[Scpg] Detroit/The Urban Farming Movement's Youngest Recruits, Teen Moms

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

The Urban Farming Movement's Youngest Recruits, Teen Moms
  By Cory Vanderpool | August 9th, 2010  1 Comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIRDteduAHE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH6sI7BqXLo&feature=player_embedded#!

It isn't often you see the words teen pregnancy and urban agriculture 
in the same sentence. Not only are these two words now being used 
together, but for one Detroit school, urban farming is a tool to help 
pregnant women get the nutritional food they need and hopefully turn 
them into future farmers of America. The Ferguson Academy for Young 
Women is an alternative high school located in Detroit, where 
education and resources are provided for pregnant teens, grades 9-12. 
Here the students continue their education with classes in music, 
home repair, IT, fine arts and parenting. But unlike other teenagers, 
these young women also grow crops and care for the school's farm 
animals housed in the barns that lie adjacent to the school. In the 
past, I have written about Detroit as the next agrarian paradise, but 
this program uniquely brings together a multitude of social, 
cultural, economic and environmental issues.

The documentary, Grown in Detroit, developed by Norwegian documentary 
filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk, focuses on the urban gardening 
efforts that have been undertaken by the 300 students at Ferguson. In 
a city where more than 3,000 pregnant teenagers drop out of school 
each year, a new, greener landscape is creating opportunities for 
these young people and the community.

Once one of the wealthiest cities in America, Detroit has become one 
of the most dangerous, faced with economic and social challenges. The 
land here was converted a century ago to make room for the industrial 
boom that the city experienced. But now, as businesses close their 
doors and residents flee, the land left behind is once again being 
cultivated and Detroit's steadfast citizens are getting back to their 
roots.

These young mothers and pregnant teens, who were initially averse to 
the physical work of farm life, are being taught agricultural skills, 
harvesting crops for themselves, the community and selling produce to 
the market. With the land and the crops thriving, without the use of 
pesticides, and with plenty of native flowers growing on these lots, 
the city's bee population is uniquely healthier than most of America. 
In this nearly extinct urban environment, innovation is providing the 
city's future generations with a better, healthier future, painting a 
renewed image of America.

The school is named after Catherine Ferguson who was a famous freed 
slave living in New York in the early 1800?s. Although Catherine 
could not read, she was one of the largest promoters of education in 
the poverty stricken areas around the city. Ferguson was named a 
"Breakthrough High School" by the National Association of Secondary 
School Principals. In order to graduate from the Academy, each 
student must be accepted to a two year college or a four year 
university.
http://www.triplepundit.com/

GROWN IN DETROIT
View the documentary and experience the power and profit that nature 
can provide.
http://grownindetroit.filmmij.nl/

Synopsis
Detroit has earned its notorious title as one of the most dangerous 
cities in the U.S. due to a struggling automotive industry, 
increasingly high unemployment, poverty, race issues, vacant houses, 
high crime rates and decreased public services. Places where houses, 
factories and schools were once thriving are left abandoned because 
only half of the city's original population remains. In the last 
fifty years, one of the wealthiest cities in America has transformed 
into one of the most economically and socially challenged.

Where residents once had major supermarkets and affordable, healthy 
dining, now liquor stores sell groceries from behind bullet-proof 
glass and fast food restaurants, are rampant. However, amidst all 
this negativity, where the press hangs on every story, the city and 
its residents have surprisingly emerged with their own solution.With 
the destruction of so many abandoned homes, nature has taken over and 
the city is 'greening' from within.

Satellite images speak for themselves, more than one third of the 
city has become green again just as it was before the industrial era. 
This new landscape is creating opportunities and hope for the city 
and its residents. Land that was used for farming a century ago has 
again been cultivated, this time by the urban farmer. The urban 
farmer turns out, whether out of necessity or not, to have a right to 
exist. Vacant lots in the heart of the city are being returned to 
fertile land. Some harvest the crops for their own use, some share 
with the neighbors or community, while others sell their produce at 
the market. For instance the bee population, almost extinct in 
America, is flourishing in Detroit. The extensive variety of native 
flowers on the vacant lots and the lack of pesticides make Detroit's 
unique environment perfect for a very pure honey production. In such 
an impoverished urban environment, it is refreshing to see such 
ingenuity. This is an image of the Unites States that is rarely shown.

Grown in Detroit focuses on the urban gardening efforts managed by a 
public school of 300, mainly african-american, pregnant and parenting 
teenagers. In Detroit alone, there are annually more than 3,000 
pregnant teenagers who drop out of high school. This school is one of 
three located in the United States. As part of the curriculum, the 
girls are taught agricultural skills on the school's own farm located 
behind the school building what used to be the playground. The young 
mothers, often still children themselves, are learning by farming to 
become more independent women and knowledgeable about the importance 
of nutritional foods. Many of them start out disliking the often 
physically hard work on the farm but this aversion disappears as they 
see their crops growing and being sold for profit. "Back to the 
roots", a simple yet effective solution for a city that has to start 
all over again and perhaps a lesson to be learned for the rest of the 
world.


Grown in Detroit
Dir. Mascha & Manfred Poppenk
[filmmij; 2009]
by PAUL BOWER





In the 1930s, a dozen writers based out of Nashville's Vanderbilt 
University, including John Gould Fletcher and Robert Penn Warren, 
wrote a manifesto of sorts concerning humankind's relationship to and 
reliance upon the land. I'll Take My Stand, the collection of essays 
by The Southern Agrarians (as they came to call themselves), echoed 
several perennial themes in American thought, but probably the most 
important was the idea that if humanity continues to detach itself 
from the land, society will eventually turn to ruin. With a watchful 
eye on the rampant industrialization of the United States, the 
writers argued the importance of farming and ecological 
responsibility as a means to keep humanity grounded in reality.

This idea is at the heart of a small, progressive, and very 
specialized public school in Detroit. The Catherine Ferguson Academy 
for Young Women, located in one of the roughest areas of the 
Midwest's most cherished post-apocalyptic wasteland, serves the 
educational needs of impoverished teenage mothers. The group of young 
ladies who attend the school range from mothers of two-year-old 
children to those who are expecting their first. Almost without 
exception, the fathers of these children haven abandoned them. To 
call the lives of these young women physically and emotionally 
debilitating would do injustice to the inimitable courage they 
display on a daily basis.

Aside from fulfilling the Michigan State academic standards for high 
school studies, the faculty at Catherine Ferguson High instruct their 
pupils in an entirely different field of inquiry: agriculture. Every 
student at the school is required to assist in the day-to-day 
activities of the school's small plot of arable land. The leadership 
of the school, witnessing the wholesale abandonment of the city over 
the last few decades (between 1970 and 2008, Detroit's population 
shrank by roughly 600,000), saw an opportunity presented by the 
unprecedented number of vacant lots sitting dormant in their 
industrial milieu: through grueling physical labor and ecologically 
informed planning, the school bought and prepared several plots of 
land and began growing an impressive variety of crops. By growing and 
selling their own produce, the young women are given something 
concrete, a tactile result of their efforts, and something to be 
truly proud of in a city where, for many, despair and futility are 
the order of the day.

The work of the Academy piqued the interest of Dutch filmmakers 
Mascha and Manfred Poppenk, and the two set out to make Grown in 
Detroit. The film takes its title from the labels the school puts on 
all of the produce it sells at Detroit's Eastern Market, an immense 
farmer's market that operates every Saturday on the east side of the 
city. The filmmakers were granted full access to the operations of 
the school and crafted an insightful, realistic, and uplifting 
documentary about the school and the students whose lives it 
enriches. Shots of young women, many of them pregnant, harvesting and 
planting crops across the street from abandoned, burnt-out houses and 
crack dens are surreal to say the least.

One of the most sought after products of the Academy is their honey. 
An administrator of the school explains that owing to both an 
overabundance of wildflowers in abandoned lots and area homeowners' 
lack of funds to buy harmful pesticides and fertilizer, the bee 
population of Detroit is one of the healthiest in the state. She 
describes Detroit as a phoenix, rising from the ashes and broken 
dreams of a rust-belt tragedy. It's an apt allegory for both the 
school and its students, ardently reaching for something real amidst 
a landscape of crushing urban decay.
Perhaps the most hopeful part of Grown in Detroit is the womens' 
insistence on continuing to garden and grow their own food after 
graduation. The care and respect shown to these vulnerable young 
women by everyone at the school is a testament to the goodwill and 
charity of which humans are thankfully still capable. But when all is 
said and done, it is the unabashed realism of the faculty and staff 
of the Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women that convinces us 
of the integrity of their good intentions. The Poppenks have made a 
truly remarkable documentary about a story of real, 
honest-to-goodness hope in one of the most unlikely places.

Grown in Detroit" Exclusive Review
By Adam Goodall
01st December 2009
Detroit, Michigan is a city known around the world as the heart of 
the American automotive industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler 
call the city home, and with the automotive industry being one of the 
most important industries to America's economy (it represented 3.3% 
of US Gross Domestic Product in 2002) its importance to Detroit's 
survival follows naturally. This makes the industry's decline over 
the last decade, caused and exacerbated by international competition, 
9/11, the recent economic recession and the rising price of crude 
oil, a particular problem for The Motor City. Indeed, in their 
documentary Grown in Detroit, Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred 
Poppenk waste no time showing us just how bad the automotive industry 
crisis has hit that city, with abandoned buildings and overgrown, 
vacant lots on every block. The thinning of the city's lifeblood has 
made it one of the most dangerous in America and caused over 
one-third of its population to flee it, and the Poppenks show us 
that, while this is an unsavoury situation, it's not one that can 
only get worse.

The specific focus of this sixty-minute documentary is The Catherine 
Ferguson Academy for Young Women, a high school for teenage mothers 
located in a largely-abandoned area of Detroit. The school puts a 
primacy on the study of agriculture. Teachers extol the virtues of 
growing your own fruits and vegetables and selling them; practical 
lessons are held on the 'Farm', a large area of abandoned land now 
used as an expansive garden by the school; the headmistress talks of 
staging a summer school programme for the girls to learn which crops 
sell best and how to grow them. It's more than a little astonishing 
to see how effortlessly and successfully this system works, and one 
can't help but marvel at what's on display.  In a city where crime, 
violence and failure are rife, and in a society where these girls 
would likely be financially and socially crippled by their having a 
child, the Academy stands out as a small, but nonetheless bright, 
glimmer of hope.

The Poppenks acknowledge this and let the students, teachers and 
Academy speak for themselves, only revealing as much information as 
necessary. Rather than going into great detail about the students and 
the school, the regular inter-titles focus on the state of Detroit 
itself. Providing information that can't be presented through images 
with these inter-titles, the Poppenks draw parallels between the 
girls and the dying city they live in, pointing out that, even in the 
most dire of circumstances, there is still a way out - and that way 
out may well be the urban farming that the Academy champions.
Grown in Detroit is an interesting film in this regard, as it 
seemingly works with an eye towards the bigger picture rather than 
towards the individual. At the same time, however, the camera is 
regularly called on to provide close-ups and shots that emphasise 
each individual, suggesting a more personal approach is, at least, 
desired by the filmmakers. The documentary also has a tendency to 
focus on certain members of the Academy's community - the science 
teacher who championed agrarian-based education in the school; a 
single teenage mother of two given her "third chance" to attend the 
school; a girl who delivers her child during the documentary's 
filming and comments on how the baby's father hasn't shown since; the 
Academy's genial and progressive headmistress. If the descriptions I 
have given seem to be missing something, that's because they are - 
names. Two of these people have their names mentioned, but there's 
never any sense that their identity is important. It's an awkward 
approach, because while the film's emphasis on the Academy as a whole 
and the city of Detroit points to a documentary interested with the 
larger implications of what this remarkable school is teaching, the 
documentary also tries to give the film a personal, more human angle, 
as if to pin real people to the overarching theme. However, with no 
names, these people become identity-less, just faces on the street 
that we recognise because we've seen them once or twice before. They 
seem to exist as metaphors, not as people in and of themselves, and 
it renders the documentary's human angle at once self-conscious and 
less effective than it should be.

That said, however, Grown in Detroit works excellently on a macro 
scale. As a documentary about hope, the tenacity of the human spirit, 
and the silver linings in even the darkest of clouds, the Poppenks' 
tale of The Motor City and its less-privileged residents is 
excellent, stunningly shot and well-devised. The only thing that 
trips the film up is the not-so-well-measured individual angle, and 
were that rectified, Grown in Detroit could well be amazing.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009
Food on Screen: Grown in Detroit

Leave it to the Dutch to fund a documentary that Americans across the 
country should watch. I don't know if or when this film will arrive 
stateside, but I was lucky to catch it at the Austin Film Festival, 
where it won the prize for best documentary.

In a nutshell, GROWN IN DETROIT is about urban farming in, well, 
Detroit, where there are a lot of unused and vacant lots, high 
unemployment and poverty. Specifically, the film is about a program 
for teenage moms that not only provides day care/education for their 
kids, but also teaches the girls agricultural skills - with the hope 
that they will both feed the city and their families, and make some 
money doing it.


The school, one of only two in the US that has a similar program, is 
called Catherine Ferguson Academy. It's pretty amazing stuff (though 
might fall under the category of common sense...). The directors, a 
young Dutch couple, were at the screening I attended, and 
unfortunately it seems that the school has lost funding and had to 
fire half their staff last year. This will obviously affect the 
quality of the program. But on the bright side, the number of gardens 
in Detroit is mushrooming - from 300 to 800 in a little over a year.

Catch this documentary if you have the chance. The sight of an urban 
environment, usually so far from nature, being transformed not only 
into a green place, but one that can sustain food (and bees! the bees 
love it in Detroit!) makes you feel hope where it might seem none is 
possible.
Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women in Detroit
The Ferguson Academy for Young Women is an alternative high school 
located in Detroit, MI. They provide education and resources for 
pregnant teens, grades 9-12. Many of the teens come from 
underprivileged backgrounds and are faced with daily challenges that 
infringe upon their educational opportunities. The Catherine Ferguson 
Academy strives to provide quality education in order to ensure a 
bright future for each child. The goal of the principal and teachers 
at the academy is to prevent the pregnancy cycle from reoccurring in 
the next generation of infants. Lots used for farming and a barn 
built by the students lie adjacent to the school. The barn houses a 
variety of farm animals that the students help care for.

Eligibility
The Ferguson Academy is open to any high school age pregnant teen 
that lives in Detroit. They hold a citywide baby showers in order to 
encourage teen mothers and pregnant teens who were not attending 
school, to enroll in their program. Each student must be accepted to 
a two year college or four year university before they are eligible 
to graduate.



Services
The academy offers many features to encourage the success of their 
students. Some of the amenities include childcare and hands-on 
interactive techniques. The school offers choir, sports, and holds 
special events for the teens. The kids have the opportunity to attend 
movie and lunch outings, and are able to attend a high school dance 
facilitated by the staff. The principal and staff of the Catherine 
Ferguson Academy do their best to ensure that their students are 
prepared for standardized college exams. Tutoring programs for the 
ACT and MEAP are available after school.

On-site Daycare
The majority of pregnant teens drop out because they have no access 
to childcare. The academy offers a fully equipped nursery, complete 
with cribs high chairs, and refrigerators. In order to accommodate 
the students' parental obligations outside of class, the academy 
provides onsite medical clinics and WIC services. The students are 
conveniently able to attend class and care for their babies in the 
same environment. The principal and staff at the Catherine Ferguson 
academy encourage students to implement interactive learning 
techniques while they care for the infants. Many of the students 
enjoy reading to their children in the nursery's soothing environment.



Available Courses
The students follow the normal curriculum established by the Detroit 
School District. They have additional access to college preparatory 
and career courses and electives.
Some of the following include:
	*	Music
	*	Home Repair
	*	Technology/IT
	*	Fine Arts
	*	Parenting
The school has an Urban Farming course under the direction of science 
teacher Paul Weertz. The students learn how to grow and nurture 
plants in an urban environment. Fresh produce is often scarce in 
urban environments and too costly for financially burdened students. 
Ninety percent of the student body qualify for free or reduced meals. 
As a result of this farming program, 100 percent of the students have 
access to fresh produce that is often unavailable to many of the 
teens.

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