The Adventures in Learning organization provides education to Fremont County residents about our natural world through its program called Sustainable Lives and the Sustainable Lives Community Youth Garden.

 

Sustainable Lives is a county-wide food assessment and needs project. This, coupled with the Youth Garden, is aimed at encouraging high school students to have greater interest in their schooling by applying themselves to projects in which they can express their talents and help make their community a better place. The students learn through field ecology workshops and activities promoting cultural understanding through language, and art programs.

 

The Wyoming Community Foundation recently awarded Adventures in Learning a competitive grant to conduct the first comprehensive food security assessment in Fremont County. This survey, distributed by the students, will identify the root causes of hunger and assess indicators such as access to fresh food and proper education about nutrition and cooking. The grant will also provide for the formation of a coalition that will use the survey information to create and direct community-initiated solutions to reduce hunger in the area.

 

Walking past Cowfish restaurant in Lander, one can witness the beginnings of these solutions that are well under way in the Sustainable Lives Community Youth Garden. High school students tend the garden, growing a wide variety of produce that they donate to a local food bank, or sell at the local farmer’s market, to restaurants like Cowfish and the Cooking Crow, to local grocers, and direct to the consumer.

 

This involvement in agricultural commerce teaches students valuable life lessons and information which they in turn have the chance to pass on to their community through educational courses about growing your own food, nutrition and cooking.

 

Rachel Price, Sustainable Lives board member, shared how this experience can impact youth: “Having children be the problem-solvers and engaging in real issues in their community, while at the same time improving their academic skills, shows them they can make their town better while they are young. Then they can bravely take on issues in their community when they are adults.”

 

The Sustainable Lives program has many faces, from developing plans to build gardens and green houses at the high schools, to helping students build and tend raised gardens for the elderly to the Photo Voice project. High school students involved in Photo Voice use photography and storytelling to express, in their own voice, their relationship to food and what they see is lacking in current food systems. The students have used the project to study and present the differences between our current food systems and compare them to traditional native ways of food gathering and preparation.

 

In Wyoming, the majority of agricultural crops produced are related directly to the cattle industry, leaving very few food crops for human consumption. In creating community-based solutions to local hunger issues, Sustainable Lives is developing methods to increase direct sales of food crops to the consumer, as opposed to exporting the majority of our resources outside the state. In doing this, many challenges arise, such as a lack of education about which food crops will grow in Wyoming, poorly developed channels of sales between growers and consumers, financial problems faced by growers, and a lack of state wide facilities to meet federal laws in regards to processing of raw foods.

 

Program Director Karl Sutton said: “There is a direct correlation in the decrease in scope of production, with the focus being on livestock feed and not human food, and people in need of food assistance. Reconnecting producers with consumers requires a lot of education about what can be grown and what is already locally available. Expanding this connection creates self sufficiency.”

 

Adventures in Learning provides information to the public about hunger issues via the fundraising banquets they host. The food (or lack thereof) provided to banquet attendees mirrors the unequal distribution of food in America. Some diners enjoy a feast while others eat nothing at all. These banquets provide community members an opportunity to look at the real issues, as represented by the data gathered by the surveys, in order to come up with their own viable solutions to eliminate food security problems.



With 11% of Wyoming residents suffering from hunger and malnutrition, effective long-term changes and solutions that build self-sufficiency in communities are needed. Adventures in Learning offers these solutions through education. This style of problem solving empowers people coming from a challenged place and gives them a voice to effect policy in our food systems that will allow the community to work together to reverse the high rates of food insecurity in our state.