State CYFAR Program Spotlight

Seeds to Success at Rutgers

Many small victories have led to a very successful program in three New Jersey communities. Gloucester County 4-H agent Linda Strieter is program director of Seeds to Success, which prepares special-needs youth age 14-18 for the workforce.

Another goal of the program is to create retail outlets for affordable nutritious food to consumers in New Jersey. With strong pre-existing ties to Extension and the farmers associated with it, Strieter said, it was easy to find suppliers. Although nicknamed the Garden State, New Jersey’s agriculture industry is dwindling.

A third goal is to provide nutritious, affordable food to the local communities, so the team organized to accept federal food vouchers (WIC and Senior Farm Market vouchers) from the first year, and food vouchers have consistently made up 10-15% of sales since the program kicked off with a flurry of activity, and a CYFAR grant, in 2003. By 2005, Seeds to Success was named a Program of Distinction.

In addition to three farmstands at Woodbury, Glassboro and Paulsboro, the program design includes a classroom component. The class is offered to special needs youth in four local high schools. To qualify, participants must fit New Jersey schools’ criteria as a special needs youth by having a hearing, language or orthopedic impairment, mental retardation or traumatic brain injury. This means that there is a broad range of abilities, and a recent assessment showed that the program is diverse in other ways, too: racially, geographically and economically.

The program reaches 300-400 students per year with its classroom curriculum on nutrition and money management in the Woodbury, Paulsboro, Glassboro and Bankbridge Regional Schools. Students learn about fruits and vegetables, their nutritional value and how they are used as food. The schools appreciate the content delivered, Strieter said, and the classes act as a recruitment ground for the summer farmstand. Students from these classes are invited to apply to work at the farmstand during the eight-week summer season.

Strieter is careful to make the hiring procedure very similar to the ones the students will experience in the business world. “I want them to have the full experience of getting a job. I ask them about their strengths and weaknesses, they have to dress appropriately for the interview. I want them to believe in themselves, to gain some self confidence. When I first meet them, they may not be able to make eye contact or answer questions. This is a new experience for them. But when they apply for a job later, they will know how to do it.”

She is also careful to make sure that the students qualify for the program before scheduling the interview, so as not to put them through it only to be rejected, so she does all paperwork first. Once hired, the youth spend one week in a paid training course, where they learn all the skills they will need on the job. Having been in the classroom course already, they are able to name all the fruits and vegetables and know how they are prepared and eaten.

In the training, they learn about the farmstand business and, beginning in the second week, they put their knowledge into practice at the farmstands. By the end of the eight-week season, they know which vegetables are weighed and which are counted, which of them arrive on pallets and which in bushel baskets, they can measure pecks and pounds, and know that the corn cobs go in the bottom of the bag and the tomatoes on top. They greet customers politely. They place orders with farmers at wholesale prices and calculate a retail price that includes profit. When the farmstand closes, they count up the takings. The financials are checked closely by the farmstand supervisors, who are college students hired as interns, most of them special education, food management or dietetics majors. Youth and supervisors are all paid by Rutgers, which makes them eligible for the university’s insurance policies. All product costs and salaries are paid by a CYFAR New Communities grant, and at the end of the season, profits, if any, are shared among the students.

Some Seeds to Success graduates have gone on to work in supermarkets. They’re not mopping or bagging groceries, they’re cashiering – a job some of them never would have been considered for without this program. Others have gone on to college. Because their special needs are so diverse, there is a wide range of successful outcomes.

For this reason and others, Strieter says, “Assessment is challenging.” Program enrollment is fairly small, with 8-10 youth per farmstand, and progress for some participants is measured in baby steps. Asked whether they would like to run a cash register, many of them initially say, “I could never do that.” But by the end of the program they can and do. “Other people might not see the difference in them, but I can,” Strieter said.

Not relying on that, Strieter and team members Lydia Blalock and Luanne Hughes developed a checklist that would accurately reflect the achievements of hard-to-test youth. Based on the US Labor Department’s 1990 Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report, in 2006 the three women published The SCANS Skills and Competencies Checklist: An Assessment Tool for Youth Work Readiness Programs.  It is a tool that assesses improvements in SCANS attributes while the youth are engaged in learning and practicing the desired skills and behaviors. It is more useful than pen-and-paper assessments for students with special needs, who may not do well on these tests. In addition, Strieter and Blalock developed a way of using the Skillathon as an assessment tool. They published an article in the Journal of Extension on this in 2007.

With good success in all three of its goals, Strieter says she has had some strong interest in replicating Seeds to Success in other states and from someone in Uganda, and there is now a 4-H club in New Jersey that is based on their formula. Strieter believes that they have hit upon a niche area that has not been addressed much before – the “great need” that lies in the overlap between special needs youth and workforce readiness.

You may wish to consult:

Blalock, L & Strieter, L. (2007) The Skillathon: Program Assessment Can Be Fun!, Journal of Extension, Volume 45 Number 3, Article Number 3TOT3, www.joe.org/jow/2007/june/tt3.shtml

Blalock, L, Strieter, L, & Hughes, L. (2006) The SCANS Skills and Competencies Checklist: An Assessment Tool for Youth Work Readiness Programs, Journal of Youth Development, Volume 1 No. 1, Article 0601RS002.

Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Cultivating Youth and Communities For Positive Futures Project website.

USDA CSREES Seeds to Success Partners Video Magazine (2007)

See previous Program Spotlight articles