Farmers Market adventures

The crew of Seattle Youth Garden Works will be selling all of the produce they grow at the Farmers Market.  This is awesome because it teaches the youth customer service, how to provide change, business, marketing, and entrepreneurship.  It also is amazing to watch the interactions of the youth with the people who frequent Farmers Markets.  They just come from such different backgrounds and it is so fascinating for me, a sociologist, to watch.  On top of all of this, Seattle Youth Garden Works is the only youth gardening program in the country that has profit shares for the youth.  Basically after working a certain number of hours in the garden they accumulate a profit share for each hour that they work.  At the end of the year I will determine the total amount made at the market, divide that by the number of profit shares, and send each youth a check.  So the better their customer service, the more they sell, the more they make for themselves.  It is awesome and encourages them to sell as much as possible.

So since they will begin selling at the market this Saturday, we took the youth on a field trip to a different farmers market in town so they could get a feel for it.  On Saturday the youth will be doing ALL of the work at our stand.  The staff will stand back and basically oversee and encourage.  But we won't be doing any of the work of selling and pricing and talking to customers and giving change.  It was a super fun day.  The youth were excited to check out all the stands (although they would never admit their excitement).  They got to talk to a bunch of farmers and taste a lot of samples.  Some of them began to let down their tough guy act and just enjoy themselves.  They also started to bond together as a group.  It was interesting for me to watch how some farmers didn't really interact with the youth and just gave the look like they didn't belong there and were just coming for the samples.  Whereas other farmers were so excited to talk to them and answer all of their questions and encourage them in their gardening.  A few of the youth talked with a beekeeper for a while after tasting her delicious honey.  She was telling them that the average age of a beekeeper is like 55 and how they really need more young beekeepers.  It was awesome.  Then there were the farmers that ignored the youth completely and quickly said hello to me as I walked up to their stand.  It was just super interesting to watch the interactions of these two completely different groups and really awesome for me to watch these youth from the street have a great time at a Farmer Market of all places.

Side note: this is the most amazing job.  What did you do at work today?  Oh well I took 15 street youth to a Farmers Market and hung out and talked with them while we were there.  And tomorrow we are gonna work in the garden together.  AMAZING!  Seriously, coolest job ever!