My name is RJ  and I have been leading our 501(c)3 non profit Double “O” G (Original Organic Gardener) since 2011. Over the years we have had amazing opportunities to work with many youth and other community members in East Oakland teaching about the importance of gardening and fresh, local food access. 

At the beginning of March we are starting our OOG workshops for another successful season with WELO. WELO hosts their after school programing at North Oakland Community Charter School. This season will be a bit trickier because we will not have access to a kitchen as we did in the past. We also have high hopes for the support we can enable to make our upcoming experience for the students even better than we have in the past. 

Our classes will be with 60 students once a week for 2 hours. We (myself and what volunteers I can organize) will work will a smaller group of 10 students for our favorite hands-on cooking classes. Can I tell you a secret? Kids and everyone else we work with love cooking!! The chance to work with fresh ingredients is an important but all too rare opportunity for some. These classes in addition grant us time to teach our students about where their food comes from and the unknown costs that lead to their shelf price. 

A major improvement as an organization we are making this season is critical surveying. As we have grown, we have discovered the importance of data collecting for grant writing and measuring our impact.

I am asking for your support to kick off this 2019 season of ten OOG workshops with WELO. Please check out our website www.Doubleog.org to see the work we have done in the past and to learn more. Our goal is raise $7,000.00 for the upcoming spring. That would put us at $600 budget a class for 60 students to have a fresh snack prepared by their classmates. Our cooking classes are Boulevard/Authentic Bagel Company quality certified. We also have a new $1,000.00 budget for materials and tools to make us more effective teachers with more cutting boards, knives, aprons, cleaning supplies, insurance, transportation supplies, and more. Don’t forget also about the super cool music videos we want more of!

Thank you for your time. Any more questions you have please give me a call. Passing along our goals as well would be super helpful. 

Love,

RJ

Farming is not easy work and doing so in an city environment is expensive too. Aside from cost we live in such a densely populated area that not everyone wants the smells associated with a farm to linger in their space. Ultimately, those factors have impacted our growth. In addition to that, our organizers and managers of OOG have personal lives that they have to sustain while we don't have appropriate funding yet. That being established our approach is limited to the resources we have to available. 

In the meantime and in between time, How do we help as OOGs? 

We want to make you aware of other Oakland/Bay Area  organizations working on local helpful food access! Oakland has many non profits fighting for local helpful fresh food access in communities that lack infrastructure for groceries. For us to guide you to these wonderful organizations workdays and farmers markets helps our whole movement's agenda advance forward. 

How we envision our major impact in Oakland's food justice movement will be through the implementation of OOG's bus. It will give us a tool to share throughout the city and county with school students to everyday shoppers of farmers markets about how their food choices have a considerable impact. Our goal focuses on other ways our students can grow local fresh food access through gardens/farms and the direction of elected officials. Our bus would reinforce OOG curriculum about garden education, energy research, and economic technology. It is very important that our OOG students have an opportunity to learn through all of their senses.