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Organization

Grow Dat Youth Farm

Also known as: Grow Dat

A 7-acre youth-led urban farm in New Orleans City Park, founded in 2011. Hires and trains New Orleans high-school students from across the city as paid Crew Members in a season-long program combining farm production, food-justice education, leadership development, and college-and-career readiness. Produces 35,000+ pounds of food per year for sale at farmers markets and donation to community partners. Among the most-developed youth-and-food-justice operations in the U.S. South.

Why this listing

Knowledge-care because Grow Dat’s primary product is trained young leaders rather than vegetables — though the farm produces meaningful food output. The Crew Member program puts ~30 NOLA high-schoolers per year on a paid, season-long farm-and-leadership track; alumni move into food-systems work, college, and broader civic leadership. The infrastructure is the youth-development pipeline.

Practical

  • 7-acre farm in City Park — vegetable production, fruit trees, season-extension hoophouses.
  • Crew Member program — paid positions for NOLA high-school students; annual cohort of ~30 youth.
  • Curriculum — combines hands-on farming with food-systems analysis, racial-justice, and leadership development.
  • Distribution — farmers markets ([[crescent-city-farmers-market|Crescent City Farmers Market]], Wednesday and Saturday locations), restaurant sales, community-partner donations.
  • The Crew Cafe and Pop-up Markets — youth-led food-business extensions of the farm.

Cultural

Grow Dat emerged from the Tulane [[san-francisco-zen-center|City Center]] / Bard Early College [[french-quarter|New Orleans]] collaboration in the years after Hurricane Katrina; the farm-and-education model was deliberately designed for the post-Katrina rebuild context. Long-term partnerships with Tulane University, Bard Early College, the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, and dozens of NOLA-area schools.

Lenses still to grow

  • The Crew Member alumni network and their post-program trajectories
  • [[san-francisco|The City]] Park location and the historical-and-ecological context of the site
  • Comparative analysis with peer youth-farm-and-education operations (Soul Fire, Black Yield Institute, East [[beacon-ny|New York]] Farms)

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Enables: [[food-deserts]]
  • Shares approach with: [[soul-fire-farm]]
  • Located in: [[new-orleans]]
  • Member of: [[organization]]

Sources

  • Grow Dat Youth Farm (growdatyouthfarm.org) annual reports and program documentation
  • Coverage in The Advocate, [[arabi|Louisiana]] Weekly, [[civil-eats|Civil Eats]]

Rooted in life.

A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

shares approach with

  • Liberty's Kitchen two NOLA youth-development operations; Grow Dat in farming-and-food-justice, Liberty's in culinary-and-hospitality; complementary skills-and-pathways

1 inbound link · 4 outbound