The following excerpt is from an article written by Christina Seminara of the The Buffalo News and published on June 7, 2012.
Learning From the Ground Up
It takes about five turns and four minutes to get from Nardin Academy to the headquarters of the Massachusetts Avenue Project on Grant Street (if you’ve parked on West Ferry and obeyed all traffic signs). For the past three years, five turns and four minutes are all that has separated me from an organization of motivated and incredibly inspiring teenagers who are making a difference in the community simply by showing up to work. If you, like me, have been not-so-blissfully unaware these past few years, it’s time for that to change.
Begun in 2003, the Massachusetts Avenue Project is a youth-oriented program that strives to “nurture the growth of a diverse and equitable local food system and promote local economic opportunities, access to affordable, nutritious food and social change education.” Each year since its inception, MAP has hired students ages 14 to 20 from the Buffalo
Public Schools for its Growing Green program, which is centered around urban farming and aquaponics. MAP currently owns an acre of farmland on the West Side on which it has produced about 6,000 pounds of organic food, including 70 varieties of fruits, vegetables, fish and chicken; cultivated an environment of 25,000 tilapia; and composted 350,000 pounds of food. But that’s only half the story.
