Our Chavista Club managers like Ariana Gallegos, who leads clubs at Roosevelt Middle School and Morse High School, are always looking for field trips that can expose our club members to organizations that are working to improve the communities where they live. Ariana recently organized a Chavista trip to the Oceanview Growing Grounds (OVGG).
The Growing Grounds is a food justice project sponsored by The Global Action Research Center (The Global ARC) and the UC San Diego Urban Studies and Planning Program. OVGG is located on a 22,000-square-foot property, that has been converted into a Community Garden and Learning Center to serve the Ocean View Community. The ultimate goal of the Ocean View Growing Grounds is to contribute to the building of a knowledgeable, healthy, connected community that has a thriving core economy and is connected to the wider food justice movement.
On this field trip, Chavistas from Roosevelt MS and Morse HS were able to get their hands dirty and learn all about community gardening. They learned how compost was made and how it is used to improve soil for growing vegetables. And they learned that compost has a strong smell but they got into it anyway!
One of the Chavistas, after learning the importance of composting, now plans to contribute food waste from her father's Taco Shop in Kearny Mesa. Chavistas also had the opportunity to taste fresh strawberries right off the plants, and they remarked how tasty they were and how much smaller they were than the commercially grown versions in the supermarket.
