Supa Fresh Youth Farm hosted its third annual Autumn Harvest Festival in Tigard on Oct. 11, reaping the benefits of a brilliant fall day that still felt like summer.
The harvest festival took place at Metzger Elementary School’s athletic field, which doubles as a public park after school hours.
The free celebration presented an afternoon full of activities for children. Supa Fresh’s young organizers, ages 14 to 24, invited kids and their families to paint their faces, carve pumpkins, make scarecrows, and throw bean bags around. Kids lined up with their “passports” on hand to mark down their visits at each destination.
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Jade and Devonte, Supa Fresh Youth Farm interns, paint faces while in costumes.
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Children carve pumpkins at Supa Fresh Youth Farm's Autumn Harvest Festival.
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Kris, a long-time Supa Fresh Youth Farm volunteer, helps children make scarecrows.
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Pizza was the main course at Supa Fresh Youth Farm's Autumn Harvest Festival. Dozens were baked in a cob oven designed and built by young people who work at Supa Fresh Youth Farm.
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Shelly, Supa Fresh Youth Farm market intern, and Katrin Dougherty, Supa Fresh Youth Farm program director, pose for a portrait at the market stand.
The lines were especially long at tables with food as kids anxiously waited to fill their plates with chips and guacamole, “spooky banana ghosts,” and sugar cookies piled high with frosting and candy decorations. Freshly made pizza baked in a new wood-fired cob oven was the main course.
“I really like this program because it gives young people work and an opportunity to develop professionally,” Beatriz Maldonado said in Spanish. Her daughter found work through Supa Fresh Youth Farm and Youth Source, a jobs training and education program.
Maldonado is pleased the great work young people do - organizing events and selling handmade soaps, flowers, and fruits and vegetables - continues to raise Supa Fresh’s visibility around the community.
The young people of Supa Fresh Youth Farm know what it’s like to plant seeds and watch them come to life – literally and figuratively.
Not only did they grow some of the pizza toppings, like onions, garlic and basil, but they also designed and built this community oven using clay, sand, straw and water. The project came together over the course of a year with support from Metro’s Community Placemaking grant program.
Metro created the Community Placemaking program to help communities create the changes they want to see in their neighborhoods, while supporting more equitable outcomes among historically marginalized communities that include people of color and immigrants.
This Tigard neighborhood lacks access to parks. It’s why the city, schools and community groups partnered to envision a public space where families and people of all ages can gather to play, learn and connect with one another.
School and city officials, along with partners that include Supa Fresh Youth Farm, are planning to transform Metzger’s open field into a more welcoming public park with a natural play area, a soccer field with artificial turf, an amphitheater and a community garden.
“The city of Tigard saw that there was a need for more free programs for kids,” said State Rep. Margaret Doherty. “We don't have a recreational district like Tualatin Hills.”
The city has already started to use Metzger’s open field as a public park. This summer the parks department hosted a free movie screening at the Metzger School Park as part of its “Movies in the Park” series.
“There's a number of apartment complexes around here,” Todd Farris, principal at Metzger Elementary School, said during a phone interview. “It's great to have a place that kids can walk to.”
“We have built a lot of what is here so far,” Katrin Dougherty said while pointing to the raised beds in the community garden. Dougherty is program director of Supa Fresh Youth Farm and Youth Source, a jobs training and education program for young people.
“The city is still working on a lot of its fundraising for this [park]… and they haven't slowed us down at all,” Dougherty said. “They said to go ahead and get started. The city has been incredibly supportive of the placemaking project and of our program for many years.”
On building community
Luis Diaz harvests pumpkins. Photo courtesy of Supa Fresh Youth Farm
Luis Diaz, 21, was part of a team that researched how to build a community oven using clay, soil, straw and water. “I’ve never been a part of anything community-wise,” Diaz said. He said having a shared oven in a new public park “will create a more united community – that’s what I’m hoping that will come out of this.” Diaz lives with his family about half a mile away from Metzger School Park.
After chopping potatoes to make a meal for his crew, Brandon Hill poses for a photo. Photo courtesy of Supa Fresh Youth Farm
Brandon Hill, 19, is an alum of Metzger Elementary School. He’s thrilled to have played a role in developing placemaking elements for a new park at his school. “It's just amazing to do stuff for your community, ‘cause now it feels like a part of me,” Hill said. “I've always liked… giving back to others and not always taking things… You have to put back to the community.”
The city and school district share half of the community garden with Supa Fresh. Park officials propose to put sheltered picnic areas near the cob oven.
The community garden and a gathering place anchored around a place to cook and enjoy meals make the park more inviting, Dougherty said about the placemaking project’s broader benefits.
“For our program and for the school, it's also a pretty big deal, because it allows them [our young people] all these leadership opportunities,” Dougherty said.
The young people participating in this project researched and developed a total of six proposals for placemaking: a cob structure (an oven or market stand); a community compost; pollinator gardens; edible gardens that also work as landscaping; and a wind turbine. They presented these ideas at public meetings.
“It was just amazing because they were leading Parks and Recreation community meetings,” Dougherty said. “They had child care set up to make it possible for the public to come.”
The young people also conducted surveys in person and by mail. They asked city officials and neighbors to select three of their ideas for the park. Besides the community oven, people chose pollinator gardens and the edible plants to wrap around the edges of the community garden.
Dougherty said pitching these ideas offered an experience much like what contractors have to do when they answer calls for proposals.
Over the summer, volunteers from Comcast, and the Timbers and the Thorns, helped build the foundation for the cob oven and prepare the soil for the pollinator gardens. Young people from Supa Fresh led volunteers and delegated tasks.
The cob oven will eventually be open for anyone to use, but Supa Fresh Youth Farm is still working out the details with officials from Metzger Elementary School and Tigard about how that will work out.
Supa Fresh Youth Farm will eventually decorate the exterior of the oven and build a roof that’s up to safety code.
In the meantime, getting to know the cob oven is fun, said 16-year-old Cristina Gomez Maldonado, who helped kids make their pizzas at the harvest festival. Gomez Maldonado recently became a mom. As a young parent, she felt isolated after giving birth to her daughter.
Being a part of Supa Fresh “helped me come out of that shell again and be a social person again, interacting with people my age,” she said. “At the same time, I'm also helping out a community that I know that my daughter is going to be growing up in later on.”
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Cristina Gomez Maldonado helps young children make pizza.
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Pizza-making at Supa Fresh Youth Farm's Autumn Harvest Festival.
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A portrait of the Maldonado family.
Her baby daughter, dressed in a unicorn onesie, seemed to people-watch during the festival while in the arms of Gomez Maldonado’s mother.
“I really like this program because it gives young people work and an opportunity to develop professionally,” Beatriz Maldonado said in Spanish.
Maldonado is pleased the great work young people do - organizing events and selling handmade soaps, flowers, and fruits and vegetables - continues to raise Supa Fresh’s visibility around the community.
Gomez Maldonado agrees with her mom. She said people are often surprised to learn most of them are teenagers.
“And it's really nice to be able to say like, ‘Yeah, we want to be a part [of this]; we want to help build our community,’ due to the fact that it's our community,” she said.
Learn more
Visit our Community Placemaking grantees page.
Metro’s investments, such as these placemaking grants, are strategically focused to help local communities create or sustain the vibrant places envisioned in the Region’s 2040 Growth Concept.
The work of the Community Placemaking grant recipients aligns with Metro's strategic plan to advance racial equity, diversity and inclusion.
Read the strategic plan: