Bertie County Community Gardeners Attend Faith & Food Event

Mr. Earl Freeman and Mr. William Freeman, two leaders from the Piney Wood Chapel Missionary Baptist Church community garden in Powellsville, and James Peele, Cooperative Extension Community Garden Coordinator, attended the Eastern Region Come to the Table Conference yesterday in Kinston, NC.

To prove it, here is a photo from the Kinston.com news article about the event entitled Growing food, weeding out poverty. Earl Freeman (plaid shirt) and William Freeman (yellow shirt) are front and center in the photo! Lucy Bradley (dark purple sweater) is the NC Master Gardener Volunteer coordinator for the state and co-presented in a jam-packed conference session on Community Gardening 101.

From Kinston.com: http://www.kinston.com/news/local/growing-food-weeding-out-poverty-1.89857

We attended sessions on understanding agriculture in eastern NC, community gardening, and local food in schools. One of the best sessions was a panel of three youth from the Conetoe Family Life Center, Poder Juvenil Campesino/NC Field and SWARM. It was a session about youth empowerment through food ministries and projects and each young person talked about how they became involved with their respective projects, the challenges they faced and the hopes they had for the future. Cynthia Brown of the Resourceful Communities Project facilitated and made some enlightening points about how many organizations say they want to include youth, but don't let youth become involved on their own terms. Using the analogy of inviting a guest over for dinner to your home, Brown said you can't just invite youth to 'come to the table' and expect they will come without asking them what time, what they want to eat, who else they want to invite, etc etc.

Leaders from the PWC Missionary Baptist Church Community Garden speak with Rev Kearney

Among the many valuable lessons learned during conference sessions were incredible opportunities to connect with the multitudes of people across eastern NC who are working in the overlap of faith and food. One such connection was made with members of the PWC community garden and Rev Kearney as they discussed ways to involve youth in the garden.

After a day of filling our heads with new ideas and our address books with new contacts, it's back to work to put all of it to use in the fields and in the meeting places where people of faith gather...where positive, real changes are just around the corner.