Camp Week 01: Food / Observe and Interact
Campers will be introduced to the importance of food security. We invite them to explore what threats exist to their food supply within their own communities and dare them to develop a strategy that tackles an important food security issue. On a practical level, we challenge them to start their own garden (this can be a vegetable patch for those with gardens or kitchen planter for apartment dwellers!)
Your child will:
Learn about food security issues, agriculture, environment, and supply chain.
Ideate solution to some of these challenges and craft a pitch.
Learn what is needed to get projects off the ground and present their implementation plan.
The BAM Virtual Camps are a process that contains two journeys. One is that of the individual camper who maintains a simple garden, observes the growth and emergence that results, and will be challenged by activities, like creating mini-greenhouses for seed germination out of household items or safely interviewing neighbors about food-related challenges. These actions force them to come face to face with their food supply. This feeds into the other journey, one of the teams that collaborate to design solutions, like a business, a social initiative, a policy or an invention, tailored to their local communities' challenges related to food. The group will present their "design" via live broadcast. From there, it can potentially be adopted as an actual effort by their local community.
Here are some possible ideas that could come from this weekly process.
A municipal task for food production.
Using discarded food waste as meals for charitable organizations
Re-purposing food byproducts into other uses, such as coffee grounds being turned into beauty products or fish scales into solar panels
This journey is designed to give individuals and groups the freedom to pursue where their curiosities take them but also maintains accountability and standardized assessment in their approach to research and tackling their chosen challenge. In short, there are no right or wrong answers. The BAM coaching team are the guides on this journey, mentoring and collaborating with campers along the way, encouraging them to think more deeply and ask better questions.
Food is fundamental to our survival. Unfortunately, 1 in 7 children in the United States lives with hunger. In 2018, 37.2 million Americans lived in food-insecure households - meaning they had to skip meals, eat less at meals, opt for cheaper less nutritious food and/or feed their children before themselves. The world already has the ability to feed 10 billion people. However, the inability to access nutritious food is driven by economic factors, not scarcity. A report by the U.N. conducted research on the best ways to combat hunger and concluded that locally-based food economies were most effective. At BAM Virtual Camps we encourage kids to take charge of their own food sovereignty by starting their own garden.
Topics Covered: Food Insecurity, Agriculture, Environment, Supply Chain