Michigan State University faculty and students are producing a documentary on a vision of Flint, Mich., as a healthier, greener city. It will show the challenges of bringing fresh produce to a food desert, feeding schools, providing educational options and battling bureaucracy.
On Wednesdays through July, Great Lakes Echo will run a segment expected to become a building block of the finished story. You can help.
Post questions, suggest interviews, make comments or offer suggestions to help producers tell the story of a city trying to re-grow its roots literally and figuratively as a model for post-industrial revitalization. Links to all of the segments will end up on the Greening of Flint main page.
This week:
Each week in the summer, about 50 high school and college students feed the hens, tend the greenhouse and sift the new compost at Youth Karate-Ka: Harvesting Earth Farm in Beecher, a community outside of Flint. At the same time, farm owners Master Jacky and Dora King, black belts in karate, teach these young workers self-defense with rakes, hoes and shovels. For many of these young students, this is their first job. For the Kings, the farm sows the seeds of a sustainable agriculture that may save Flint.
Related stories:
Urban pioneers turn vacant lots verdant in Detroit
Inmates harvest food, savings, education and jobs from jail gardens
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This is wonderful. And exciting. And so full of potential. Flint is the absolute best place to work out the issues of creating new, vital cities for the 21st century. Growing good, healthy food locally is one of the lynch pins critical to community building. I am reminded of the urban farming undertaken by the Growing Power group in Milwaukee. I’ve attached a link. Urban farming is the new green revolution. Keep it up and go Flint! Thanks, too, to Master Jacky and Dora King for their long, deep vision. A community can’t have too many of these people.
http://www.growingpower.org/