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Teens for Food Justice
Teens for Food Justice (TFFJ) fights food insecurity and diet-related disease through school-based, youth-led hydroponic farming, providing local, sustainably-grown produce to food desert communities and building health equity for all New Yorkers and beyond. TFFJ works within NYC Title I middle and high schools in food desert communities, training students to build/maintain indoor hydroponic farms, each capable of growing up to 10,000 pounds of produce annually, that is served daily at school lunch and distributed to the surrounding community’s food-insecure residents. Further, students learn/master nutrition/health skills to share with peers/neighbors, empowering them to lead themselves and others towards healthier futures.
Non Profit
About Teens for Food Justice
TFFJ grew out of the nonprofit Students for Service, formed in 2009, to engage teen volunteers in
meaningful community service programs for the benefit of at-risk populations throughout New York City.
In 2013, the organization honed its focus to the critical issues of food justice and sustainable, healthy food access, launching the current TFFJ model. In its first five months, TFFJ raised more than $90,000 to bring teen volunteers together from across NYC to build its first school-based hydroponic farm in an under-resourced, food-insecure neighborhood in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and run a healthy food access and a food justice advocacy movement for the community.
During its second year, TFFJ received a comprehensive pro-bono program evaluation from NYU’s
Wagner School of Public Service, which validated the program’s positive impact on both the youth and
community served, but advised shifting toward a school- and community-based model in which students
drive the program in order to maximize impact for all participants. Following these recommendations, a
second Brooklyn classroom farm was launched at The Urban Assembly Unison School in January 2016,
engaging students in a thrice-weekly afterschool program in which they began to build and manage a
food production and food justice advocacy program that is community-based, -led, and -controlled. This program continues today and has since been joined by farms on four other school campuses: DeWitt Clinton Educational Campus in the Norwood/Kingsbridge community within the Bronx, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Education Campus near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, the Brownsville Collaborative Middle School in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the Far Rockaway Educational Campus in Far Rockway, Queens.
TFFJ currently engages more than 1,800 students directly in our programming and grows thousands of pounds of fresh, healthy produce annually that feeds more than 7,000 students daily in each school’s cafeteria and is distributed within each school’s surrounding community. Through this process, the program provides immediate and measurable impacts on the nutrition and health of the students and their neighborhoods.
Project Archive (1)
| Title | Organization | Program | Format Title | Managers | End Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teens for Food Justice Regional Expansion Strategy | Teens for Food Justice | NYU Wagner Capstone: Social Impact, Innovation & Investment (Fall 23'-Spring 24') | Live Case | Gabrielle Mosquera | 05/2024 |
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