LIVERootDown LA - Youre Gonna Wanna Eat Your Veggies!
South LA youth, who now run RootDown LA, know how to build demand for, and create supplies of fresh produce, directly in their neighborhoods. Our goal this year is to support these young people to begin to develop their own for-profit healthy food ventures, incorporating the nutrition and culinary educational activities they already expertly facilitate, and the produce from the garden networks they installed and maintain, at our South Los Angeles Youth-driven Neighborhood Food System sites.
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
South LA
How do you plan to use these resources to make change?
Engage residents and stakeholders
Implement a pilot or new project
Expand a pilot or a program
Mobilize for systems change
Create jobs for youth in South Los Angeles
How will your proposal improve the following LIVE metrics?
Access to healthy food
Number of households below the self-sufficiency index
Obesity rates
Prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (Dream Metric)
Percentage of LA communities that are resilient (Dream Metric)
Please explain how you will evaluate your work.
RDLA’s greatest success can be observed in the passion and commitment of our first program participants, who are advocates for, and now run the majority of our programs; five are paid employees, who train and manage the next generations of younger youth interns. You can find them all online - their collective enthusiasm is reflected in our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, which they post in, regularly. Since its inception, RDLA has used both formative and summative assessment methods, employing qualitative and quantitative tools. We measure progress of the organization in terms of the depth of our partnerships in the community, and our relevance where we work, as is expressed by constant demand for us to increase our programming. More specifically: intake/outtake surveys are used to measure our impact on program participants’ knowledge, behavioral change, and self-confidence relating to healthy food in our series classes. Focus groups capture long term change.
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed
Money (financial capital)
Volunteers/staff (human capital)
Publicity/awareness (social capital)
Infrastructure (building/space/vehicles, etc.)
Technical infrastructure (computers, etc.)
Community outreach
Network/relationship support