East New York Farms!
Every Saturday each summer and fall, East New York Farms! brings east Brooklyn residents to its farmers' market tents for collards, strawberries, fish and other fresh food. Twenty young interns run the market, but their involvement goes far deeper. They also plant, harvest and supervise a local network of 10 community gardens producing vegetables for sale at the market, and till their own plots as well at United Community Centers' farm adjoining its headquarters on New Lots Avenue.
The Pratt Center has been involved in East New York Farms! since 1995, when it helped facilitate a community planning process to envision new possibilities for the neighborhood. At a series of forums, local residents assessed the community's strengths and problems. One of most obvious were the vacant lots that pocked East New York at the time. But geographic information system analysis showed that many of these lots were being put to an important use: the neighborhood had the city's largest concentration of community gardens. East New York also had--and still has--a serious shortage of places to purchase fresh produce. Capitalizing on existing resources of land and labor, East New York Farms! was born. It is a partnership between United Community Centers, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and the Pratt Center.
With the help of Pratt Center architectural director E. Perry Winston, who worked on early plans for a permanent space for the market, East New York Farms! is now reaching beyond its neighborhood boundaries. It is part of a boroughwide farming network called Brooklyn's Bounty, which with support from the Project for Public Spaces is bringing together farms in Red Hook, East Flatbush and East New York to help the neighborhood markets better serve their communities. With rising public demand for the quality produce and community spaces farmers markets bring, the number of farmers' markets in New York City has increased dramatically in recent years. Competition for vendors from the region's farms has grown especially fierce, and low-income communities in the outer boroughs--the very places that most urgently need farmer's markets--have found it extremely difficult to recruit enough vendors. Brooklyn's Bounty will help the farms' small self-run markets grow through marketing efforts to customers and recruitment of new vendors, turning them collectively into a more powerful force.
Contact: Sarita Deftary, United Community Centers, 718-649-7979
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