SEED Skills Crew

(formerly Youth Seed Enterprise- YSE)

SEED Skills Crew is an opportunity for youth ages 13-18 to sharpen their leadership, communication, and work skills through learning to manage an organic garden and delivering healthy and nutritious produce to surrounding communities.

Make a Donation

Get involved

REGISTRATION FOR 2023 IS CLOSED

email register@trellis4tomorrow.org to inquire about joining our waitlist

SESSION 1: June 19-July 13
SESSION 2: July 17-August 10

Trellis for Tomorrow’s SEED Skills Crew is an “earn while you learn” program that challenges youth participants and their communities to think, interact, and grow in new ways. This high-impact summer program offers youth participants ages 13-18 meaningful opportunities to build work-related skills while learning to manage organic gardens, engage in relationships and activities that enhance their social and emotional capacity, develop new understandings, and participate in the creation of youth-led enterprises that increase access to local, nutritious, and affordable food.

“This program improved my social skills and gave me a chance to meet new people while learning how to positively benefit the community!”

– SEED Participant

A dynamic combination of hands-on work, engaging classroom sessions, and transformative activities.

Hands-on Work

Youth participants gather in organic gardens established by Trellis within their own neighborhoods and communities, where they learn to grow, harvest, and distribute produce to others.

Engaging Classroom Sessions

Takes place daily and features Trellis’ compelling “systems change” curriculum, which presents participants with a space to explore, discuss, and discover new ways of thinking about themselves, their world, and their power to affect meaningful change.

Transformative Activities

Trellis staff work to identify, develop, and lead engaging activities for youth participants which sharpen their skills, build their capacities, and create opportunities to practice what they are learning.

The interplay between the hands-on, real-time application of knowledge and Trellis’s interactive, exciting curriculum creates a significant and transformative experience for SEED Skills Crew participants. Teens participating in SEED broaden their understanding of the world while gaining powerful skills that increase their educational and post-educational success.

Pounds of fresh food grown by our SEED Skills crew

Young people have participated since 2018

Young people joined our Leadership Track

Program Offers

Springboard

March to April – Springboard is only for returning participants who are interested in joining the SEED Leadership Track. Participation in Springboard is a pre-requisite for all SEED Leaders. Youth set personal goals for themselves while sharpening their understanding of peer leadership and help Trellis staff to plan the summer program. The program is 1-2 times per week (after school and some weekends) for 8 weeks.

SEED Skills Crew Summer

June to August – Two 4-week sessions. The SEED Skills Crew summer program takes place across four garden sites. Each site meets twice a week in person at the garden and once a week virtually. Main components of the summer program include:

Gardening, nutrition, food demos and food justice discussions
Delivering produce to the surrounding community
Curriculum on systems thinking and systems change
Leadership development, goal setting and career preparation
Connections to local leaders

SEED Skills Crew Launch

September to October – the SEED Skills Crew Launch program is similar to the Springboard program but is focused on the entrepreneurship side of SEED, concentrating on culinary skills and value-added product development. The program is 1-2 times a week (after school and some Saturday mornings) for 8 weeks. *Scheduling is contingent upon sufficient enrollment per site.

Program Sites

Because of the localized focus of our work, priority is given to youth applicants from the communities surrounding the garden sites. SEED Skills Crew currently operates gardens in four locations:

Lower Pottsgrove

The garden in Lower Pottsgrove can be found within the Rolling Hills Apartment complex, which is located at 2120 Buchert Rd, Pottstown, PA. The garden sits behind the community room, where a pool used to be. In Spring of 2020 we were able to collaboratively raise the funds to transform the fenced in area to a twenty mounded bed garden. In summer of 2020, Trellis staff with the help of Better Tomorrows’ Social Services Coordinator began the inaugural cohort of SEED at Rolling Hills amidst the pandemic. Since then, young people have been able to distribute food directly back to the Rolling Hills community.

Phoenixville

Don Coppedge Village garden is located at 170 Persimmon Lane, Phoenixville, PA. This partnership at Don Coppedge Village grew out of Trellis’s relationship with the Chester County Food Bank (CCFB). Several years ago, CCFB had partnered with the Housing Authority and Pennrose to install a community garden. In Spring 2020, Trellis formed a youth cohort to manage, maintain and enlarge the Don Coppedge Village garden site. In Summer 2020, the teens more than doubled the size of the garden, which includes some plots that are designated for resident households.

Pottstown

The Pottstown/Hobart’s Run garden is Trellis’ eldest SEED garden site partnership located in the heart of the Borough of Pottstown on the 700 block of Walnut St. Initiated in 2018, the Pottstown SEED site is the product of a partnership Trellis and Hobart’s Run-the community development and outreach arm of the Hill School. The garden includes 20 raised beds and participants engage with the surrounding community to deliver the produce to neighbors and partners at the Ricketts Center.

Spring City

Park Spring Apartments garden is located behind the Community Room at 1800 Park Springs Blvd, Spring City, PA. Trellis and Park Springs have been partnering for over 15 years to recruit young people into Trellis programming. The garden began as a small youth-run garden and has now expanded into a large community garden that is managed by SEED participants. The produce grown in this garden is distributed directly back into the community.

Program Highlights

SEE OUR IMPACT REPORT

Because Trellis for Tomorrow SEED Skills youth programs are supported in part by federal funds, our participants are guaranteed certain rights by law. All of these rights, along with related grievance/complaint procedures, can be found in these documents.

1. Participant Rights and Grievance Procedures 2. Equal Opportunity Notice 3. Sexual Harassment Policy 4. Participant Civil Rights Trellis for Tomorrow also has its own version of Equal Opportunity policies and grievance procedures. For a full copy of Trellis’s anti-harassment and discrimination policy, including grievance procedures, please click here. Should you require a translation of this document into another language or an audio version, or have questions or concerns, please reach out to our Executive Director at 610-886-4901. Thank you.