Sanaya Irani '19: Alumna Invites You to Keep Growing Detroit on WSU Alumni Week of Service
Alumna Sanaya Irani '19 has volunteered with Keep Growing Detroit since 2016. While a student at the Irvin D. Reid Honors College she was taking a class called Cities and Food when she first heard guest speaker Ashley Atkinson, co-director at Keep Growing Detroit (KGD) discuss her nonprofit.
KGD says that its mission is to "promote a food sovereign city where the majority of fruits and vegetables consumed by Detroiters are grown by residents within the city's limits".
They aspire to meet that end through several initiatives including their KGD's Garden Resource Program (GRP), which supports a network of 1,600 urban gardens and farms in the city and the Grown in Detroit (GID) program provides urban growers with low-barrier opportunities to sell the fruits and vegetables they grow at local market outlets.
In 2019 alone, Keep Growing Detroit supported more than 25,000 Detroiters, engaged more than 1500 farms, distributed 53,000 packs of seeds, and 204,015 transplants (fully germinated seedling or mature plants that can be replanted in a permanent location for the growing season, a process which is especially helpful in climates where plants can't grow in winters).
Irani is currently a student at the University of Michigan Medical School. In between medical school and her graduation from Wayne State University, she spent a year as a member of Food Corps (part of AmeriCorps). As part of her assignment, she has taught students at Charles L. Spain Elementary-Middle School how to grow and care for plants from KGD.
"In the fall of 2019 we planted Easter Egg Radishes which are white, pink, magenta, and purple so they were really excited to see all the different colors," Irani said. "My preschoolers helped pull them out of the ground and then washed them and ate them."
Since that planting, Irani partook in educational courses at KGD she says will only further enhance her ability to share gardening with others.
"It taught me about starting a garden, getting funds, and literally everything from buying a plot of land to building beds and maintaining it. After the class, I earned a free membership KGD's garden resource program gives you almost unlimited seeds and transplants every year".
Transplants are convenient, Irani said, because "all you have to do is take it out from the little tray and put into the ground because KGD already starts the growing for you."
During Alumni Week of Service and throughout the year, volunteers are encouraged to explore volunteer opportunities at KGD's 1.5-acre urban farm and teaching facility located in Detroit's historic Eastern Market District. Likely activities could include putting transplants into plastic flats (of 50 or 72 seeds) so gardeners can transport the plants to their own farms, or packing plastic bags full of special seeds and specific growing instructions.
"A lot of times people have labeled Detroit as a food desert, but it's really not because a lot of the city of Detroit is taking the initiative to start growing their own farms or urban gardens and take the production into their own hands," Irani said. "And especially in something like this Covid-19 crisis, it would be amazing to have your own potatoes and not have to worry about going to a grocery store that might be low on supplies," Irani said.
"Volunteering at Keep Growing Detroit is also a great way to be outside in the sun, get your hands in the dirt, and help make something new."