Sudbury Shared Harvest looking to grow youth involvement

A Sudbury group is working to educate young people on agriculture with the hope the knowledge will be shared and grow.

Sudbury Shared Harvest is a not-for-profit group working to cultivate community health by starting food projects and educating the public. It's created a large edible food forest at Delki Dozzi Park and four smaller ones throughout the city.

Now, the group is looking for public support to help grow its projects. Carrie Regenstreif, executive director of the group, says they want to expand a group involving young people, called the Youth Agriculture Mentors, or YAMs.

"They have some experience now working in urban agriculture projects," she said.

The group has entered an online contest by Gardens for Good where they could win $15,000. Regenstreif says if they earn that top spot, they'll be able to hire two youth interns for a year.

"They would be able to do all kinds of things with a year of full time employment," she said.

"We would have them doing all kinds of great work, outreach in the community to other people and working on these garden projects."

She says it's been beneficial to get young people involved with the project.

"They have such great ideas and we have so many problems and issues that we need to address," she said. 

"They're the ones that are going to be around the longest to do these kinds of projects so involving them in actually planning and figuring out what kind of projects we should pursue, is really important."