Birmingham Magazine April 2018 Issue

Jones Valley's
Urban Farms &
Farm Labs
1,200 taste tests
1,910 student
internship hours
for course credit
4,646 students
engaged
THIS PAGE: Clockwise from top: A map of Jones Valley's Urban Farms and Farm Labs (teaching farms). (Illustration courtesy of Jones Valley Teaching Farm). Jones Valley
lessons emphasize the interconnectedness of plants and animals, especially insects like bees. The Putnam Middle School greenhouse was built through a $10,000 grant from
The Birmingham Change Fund.
OPPOSITE PAGE: Top to bottom: JVTF Instructor Leah Hillman works with students in Putnam Middle School's outdoor classroom. The produce stand at the Downtown Urban
Farm is run after school by students from Phillips Academy.
379 varieties
of fruits &
vegetables grown
That same year, Jones Valley started
teaching lessons at Glen Iris Elementary,
and Good School Food was born. By spring
of 2013, Jones Valley’s first teaching farm at
Glen Iris was complete. And in the next five
years, five more school sites were established
with teaching farms of their own.
By 2016, Jones Valley had grown
exponentially. That year 3,500 seeds were
sown, 4,646 students were impacted, and
13,259 pounds of produce were harvested
from the seven school sites. In the 2016–
2017 school year, 1,096 lessons were taught,
259 after-school programs were held, and
Jones Valley’s staff had grown to 26. A big
part of that staff growth came in 2016 when
Jones Valley altered their structure to add
full-time instructors at each school rather
than using transient AmeriCorp VISTAs.
Hillman, who already had been working
with Jones Valley for the past two years, first
as a VISTA and then hired on as a secondyear
fellow, was one of those hires.
She’s now been at Putnam since December
2014, even before the school’s teaching farm
was finished the following February. Over the
years, Hillman has worked with nearly every
teacher at Putnam to develop lessons that
both fit with Alabama teaching standards and
that get students excited to learn. The lessons
can be cross-curricular or taught over several
weeks as a unit.
“My first group of sixth-graders were the
eighth-graders who graduated last year, so
being able to see students from the start of
their middle school career and being able to
see how they grow as individuals has been
really rewarding,” Hillman says.
Some of the students in that group of
eighth-graders even helped to design and build
the greenhouse that was completed in May of
2017 (just in time for their graduation) through
a $10,000 donation by the Birmingham
Change Fund. And now those eighth-graders
are freshmen at Woodlawn High School,
where they’ll have the chance to spend time
in another student-built greenhouse and
continue their involvement with Jones Valley.
35,000 seeds sown
1,000 lessons/year
*From 2016 Annual Report
110 | Birmingham | APRIL 18