Intergenerational Club Sustainability Nights

Hastings KIDS x Hastings Senior Council 

By Frieda Belasco and Sofia Eliasi 

As co-founders of the Intergenerational Club, a partnership with the Hastings Senior Council, at Hastings High School through Hastings KIDS (a branch of the Hastings Youth Council), we work to foster meaningful connections between Hastings High School students and the senior citizens in our community. Each month, we plan engaging activities to deepen these connections while also providing an entertaining evening. Our goal was to expand our venture to include educational opportunities in these events to make a broader impact on the community as whole. One way we hoped to do this was through a number of educational sustainability projects. Over the course of the 2024-2025 school year, we wll host multiple events focused on teaching sustainable practices and spurring intergenerational conversations around the importance of environmental protection and justice. Some of these events include learning experiences centered around composting, pollinator paths, and sustainable cooking. At these events, we not only hope to provide resources to learn more about a topic, but also the materials necessary to further participants’ sustainable practices. 

We hosted our first such event, a sustainable cooking night, on September 26, 2024 thanks to a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies Youth Climate Action Fund. A professional chef, Patty Nusser, walked 17 participants through cooking a healthy, sustainable meal: roasted carrots with carrot-top pesto and a whole-lemon jam. Throughout the event, we hosted discussions about the importance of including sustainable practices in cooking and methods to do so. We hoped that participants would take all that they learned at the event and apply it to their own lives and how they cook. We will hold our second event on December 8, 2024.

Methods 

Planning the sustainable cooking event took most of the summer of 2024. We coordinated with our chef to craft a menu that was healthy, sustainable, allergy-inclusive, and delicious. After doing so, we had to buy all of the necessary ingredients, including working with a local vendor to ensure that the produce was sustainably sourced, as well as other goods needed to host the event. As participants were leaving, we gave them all sheets of paper with the recipes that we created so that they could replicate the meal at home, plus additional tips on how to cook sustainably. 

To stay true to our sustainability goals, we ensured that all utensils, napkins, cups, and plates were compostable and we urged participants to only use the composting bins at the event. In preparation for the event, we also attempted to limit our output of garbage. 

We hosted the sustainable cooking night at the James V. Harmon Community Center in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. We hope to host all of our upcoming events at the community center. We urged all participants to complete an entrance and exit survey that asked questions regarding their perceptions of sustainable cooking so that we could gauge the impact of our event. 


Event Description

We thoroughly enjoyed getting to know all of the participants at our cooking night. The room was filled with conversations as the teens and seniors worked together to create a delicious meal. Through planning for this event, we learned valuable lessons about how to work on a team composed of people with many different perspectives (in this case, different generations) and we learned how to work with businesses in sourcing our ingredients. 

Posters made by Patty Nusser with the  recipes “The Whole Lemon” and “The Whole Carrot,” and demonstrating how to make a sustainable impact by using simple ingredients. We made our meal more flavorful by adding salt, sugar, walnuts, pepper, and dill. Generous community supporters of the event donated their cutting boards, knives, food processors, and other utensils. 

Most people only use the orange part of the carrot, and they often peel the outside. This both removes many tasty and nutritious parts of the food, but is also wasteful and therefore less sustainable. We used the whole carrot, including the leaves and the skins of the carrot, to make delicious roasted carrots with a carrot-top pesto. 


Output 

We surveyed seven seniors and ten teens about their sustainable cooking habits before and after the event. Using a Likert scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “Very Easy” and 5 being “Very Difficult,” we surveyed the participants on how easy or difficult they thought it was to cook sustainably. Before the event, the average score was 2.824. After the event, the average score was 2.411, displaying an increased ease of .413 points. 

62.5% of participants reported composting before the event, and 88.2% of participants reported practicing recycling. After the event, there was a 14% increase in intention to compost and a 5.9% increase in intention to recycle. 

Outcome 

We observed that many participants had already implemented some sustainable cooking practices in their lives. Here were some of the responses to: “What sustainable cooking practices do you implement at home, if any?”

After the event, participants were asked, “Are there any sustainable cooking practices that you learned today that you plan to implement in your life?” Here are a selection of their responses: 

Overall, the participants responded with more creative, impactful sustainable cooking practices than they did before the event. 


Conclusion 

Based on the data, we can conclude that we succeeded in our goal to educate the event participants about ways to include sustainable practices in their cooking habits through hosting a group discussion and presenting new sustainable methods in a fun and interactive way. We look forward to continuing our progress in encouraging conversations between seniors and teens regarding sustainability through our other upcoming projects throughout the 2024-2025 school year.