The Future of Serving Youth in Shasta County - Planning for 2026!

The Oliview Community Building Farm Project has been in operation since our first semester opened in January of 2022. We started with 5 youth, and since then have hosted several dozen underserved, at-promise youth in the north state community. We now have more youth than ever interested in participating, which is great news! These are largely diversionary youth, who have not yet engaged with the justice system, and working with them now can help them totally avoid it. This means they get to focus on building their lives rather than recovering from justice engagement.

Stipends are our biggest cost: we offer a stipend to youth to recognize the investment they're making in themselves when they decide to spend time on the farm. They are growing food to feed the community, and are building social and physical infrastructure to support that work. Stipends are an important recognition of their contributions and personal investment.

Animals - furred and feathered! - can be an important part of the healing process. Youth faces are obscured where privacy is prioritized.

Second to stipends is staff time: while we can’t always pay staff, and are lucky to have people willing to volunteer their time with this important population, paying staff is nearly as important as recognizing youth through stipends. We would like to be able to pay one full-time staff member and one part-time staff member annually.

Finally, costs associated with curriculum, materials, tools, seeds, and independent living training are also important. While we are often able to get these covered through partnerships and collaborations in the community, it all adds up and is all important to creating a complete and supported experience for youth.

Youth are working together to prep chicken for tacos in this independent living skills-building experience. Again, youth privacy is protected by obscuring faces.

Your help is essential to making this program work, and showing youth that they are not forgotten, but that they are important - even essential! - members of our community. We need at least $50,000 to run a robust 2026 program serving at least two dozen youth. Show these young people that the community sees them, and is making a conscious effort to invest in them.

Thank you!

Fall Update: better late than never!

Building Community as the Seasons Change

We are decidedly into the fall season, and teasing winter. This is my favorite time of year - fall leaves, baked goods, back-to-school beginnings, and winter greens! - but it can make our outdoor-based programming a challenge with cold and rainy days! This is partly why our woodshed programming addition is so important: proving youth with hands-on creative outlets that increase their self-confidence and skills portfolio, even in inclement weather. They have made garden tools, including planting boxes, soil sifters, and tables, as well as basic cutting boards for their families. Youth reentering the community need basic furniture, so we are planning for lumber and timing requirements for these projects. A wet start to the season means a head start on these projects!

Youth participant utilizes the planer to start a cutting board while project staff observes.

California College Corps - Capacity for All!

We are in year 4 of our participation in the State's College Corps program, began during the pandemic as a way to build community capacity AND support college students financially and with community and workforce connections. We participate through Shasta College, who administers the program for several dozen students. This year we're hosting four volunteers, who contribute 10 hours a week through onsite work with youth and on the farm, as well as programmatic support functions. In return they receive a State-funded monthly stipend and an education award in June.

You'll be hearing more about these really wonderful, interesting people and their dedication to healthy, capacity-building youth programming - with the possibility of a volunteer-hosted newsletter in coming months!

New Fiscal Sponsor! New Fundraising Tools!

We are thrilled to be the newest member of the Inquiring Systems, Inc. family, benefitting from their half-century of nonprofit experience as a new fiscally-sponsored program. 

Take a look around our page - including the video produced by our fabulous project partner, Shasta County Probations! - and consider making a monthly contribution to sustain our work!

The most important part of our program name is COMMUNITY: we're not only helping youth in finding their place in our community, but we're growing community through making connections and strengthening our social fabric. If you'd like to be part of this work, we'd love to talk with you! Want to see the farm? Let us know! Please share our work with others: YOU are the best emissary for the people you know!

Golden Days

Like every year, it seems to have gotten hot way too soon. (Unlike every year, we’ve broken heat records already, but that’s for another post!) A lovely consequence of the early heat, though, is early salads!

Burpees Golden Beets thriving in our 24” hand-dug beds - root veggies thrive in this tilth!

We have gorgeous gorgeous golden beets this year. I love beets: a sweet vegetable? Sign me up! We’ve been growing various varieties of golden beets for the last few years, and are really pleased with their combination of sweetness, tenderness, and no staining! Yay for my hands! And clothes!

The beets we’re growing this year are the Burpee’s Golden Beet, from the amazing Seed Savers Exchange: they are so sweet and low in tannins that we eat them raw! Yes, raw beets: something my grandmother would not have ever dreamed of serving!

Burpee’s Golden Beets: aren’t they gorgeous? Along with Rainbow Chard, the garden is full of delights!

I had a few of these in my fridge the other day, along with a few carrots, ginger nubs, and some Serrano chiles… and a new salad was born!

Know that I’m a very loose cook: some substitutions here, a pinch of this there, and I have a masterpiece… but one I might not be able to recreate at any point in the future! I wrote this down, though, because it was so good and I wanted to share it.

I hope you are able to come by and pick up some Burbee’s Golden Beets, and enjoy this piquant salad, full of the promise of summer!

Oliview Farm’s Golden Summer Days Salad

Ingredients (serves 3-4):

• 2 medium-sized carrots

• 4 medium-sized beets

• 4 T. lime juice (from about 1 lime)

• 1 T. dried onion (I like the deep savoriness that dried onion gives, but feel free to use fresh!)

• 1/2 t. salt

• 1/2 of a Serrano chile, chopped fine

• 1.5 inches of ginger root, chopped fine (you could probably use dried/powdered ginger, here - I’d say maybe 1-2 t.)

• 4 T. mayonnaise (extra points for making your own with Oliview olive oil!)

Instructions:

1. Into a measuring cup, pour the lime juice and add the dried onion. Let this sit to slightly rehydrate the onion.

2. Coarsely grate the carrots and beets and mix into a bowl that will hold them both.

3. Chop the Serrano chile and ginger root finely (I use a mini cuisinart). Mix these into the lime juice mixture, and also add the salt and mayonnaise. Whisk this together until it is completely mixed and nicely emulsified, and then pour it over the carrot-beet mixture. Mix well and enjoy with some of the beet greens - delicious!

Oliview Farm’s Golden Days Salad: I’ve been enjoying this with some slices of apple and havarti to provide the boost I need midday - both from an energy standpoint and psychologically!

Welcome, new visions!

Winter is a great time for contemplation. 

Pedro was sitting in his favorite chair this morning, watching the birds in front for what must have been about an hour! Western blue birds, female blackbirds, flickers, robins, and towhees – they love the cool, moist weather we have right now as much as we do (though we certainly enjoy it in different ways!).

This is usually our time for seed ordering, but we ordered early after seeing the shortages over the last year as a result of pandemic panic. We are just about done… despite the large stack of gorgeous seed catalogues on our table! And it is rainy, so no farm work, aside from making sure the animals are fed and housed. Holidays are over and cleaned up, the fridge is stocked…

And so we are freed to dream.

Calendulas are some of the hardest-working flowers in our garden: they germinate in spring, bloom all summer, and thrive through the winter, too! We use them in salads all year long, and dry their petals for tea. Calendulas also provide excellent forage for pollinators in times there’s almost nothing else!

I was lucky enough to be part of an online workshop earlier this month focused on the work of community organizers, and imagining what we want for our future. So much of what we think about (and organize around!) is what we don’t want: we march against police violence, complain about corporate takeover of our lives, ignore indigenous values and foodways, and neglect the climate catastrophe. Spending energy on these is like coddling a porcupine! It is bad for us, bad for the problems, and bad for our community. Consciousness of these issues is important, but as we spend our precious winter hours of deep thinking, how much better to envision what we do want for our future?! 

In this workshop we were asked to create a list of actions and values that are the root of why we do the work of community organizing. We then turned those words into positive statements of what we are working towards. We got into small groups and read through those phrases: thoughts of intergenerational partnership, better listening, an equitable and inclusive economy, Native American Indian values that grow to include all of us who live in this place. Wow! I am energized just recalling these visions! 

My work in this workshop was focused on my community at large, but I always have Oliview at my heart. The reason Pedro and I got into this gig called “farming” is because of the center it provides to all of our lives. Food is a connection to the earth, and done with reverence, it allows all of life to flourish. Food is a connection to our culture, the souls of our ancestors, and the flavors of diversity. It is a connection to humanity. Growing food locally and with patience and hard work also is an act of love and belief in our shared future. It is an act that helps in our resilience against the consequences of past actions. Growing food ties us to our place and each other in a way that nothing else can. 

This is us living our values and our faith that we not only can, but will do better. This is our winter meditation and contemplation. We, like the birds, are busy provisioning ourselves. We are doing that essential inner work that will fuel us through the challenges ahead: through the coming Central Valley summer and beyond.

Love to you and cheers to a new year. We hope you have time for contemplation, visioning your actions in support of the world you want to see in 2021 and beyond. 

Love,

Elizabeth 

The Mission olive trees are contemplating their next move right now, as well: it’s quiet time, but the buds are forming and the 2021 crop is already envisioned!