail.com or check out our events calendar.

Shannon Brescher Shea is an outreach organizer for Ecolocity DC.

Posted by Kacie Warner | September 8th, 2010

video: 39th Annual Family Cook-off at Washington Youth Garden