Without Walls

Without Walls has been a project in The Hudson School for three years. After building a strong framework for "youth leading youth" education within the school, this year Without Walls took on broader challenges in the surrounding community through integrating community projects into the Without Walls curriculum for each grade. The goal was to create projects in a participatory way, with dialogue between each grade and community organizations, through the Without Walls facilitators, in order to create projects that were sustainable, contributing to already ongoing work on the issues, and empowering for each group of youth. The ninth grade group partnered with another school to work on an event that raised awareness, funds, and cans, for local hunger relief organizations. The Without Walls youth acted as mentors for the elementary school students they were partnered with and contributed both their time and effort, as well as their emerging skills as mentors and educators about the issues of hunger and food justice that they had spent the previous months learning about with their own Without Walls facilitators. The tenth grade took on three projects, each approaching food issues from a different angle. The first group set up a compost program in the school taught the rest of the school how to use it. The second group fed the fifty residents of the local homeless shelter for six weeks by making sandwiches and raising donations for sandwich materials. The third group worked with the local food pantry to build partnerships between local grocery stores and the food pantry which would allow for fresh produce donations and meet the needs of low-income emergency food pantry users who currently lack healthy fresh produce in the options available to them through the pantry. The eleventh grade took on three projects as well. The first group volunteered their time at the food pantry helping to sort books, clothing, and food, as well as meet with incoming families and organize packages of food donations for clients. The second group organized a food drive taking a twofold approach of both an inter-grade can collection drive, and a campaign to raise awareness and donations at local grocery stores by giving out "shopping lists" with need items as shoppers were entering. The third group created posters raising awareness and challenging community members to think critically about the issues of hunger and homelessness in Hoboken. The twelfth grade took on two projects as well. One group worked as facilitators for the seventh grade class, getting the middle school youth involved in the issues, and guiding them in developing their own community food project. The second group worked with the food pantry to build vegetable garden boxes. The group planted vegetables from seed, as well as purchased some small plant starts, and designed 15 vegetable garden boxes which can contribute much needed fresh produce to the diets of families currently using the food pantry. Each garden box will be given to a family to keep in their apartment or balcony. This project both contributed materially, by creating a source of fresh produce, and educationally by encouraging children and families using the food pantry to learn more about the possibility of growing their own vegetables.