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Medalia Spends Spring Break in LA on Pace Center Trip
April 02, 2010 | Field Hockey
Princeton field hockey sophomore May-Ying Medalia spent her Spring Break on a Breakout Princeton Civic Action trip organized and sponsored by the Pace Center to learn about urban food issues in the Los Angeles area.
Below is an account of the trip written by Medalia:
This past spring break, I was accepted to go on one of the PACE Center's breakout trips to Los Angeles to study and learn more about urban food deserts while volunteering and participating in several community service activities. Breakout trips are civic action trips that Princeton's PACE center sponsors over both fall and spring breaks to allow groups of students to learn more about and take action on important public issues that exist in America today.
Our trip to Los Angeles was focused on how difficult and oftentimes expensive it is to get healthy, fresh produce and other nutritious food in lower income urban areas. We also looked at how this affects everything from students' ability to perform in school to higher rates of obesity and diabetes in these areas where there is not enough money to purchase the healthy food that is available never mind pay for expensive medications or doctors' fees.
During the trip we visited and volunteered at a number of organizations in the Los Angeles area, starting with the Garden School Foundation. The Garden School Foundation is a project that promotes garden-based learning in schools in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods. The program builds a garden on a school's campus to teach children about planting and growing food, to show them other ways to learn outside of the classroom, and to get parents and the community more involved in the school by allowing them to come in and garden. We went to the 24th Street Elementary school, which is the Garden School Foundation's first and largest location to help them turn over a new plot, plant seeds, water, and weed the one-acre garden next to the school's black-top.
Throughout our two days there, we got to interact with the students, helping them work in the garden and getting to hear about the food they eat and what the school serves them everyday. Most notably, there seemed to be unanimous confirmation that the lunches they were served in school were 'gross' and that none of them actually ate what was given to them at school so they would wait until they got home to eat every day. One of the largest problems with LAUSD is that there are over half a million students enrolled, which means they need to feed over half a million people daily. This makes it difficult to put even moderately nutritious food in the schools for lunch. Although many of these students and their parents do not realize, by not being properly fed it is very difficult for them to remain attentive and properly participate throughout the course of the day. The Garden School Foundation works with (in this case) the elementary school to try and promote awareness of this fact and also to try and get fresh fruits and vegetables that the students grow into their own homes so they can start to improve their diets.
The other major organization that we visited was the South Central Farmers co-op, which however used to be located in South-Central Los Angeles, has been re-located to an 80-acre plot in Bakersfield, CA. There is actually an Oscar-nominated film titled The Garden that documents the plight of this co-op that was forced to move out of their original location based on a fight they had with the developer who owned the land they initially farmed. We went out to visit the farm in Bakersfield and helped the two brothers who are in charge of the farm harvest two different types of kale.
The other organizations that we visited and volunteered at include the Hollywood Farmers' Market, A World Fit For Kids, Market Makeovers, La Causa, the Los Angeles Food Bank, and the Immanuel Presbyterian Church food pantry. Overall, one of the common problems that all of these programs faced was that there was always a larger government operation or policy that prevented or made their goals much harder to achieve. In addition to that, the incredibly large number of people in Los Angeles who need help from each of these groups was astonishing and showed how important policy making and urban planning are to influencing a community and impacting the ability of smaller organizations to perform. As a result, I hope to get a certificate in Urban Studies from Princeton so that I have a better idea of how this process works from the top-down to contrast the bottom-up perspective that I gained from the trip.
Click here to learn more about the Pace Center.