At a Sept. 19 Harvest Hoedown, neighbors visited the new North Long Beach farm operated by Sowing Seeds of Change, shared food and played games. The gathering also introduced people to the nonprofit’s work. In an Oct. 28 report, Long Beach City College’s student newspaper profiled Beverly Gonzalez, an LBCC alumna who now teaches culinary arts at Sowing Seeds of Change; her lessons connect the farm setting with cooking and job skills. This is a look at an ongoing training program, not a new event: the Hoedown was more than a month earlier.
Gonzalez brings more than two decades in the food industry to the teaching role, the LBCC Viking News reported. The LBCC report also notes that her culinary work has taken her to television shows including “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Cutthroat Kitchen.” She described a career that included starting a culinary program at a previous organization serving adults with intellectual disabilities, then bringing that experience to Sowing Seeds of Change. Her focus is practical instruction. At the farm, she teaches students how to prepare food, work with seasonal ingredients and understand how those ingredients are grown. She told the newspaper that hands-on learning is central to the work. “I love what I do,” she said, describing community service as her motivation for teaching.
Gonzalez told the newspaper that students learn how a product moves from a farm to a customer, connecting food preparation with customer service and retail skills. That practical lesson builds on seasonal crops grown at the farm, according to the report.
Sowing Seeds of Change describes itself as a vocational training center for transition-age youth with disabilities and foster youth. Its website lists three learning areas: nursery operations, urban agriculture and culinary training. The organization says the training also includes job-readiness workshops and entrepreneurship. On its website, the nonprofit also describes free farmers markets and food fairs as ways to increase food access, reduce waste and build community connections.
One program listed on the site is a four-week Farm to Table and Life Skills Bootcamp for young adults with disabilities. The nonprofit says participants tend crops, harvest produce and cook alongside an experienced chef on its five-acre North Long Beach farm. It lists kitchen safety, knife handling and food sanitation among the skills covered. The sequence lets participants encounter food at more than one stage, from growing ingredients through preparing them for a meal.
The organization says participants can make artisan farm products and practice their skills in public cooking demonstrations. It describes a community graduation lunch as the capstone and uses a Vocational Skills Passport to record work in agriculture, culinary arts and customer service.
At the Hoedown, founder Lindsay Smith told the Viking News that the organization aims to make participants feel welcome. She described the goal as creating a “safe space where everybody feels welcome” and said time outdoors can be meaningful for participants. Attendee Rogelio Yates captured the event as “Good food, good cause, it’s a win win!” North Long Beach resident Boni Face said gatherings matter because they give people a chance to “break bread and laugh.”
The event brought the public onto the farm while supporting Sowing Seeds of Change’s Long Beach Gives campaign, according to the report. The campaign benefits the farm and its community programs, the report says. Photo captions identify volunteers Katelyn Ha and Sanaa Fisher serving a drink to an attendee and volunteer Panya Krich playing ring toss, a glimpse of how the gathering opened the site to neighbors. The organization’s website lists its training center at 750 East Via Carmelitos.
For Gonzalez, culinary teaching gives her experience a community purpose. For Sowing Seeds of Change, the farm is part of a broader effort to teach practical skills tied to food and service. The Oct. 28 profile documents that work through interviews with the instructor, founder and attendees. Training details about program structure come from the nonprofit itself; neither the article nor its website provides program completion or employment outcomes.
Reader responses