Create a campus environment that not only benefits the youth but the community as a whole.Create outdoor spaces and demonstration areas where community and global citizens connect to learn about community supported agricultural systems, food innovation, entrepreneurialism, and economic development.Foster synergy between all three groups through shared spaces and collaboration.Interweave spaces dedicated to athletic performance, education, and farming with the urban fabric of East St.Campus landscape plan (Courtesy Nelson Byrd Woltz)Īs for the NBW-helmed design of the new center, it “focuses on youth engagement, athletics, health and nutrition, and economic expansion through metropolitan food production.” As detailed by the firm, the design vision for the large JJK FAN campus aspires to: Louis is very much a food desert although grassroots initiatives have been launched in recent years to provide its residents with easier access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food. Similar to large swaths of its larger Missourian neighbor across the Mississippi, East St. Louis youth with “the opportunity to win in life.” The newly established JKK FAN further hones the foundation’s larger mission by offering community-based programs in STEAM+Ag, nutrition, food production, physical fitness, and more. As noted by the foundation, it sets out to provide East St. Louis by providing them with the tools and resources needed to thrive in academics, athletics, and leadership. The JJK was first established in 1988 to inspire, educate, and open new proverbial doors for young people in East St. Louis was deluged by recent record-breaking torrential rainfall just yesterday officials declared a state of emergency in the flood-stricken city.) In 2021 it ranked as the poorest city in Illinois. Louis, like many Rust Belt cities, later fell into a steep decline in the mid-20th century and has historically struggled with high unemployment and crime rates. Once a prosperous industrial center, East St. Louis, a small southwest Illinois city located directly across the Mississippi River from St. The recipient of six Olympic Medals-including three gold medals-won over four different Olympics games in the heptathlon and long jump events, Joyner-Kersee was born and raised in East St. Louis is at the core of this collaboration. Even though we’re three individual organizations, we sync and work as one,” said Joyner-Kersee, who serves as founder and CEO of the JJK Foundation, in a statement. “Education and opening endless opportunities for youth in STEAM-Ag in East St. The new center will be used to house staff of the foundation and its Winning in Life program, along with the University of Illinois Extension Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program and Danforth Center’s JJK FAN Center staff. Louis–based nonprofit Lansdowne UP donated the property to the JJK Foundation. Teaching Gardens at the JJK FAN campus in East St. Louis, with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects ( NBW) overseeing a five-phase build-out of the space to include multiple indoor and outdoor agricultural demonstration sites along with “space for youth and community members to engage in hands-on training and certification programs related to growing food, ag innovation, and nutrition for improving health and performance, as well as space for athletics and physical training,” according to a press release from the firm, which maintains offices in New York, Houston, and Charlottesville, Virginia.Īlong with the larger project launch, a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first part of the center was held in April. Launched in April, JJK FAN-borne from a private-public partnership between the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Illinois Extension-will be housed in a 12,000-square-foot former office complex in East St.
0 kommentar(er)
