If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that for a number of years, each December, we’ve participated in NVIDIA’s annual Project Inspire event.

It’s an opportunity to look beyond ourselves during the holiday season, and give back to our community, and for us it’s far more rewarding swinging a hammer, up to our shins in mud, than fighting through the madding crowds at a mall.  It’s also heartwarming to see so many others out there that are willing to unselfishly give a gift of their time, and skill, to help transform their community.

Since 2001, instead of spending money on a needless holiday party for its employees, NVIDIA has taken that money and invested it into a local community project. The company’s employees, and their families, volunteer alongside members of the local community to restore, renovate, and improve a local resource instead.

Our first Project Inspire build event was in 2007, where we helped to renovate the East Palo Alto Charter School. In 2008 we volunteered to help set up the new science laboratories at Overfelt High School in East San Jose. In 2010 we were part of NVIDIA’s Project Inspire team that helped to renovate San José’s History Park, in Kelley Park, and last year we spent a day working on a new Teaching Kitchen at Full Circle Farm, in Sunnyvale.

This year the Project Inspire team helped to transform Veggielution Community Farm at Emma Prusch Farm Park, in San José.

You may recall that earlier this year we spent some time at Emma Prusch Farm Park during the annual California Rare Fruit Grower’s Scion Exchange. We love that Emma Prusch had the foresight to set aside her land as an agricultural, and educational, community resource.

Although it’s difficult to see it today, the Santa Clara Valley has a rich agricultural past.

Emma grew up on the farm, and it was once her dairy, long before Silicon Valley existed!

Now the Farm is surrounded by freeways, busy city streets, and strip malls, and yet it’s easy, just for a moment, to forget you’re in the heart of the City. See our previous post for more about Emma, and the Farm.

As part of the Farm, Veggielution is striving to create a more sustainable food system in San José, and also helping to reconnect the local community with the land. Veggielution community volunteers learn about sustainable, healthy, farming practices, and help to grow the food that is distributed throughout their community, and also sold through the Farmstand, and Farmer’s Market.

We feel strongly that everyone should have access to quality, fresh, wholesome, and affordable food, so we were very excited to participate in this year’s event.

Like last year at Full Circle Farm, we volunteered again to help construct a new Teaching Kitchen at Veggielution. Growing sustainable food is important, but we know it’s only half of the equation. Learning how to prepare and use farm-fresh foods is equally important. Families that have the confidence, and competency, in the kitchen to prepare fresh fruits and vegetables, are far more likely to continue to support sustainable food systems within their communities.

Even though on an individual level giving up a few hours of our day didn’t seem like much, when those hours are multiplied by more than 1500 participants over two days, it becomes a real force for change.

This was perhaps the most ambitious Project Inspire build event we’ve attended yet. Over the course of 2 days, some of the goals for this year’s event were to construct a greenhouse, a teaching kitchen, farm stand, outdoor classroom, fences, improve irrigation systems, and plant numerous fruit trees, and perennials.

Just behind where we were working it looked like the picnic bench construction was progressing quickly!

We were fortunate that the good weather held up over the weekend, although there was a lot of mud in the construction areas as a result of the record breaking rains we’d had the previous week.

Our team on Friday, Team 7, was led by Parke Hudson of City Year, a national youth-leadership organization, and Andy Stavros, a Systems Engineer from NVIDIA.  They both helped to keep the crew organized, and on task.

The team split construction tasks early the first morning between the kitchen’s roof framing, and wall framing. While some members of the team worked on roof truss assembly, Mr. Curbstone, myself, and Joshua set to work on the wall framing.

If you’ve seen some of the projects we do here on the farm, you know of course that we’re sticklers for accuracy, and level, and this project was no exception!

The teaching kitchen plans had been drafted by an architect in advance, so we were able to work directly from those plans, using a pole barn method of construction.

In some respects we found this method to be a less efficient method of construction than we used on the kitchen last year, or on our own barn project, especially for getting the framing done within a weekend.  However, for a larger building this is a very sturdy, and durable, method of construction. After working out a few details in the morning, the plan seemed relatively straightforward. By lunch time we were really finding our ‘groove’, and the walls were starting to take shape.

Hopefully we helped to get this project off to a good start, although we would have liked to have been further along before the end of the day. Unfortunately, that’s the downside of doing something like this in December, because the days are so short!

Again this year, we weren’t able to work the second day of the event, as it’s challenging balancing our time away from our own farm, and animals.  Knowing how long it takes to put a building like this up though, if there’s still some construction left to do, which I suspect there is, we’d be more than happy to help with its completion.

Regardless, we will be returning to Emma Prusch Farm in just a few weeks, as the next Scion Exchange is scheduled for mid-January. We’ll be sure to stop by Veggielution when we return to see how the Teaching Kitchen, and all the other construction projects, has progressed.

There are many non-profit organizations that would be grateful to receive the gift of your time this holiday season.  Organize a group of friends, volunteer, and make a difference in your local community.  You’ll be glad you did!

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.  ~Anne Frank

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For more on this year’s Project Inspire Event, see:

– NVIDIA Corporation’s Flickr Stream

– NVIDIA’s Blog

 

*The public domain image of the Santa Clara dairy herd, c. 1940, was sourced from the Online Archive of California‘s collection on ‘Santa Clara County’s Agricultural Past’