Cultivating Sustainable Mindsets at MPS Culinary

The following blog post was authored : Maria Montero & Quinlan Genrich on the Minneapolis Culinary internship project. Additional Team Member: Amelia Bowser

Accessibility. This word was emphasized to us by Caitlin, our team lead and Urban Farm Manager, as well as our contacts at Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to whom we ultimately report. Through our summer internship with Spark-Y, we are working to create an accessible learning space for MPS students and community members. One that educates students on sustainable growing, eating, and living in an engaging manner outside of the typical classroom. Our internship focuses on two main strategies to encourage accessible sustainability. First, we care for the diversity of plants in the community garden space. Second, we have planned and designed an outdoor education space, which we will create by the garden and adjacent to the entrance of the MPS Culinary & Wellness Services building. Our main goal is to bring the youth and classrooms of MPS outdoors to the natural world and make learning accessible and enjoyable!

Community Garden

The Minneapolis Public Schools Culinary & Wellness Services contains a beautiful garden encompassing the front sides of the building. One of our responsibilities as part of our summer internship project is to maintain the communal garden space by weeding, planting, and harvesting the many varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. As a group we stay very productive with hands-on work and assistance to our wonderful Urban Farm Manager and team lead, Caitlin. We have learned a lot from her urban farming expertise and how to best care for the growing space. There have also been many generous volunteers of all ages helping out and we could not be more grateful for their dedication and hard work! With the little time we have left of this internship experience, we cannot wait to continue our journey of enriching sustainable living, getting our hands dirty and digging into more garden exploration!

Outdoor Education Space

Within the dominant education model, experiential learning is often forsaken in favor of sitting inside at a desk seven hours a day, nine months a year. In high school, I remember asking my teachers each spring to take class outside to which the answer was usually “no, we have too much to do.” I remember savoring each 20-minute lunch when, on nice days, my friends and I would sit on the grass and try to avoid being hit by a stray frisbee. Through providing an outdoor educational experience, our internship challenges the idea that learning can only be accomplished by reading and lecturing in an indoor classroom. In addition to the hands-on garden space, we are working with MPS staff to design and create an outdoor classroom and produce preparation space. A table equipped with a sink will allow for easy produce cleaning and preparation. Stools will allow for flexibility of arrangement and use. Picnic tables will provide additional seating and table work space. A chalkboard will provide ample space for written instruction and information. Finally, a sign will welcome people to the garden and learning space, intentionally engaging the youth, the community, and the MPS Culinary employees. These components will work together to foster an exciting educational experience and support a tactile learning environment. We hope this space, as a departure from the traditional classroom, will engage visiting MPS students in a different way and inspire them to further explore the origin of their food, its preparation, and the meaning of sustainable living. Having spent the first half of the internship budgeting, proposing, and planning the outdoor classroom and produce preparation space, we look forward to seeing our plans come to fruition throughout the remainder of the internship!

Our participation in this Spark-Y summer internship will add value in our futures by fostering more sustainable living habits, knowing how the connection of people and nature can build community, and enhancing our interests in the environment. This internship has developed our problem solving skills and provided space for us to think about how a garden and education space can be engaging and accessible for everyone. We have explored what sustainability means to us and thought in a mindset that encompasses a world greater than the individual, inclusive of the natural world and the systems on which we rely. We will bring this sustainable mindset with us in our future careers and our expanded understanding of what constitutes education will continue to shape how we learn and interact with others.

A Summer of Sustainability at Roosevelt

The following blog post was written by Nurfadila Khairunnisa, Keriann Cooper, Olya Noyes, and Tunger Hong on their 2019 internship project at Roosevelt Urban Farm (RUF ).

This summer, the Roosevelt Urban farm (RUF) team is taking on big projects for the students and community members at Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt is located in South Minneapolis, just a couple blocks north of Lake Nokomis. During the school year, Roosevelt offers an Urban Farming class that works on and takes care of the aquaponics system and the outdoor garden in collaboration with Spark-Y. This is all part of Roosevelt principal, Principal Bradley’s initiative to make his school “made by the students.” Two of Spark Y’s interns in the RUF team this summer, Olya and Keriann, are also students in the Urban Farming class during the school year!

As our biggest project, our team will build a hoop house on school grounds for students to be able to grow plants all year long. A hoop house acts very similarly to a greenhouse but with better ventilation. It is made by hoops made of PVC which are placed in a row and covered by greenhouse plastic. They should be placed in a location with good soil and in an area open to sunlight. Some benefits of having a hoop house include helping extend growth season by up to four months, holding in heat, being easy to relocate and move around, holding in moisture which is good for the soil, and much more.

So far, we have not started on the hoop house since we’ve only gathered all of our material last week. We hope to get started on it this week and to have it done as soon as we can.

Another one of our projects is to reorganize the aquaponics classroom that students use during the school year. We are getting help from an interior designer named Ilana, who is a friend of our team lead, Matt. In the first picture, you can see how the room currently looks like after moving around some of the big tables and cleaning up the area. It isn’t how we want it to look like just yet but looks a lot better than how it looked when we first stepped into the room!

The classroom following interior design changes.

Here are some things that our interns at Roosevelt have to say:

Tunger: "I am most excited about doing some changes to the aquaponics room and building the hoop house. Our project at Roosevelt is important to me because helping out the community is always a good thing and gives a feeling of accomplishment once finishing the project."

Keriann: "Working on Roosevelt's food systems has empowered me to start my own sustainable garden. I have a good feeling that our aquaponics system and new hoop house will also excite future Roosevelt students to engage in sustainability."

The Future of Biolubricants

This Post was written by Jared Miller and Hani Abukar,
Spark-Y’s summer interns working on the Lube-Tech project.

A big question in sustainable living today is exploring and creating renewable forms of energy so as to maintain our world and make a better environment for future generations. Taking a central role in that subject is the use of fossil fuels in creating energy and in various other fields, in this case the creation of lubricants for the smooth running of engines of various sizes.

Earlier this year, Spark-Y began a collaboration with Lube-Tech, a large manufacturer of oils and lubricants (amongst other business units) to explore the future of biolubricants. What is a biolubricant, you may ask? Well, a biolubricant is essentially a lubricant made from plant based oils such as sunflower or canola oil as opposed to the typical petroleum. It is also known as a bio-based lubricant and is used to a small degree in companies such as Lube-Tech.

Lube-Tech approached Spark-Y with the mission of sounding out the current biolubricants market: what else is there, how viable are these options, who supplies them, and what biolubricants are currently being researched for potential future uses? We are excited to work on this project for Lube-Tech, as the path to a sustainable society necessitates that not only individuals, but groups and corporations take steps towards using renewable resources in their production, and we are very excited that Lube-Tech has tasked us with the mission of taking these first few steps for them.

In addition to the effect that this project will have on helping Lube-Tech to understand and potentially expand into the field of biolubricants, We feel that this project will become a cornerstone of experience for our futures, both as stewards of a sustainable world and as young entrepreneurs entering the workforce, as the aspects of the project involving market research and creating a consulting-style report will prove to be valuable skills for our future career paths. Though we are just starting out on our project, we both feel that this experience has already begun to shape our views on business, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.