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Media That Matters: Good Food

Inch By Inch: Providence Youth Gardens for Change

8:00 min
Documentary
Director: Ilana Friendman
Producer: Ilana Friendman

FILMMAKER BIOS

Ilana Friendman, Director and Producer

Ilana Friedman is a gardener and teacher in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father’s roof garden, which included raspberries, basil, and apples, inspired her to start a community garden while studying for her Bachelors of Arts at Brown University. She grew curious about the overlap between urban gardening and education, since she was thinking about teaching, and she found that school gardening projects in Providence fostered multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning. Seeking to motivate teachers everywhere to grow food with their students, Ilana made her first documentary, Inch By Inch, and received the C.V. Starr National Service Fellowship, which funded the project. Ilana graduated from Brown in 2004 and became a city farmer and an educator in Providence children’s gardens. She has taught dozens of kids how to grow food in the city, cook nutritious eats, and make compost with the scraps. Currently Ilana is studying for a Masters of Arts in Teaching at Brown.