For This WISE Scholarship Recipient, Local Farmers Market Proves a ‘Tasty’ Way to Engage the Community
This academic year, Woodbury Integrative Student Experience (WISE) granted $1,000 scholarships to 25 students. The WISE Program, which enables students to earn scholarship funds while gaining invaluable life experiences, develops compelling educational opportunities in five High Impact Practices — undergraduate research, study away, civic engagement, leadership and internships, each applicable to emerging local and global communities. The program is available to eligible students throughout the university.
Woodbury junior Jerry Sun, a 2018 WISE Tuition Scholarship recipient, selected the scholarship’s civic engagement component and promptly embarked on a novel ‘Farm to School’ campaign modeled on Tasty, Buzzfeed’s video series on comfort food developed for Facebook, where it has attracted in excess of 90 million followers.
Farmers markets are all about fresh and healthy, but turning that bounty into something memorably delicious can be another thing entirely. So just to make sure that those enticing food prep demos, conducted as shoppers mill about, don’t go to waste, Jerry captured some of them on video. He recently uploaded one of three videos as part of an Earth Day celebration at the Lincoln Heights Certified Farmers Market, filmed earlier this spring at Occidental College in Eagle Rock. Jerry’s motivation for his volunteer work and WISE project was to provide a service to an underserved community that did not have many healthy food options.
“Because I’ve been volunteering at the farmers market and have watched these food demos every other week, I thought that filming them in a ‘Tasty’ style would be helpful for the community members who couldn’t make it to the demos but still wanted to make the food at home,” Jerry says. To prepare for the undertaking, he devoured “a lot” of Tasty videos on Facebook. “I also went down to Buzzfeed’s Tasty kitchen to watch the pros at work – and I learned a lot!”
As Jerry wrote on Facebook, “Healthy can taste good too! This week is Avocado Salad 🙂 YUM! ¡Healthy también sabe bien! Esta semana es ensalada de aguacate 🙂 ¡MUY! TRY IT AT HOME:
Your local market can bring the whole neighborhood together!”
Wise words.