By Courtney Shojinaga

This past week, Kyle and I had the honor of being guest speakers at NCI: an 8 week summer internship through Kizuna. The 13 interns were growing into our next generation of community leaders, learning about their ethnic identity and increasing awareness of Asian American communities and issues. Our role was to help broaden their scope from Japanese American issues to those of the general API community. The interns demonstrated immense knowledge about historic Japanese American involvement in agriculture!

During our workshop, we taste-tested grape tomatoes from a supermarket vs grown from our API farms- and the difference is drastic! The tomato haters in the group actually ended up enjoying the produce once they realized what grape tomatoes are really meant to taste like. I encourage you to try this out yourself!

To end out the workshop, the interns planted their own basil seeds in take home pots. They were eager to get their hands dirty and start growing their own herbs. Thank you so much Taylor for this opportunity to work with your interns!