From time to time United Way will "loan me out" to other groups to help build the capacity of other organizations in the area of New Media. Yesterday I did a workshop for a group of nonprofits for the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In these workshops I often find I am struggling to guess what the skill level of the audience will be to create just the right Powerpoint presentation. This can be very difficult to get right in a workshop situation.

Did you know it's Food Day today? Did you know there are many days of celebration's in New Haven, so I guess we can call it Food Day's? If you have not already done so, you should checkout the list of upcoming events in New Haven (http://fooddaynh.org/find-an-event/). There is a lot to choose from. I have already been celebrating. This Saturday I went by bike on a tour of many of New Haven's urban gardens.

Over the last couple of years, United Way of Greater New Haven has been building a community blogging presence. Our theory was that United Way is uniquely positioned as a connector for many area social organizations and community leaders. For this reason a United Way blog would be a natural way to connect more people in the community to these perspectives. We saw it as an efficient way to make the Greater New Haven nonprofit sector a little more transparent and show the community the various perspectives of people working in the field. 

In addition to my job as Director of New Media Strategies at United Way, I spend a lot of time volunteering as the Board Chair of the New Haven Land Trust. In this role I get to see another side of the community as I work with environmentalists, gardeners and community organizers.  Recently I have found myself working on a project to connect gardens to schools.

You might be asking yourself why do school gardens matter? In my view they matter because school gardens can function as an outdoor classroom, creating opportunities for hands on learning and student engagement across all subject areas and grades.  Studies have shown that school gardening programs boost students’ scores on science achievement tests.(1) Educators are seeing that activity, healthy eating and learning are linked. In addition to anecdotal evidence, a growing body of research-based literature supports the use of school gardens as a teaching tool. Research has found that participation in youth gardening programs can have the following impacts on students:(2)