Gallatin student Pablo De Castro Gomez recently led a community service project focused on urban farming while studying at NYU Tel Aviv. Working with a group of fellow NYU Tel Aviv students, local students, and a local NGO, Pablo found the experience meaningful. 

When you live in a city like New York where everything exists in abundance, it’s easy to forget that some of the food we take for granted can also be a luxury. For the immigrant and refugee communities in southern Tel Aviv, things like fresh herbs and vegetables are often commodities beyond their reach. Unfortunately, many families rely on cheaper foods that can be detrimental to their health over time. Unwilling to turn a blind eye,  NYU Tel Aviv has partnered up with the Isreali afterschool scout program Eitan Scouts and the Association for Urban Farming NGO, to make a difference. Over the course of a month and a half, delegates from all three organizations rallied to meticulously design a low-cost hydroponic farm at the Scouts headquarters in southern Tel Aviv. Following weeks of planning and gathering the materials, we all once again came together to build a healthier future for the city. After a strenuous day of working the land, programming the hydroponics elements, and making sure everything was pretty enough for Instagram, we had manifest our plans into reality. Not only do these kids now have access to a wide variety of herbs and veggies but by incorporating them into the design process, they learned how to expand their low-cost high-efficiency gardens throughout their community. Seeing how excited and proud the scouts were of what they had built, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more hydroponic gardens popping up really soon.