Isabel Brauhn
Despite it still feeling like summer outside, Columbia’s Agriculture Park was radiating fall energy on Saturday, Sept. 20, at the 16th Annual Harvest Hootenanny.
The event, hosted by Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, featured food, live music, games and more. The MU Healthcare Pavilion was filled with rows of tables where people were laughing, talking and enjoying food.
The event began 16 years ago when the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture wanted to fundraise and decided to share their food with neighbors.
“[In] our second year, we had a really big harvest, you know, and a lot of food,” said volunteer program manager Mallary Lieber. “[We] decided to have a communal meal with the community and invite everybody in. And back in those days, we were just asking for donations, you know. … And as it’s grown, you know, of course we’ve kind of formalized things, but we still try to make it as accessible and free as possible.”
Since then, the Hootenanny has grown significantly. Now, the event is still free, but food tickets are available for purchase. Additionally, various community organizations come together at the event and set up booths to reach out to the community.
One booth was for the Central Missouri Humane Society. They brought some of their adoptable dogs for people to meet and learn more about.
“[We are here] to get our name out there to the community and get our animals exposure so they can get more adoptable, but also to socialize them too, because this is really good for these [dogs], to be able to get to know other people,” Central Missouri Humane Society volunteer Randi Webster said.
Many of the booths also had games or toys set up to engage with children. For The Food Bank Market services manager, Leilani Tiefenthaler, this is her favorite part of the Hootenanny.
“Another reason why I am with an organization that serves people is to be with people,” Tiefenthaler said. “Being here, I get to play games with them and talk to them.”
For some, their organization’s mission is personal, leading them to reach out to help others in similar situations around the community.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 29,” said Jamie Currier, associate director of community partnerships for the American Cancer Society. “So when I learned about the amazing research that American Cancer Society does … that’s when you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s really amazing that this organization develops treatments and actually funds research so that we can really address every cancer with every life.’”
Currier’s work with the American Cancer Society brought her to the Hootenanny, a place where she can connect with members of the community and provide them with cancer education and resources.
“Being at an event like this allows me to talk to a majority of the families that come out here and really spread the information, because ideally they’ll take it back to their family and say, ‘Oh gosh, look at this thing I got this weekend,’” Currier said. “So it’s a one-to-many approach. It’s kind of how public health is; if I share it with one person, hopefully they share it with many.”
There were also a number of booths dedicated to teaching about the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s mission, including a table encouraging people to create as little waste as possible at this event. On it, a sign read, “Hand trash to volunteers or place on table.” Instead of finding trash cans, volunteers were asking people to give them their trash in order to sort it between compost, recycling and actual waste. The goal is to be as zero-waste as possible.
“We usually only end up with one to three bags of trash from 4,000 attendees,” said event volunteer Zoë Westhoff. She has been a volunteer at the Harvest Hootenanny for six years now.
Information was also available about the different programs that Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture offers, including Opportunity Gardens, which teaches people how to grow their own food, and Planting for the Pantry, which provides fresh food to places such as The Food Bank Market. These programs have been instituted after years of growth within the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, as the organization originally started small on the Mizzou campus.
“There was a group of folks at Sustain Mizzou who did a composting project, and they were composting food scraps from our dining halls on campus,” Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture Executive Director Billy Polansky said. “And then it kind of became its own organization, and lots of different programs from there.”
Now, the event is a large social gathering for the whole community. Driving around Columbia neighborhoods, you are likely to see Harvest Hootenanny yard signs. Thousands of people come to enjoy everything the event has to offer, all to support the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s mission.
“The Hootenanny is a really cool event because anybody can come,” Westhoff said. “It’s open to all people, anybody who is interested in this type of thing, but it’s also a fantastic fundraiser for CCUA. All of the food is farm-to-table. … It is just such a good introduction into urban agriculture for people who maybe have never heard of the organization or never heard of urban agriculture in the first place.”
Edited by Ainsley Bryson | [email protected]
Copy edited by Danielle McCorison and Emma Harper | [email protected]
Edited by Chase Pray | [email protected]