The Green Bronx Machine by Stephen Ritz
The Bronx Zoo Farm: Through a partnership with the FarmOn! Foundation, members of the Green Bronx Machine created a seasonal educational garden for children at the Bronx Zoo.
School Garden to School Cafeteria: Green Bronx Machine operates a preeminent and exemplary School Garden to School Café Program in partnership with NYC Department of Education and NYS Department of Agriculture. Students routinely prepare and serve a locally grown, organic lunch — supplemented with student grown produce from our indoor…
PS 721: “Green Bronx Machine designed, built, and continues to support the first year-round, wheelchair-accessible urban farm and culinary training kitchen in the nation. Modeled after The National Health, Wellness & Learning Center, this unique and 100% accessible classroom allows special needs students the opportunity to work-to-learn and learn-to-work.”
Partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital: “[The team produces] 400 bags of student-grown leafy greens and vegetables every month, which are distributed locally to food insecure senior citizens who are recovering from cancer and live in public housing.”
Food For Others Garden: A long-standing project where students grow fresh food and produce for Part of the Solution. The goal is to help low-income households move from “crisis to stability and self sufficiency”.
Subject Vs. Content: Food for Others Garden
In this project, Stephen Ritz, founder of the Green Bronx Machine, operates an urban garden on a reclaimed city street. Each year, Ritz and his team grow over 5,000 pounds of fresh food. Each year the harvest is donated to a choice cause, and in 2017 through a partnership with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, they donated the produce to recovering cancer patients who battle food insecurity.
To Ritz and the children that get involved, this is more than an urban farm. So many children in America’s inner-cities are food insecure and many of them live in places known as ‘food deserts’. By connecting city children with fresh food and food education, this project is able to change the way the children (and others) look at what they eat and their connections with the environment. Urban farming serves as more than just a farming strategy in a changing wold; it serves to drive social empowerment, community engagement, and the education of our youth.
Relevance
Since we started this class, we have learned a lot about the importance of public art and public engagement projects. Public art projects and projects engaging communities are more than just entertainment or education. When done right, a public art or community project engages communities, empowers them, and drives meaningful social change, just like Ritz and his Green Bronx Machine.
“…most people talk about making healthy changes in their diet and lifestyle; Stephen Ritz embodies these changes every day, personally and for “his kids”, locally for his neighborhood and even globally. Stephen is an inspiration to us all to take responsibility to make personal changes and to make our world a better place…one seed at a time.”
– Steven G. Ullmann, PhD. Professor and Chair, Department, Health Sector Management and Policy, University of Miami School of Business Administration, Coral Gables, Florida
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