Featured Partners

October 2009: Girls to Women

Girls to Women (GTW) is an after school program in East Palo Alto for 6-14 year old girls, founded and directed by our city’s former mayor, Patricia Foster.  In October 2008, Collective Roots partnered with Girls to Women to start a garden-based nutrition program that consisted of 23 weeks during the school year, with 2 class sessions per week.  The program continued through the summer of 2009, and we started our second school year program this past September. 

The focus of the program is to provide garden-based education with a concentration on organic gardening, environmental awareness and cooking from the garden.  The GTW garden consists of 2 garden beds, where the girls have been responsible for planting seeds, transplanting starts, weeding, watering and harvesting the produce from the garden.  Many delicious recipes have been created in GTW’s full-sized kitchen, including delicious garden salads, kale chips (which remain a favorite of many of the girls), citrus collard greens with raisins, zucchini muffins, and bike blender smoothies.  The girls have also learned about organic gardening methods, have become environmental stewards through their work with the garden and environmental awareness activities, and understand how to work cooperatively to make healthy changes in their environment.