Food Strong

School gardens and culinary arts programming: we visit schools and other institutions to guide young learners through planning, building, planting, maintaining, and harvesting fresh food, herb, and native flower gardens. We emphasize stem, the arts, environmental and community stewardship, nutrition, and entrepreneurship. We also teach our students how to cook healthy food from scratch. We focus on promoting minimally processed whole foods and teaching through showing that healthy food can be inexpensive, quick to prepare, and delicious. We currently serve about 450 youth in our school programming, and this number continues to climb.

Food strong's urban farms:food strong learning garden: this is our urban farm located at our partner organization's site, the coit road farmers market. We use this space to host field trips and learning experiences and use the food we grow in our culinary education. We also allow our students to help to sell freshly grown produce at farmers' markets to gain valuable entrepreneurial skills. We host monthly volunteer events to help us plant, develop, and maintain our learning garden and assist the market with much-needed maintenance and repairs. Superior avenue community farm: we are in the process of acquiring a 2.85-acre property near downtown cleveland in the st. Clair-superior neighborhood. This site features a 20,000+ square foot church and 7,000 square foot farm house, as well as 5 high tunnel hoop houses for agriculture. This property needs complete restoration, and will serve as food strong's headquarters, as well as community space for food access, education, workforce development, gathering, and sustainability. Food strong is currently in phase i of a 3-phase process of restoration and land use.

Fresh food retail: in 2023, we hired a farm manager to oversee learning garden operations in order to produce enough food to sell in underserved, low-access communities. We will be accepting snap benefits and other incentive programs in return for our freshly-grown produce. We operate a food trailer that serves as a pop-up "farm stand" to sell our food in a variety of community locations (with an emphasis on low-income, low-access communities)