What is SOYL?
Sustainable Opportunities for Youth Leadership (SOYL) is a 6-week summer program which empowers students entering grades 9-12 to cultivate and steward our schoolyard farms in Vancouver and Coquitlam! Through their time with SOYL, youth develop skills in growing, cooking, and selling food, as well as a greater connection to themselves, their community, and the regional food system. Youth also receive a stipend and may be able to receive school credit for their contributions.
What happens at SOYL?
Grow
Working closely with our farmers, SOYL youth tend our farms, doing everything from weeding garden beds to harvesting produce for our market stand
Cook
Twice-weekly Community Eats meals have youth cooking with chefs from LunchLab to create and share delicious vegetarian lunches with their SOYL peers and the farmers. Youth also learn about food preservation, making and canning their own jams, salsas, relishes and/or chutneys.
Sell
Selling what they’ve helped to grow and make at our farmer stands, youth develop financial literacy, customer service, and public engagement skills.
Explore
Explore Metro Vancouver’s food system by engaging in weekly field trips with local food-related organizations to deepen their understanding of our food systems.
Lead
Youth develop personal capacity through a variety of food systems and leadership workshops, and have opportunities to practice giving and receiving peer feedback. SOYL youth can apply to participate in a Camp Staff in Training program at the end of their SOYL summer, and returning youth can apply to be peer mentors for new SOYL youth!
Who is in SOYL?
Participants
SOYL is open to all students entering grade 9-12. Each SOYL cohort has around 20-25 youth from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, skills, and abilities. Around ⅓ of students are referred to SOYL through Life Skills, LRP, and other supportive programs, and the remaining 2/3s are interested secondary students from across the city. We have one cohort in Coquitlam, based at the Suwa’lkh Medicine Garden, and one in Vancouver, who splits time between the farms at Van Tech and David Thompson Secondaries.
Staff
Each cohort is led by trained Fresh Roots facilitators, with additional support from Fresh Roots farmers and LunchLab chefs. If we are able to offer summer school course credit, a district teacher and EAs also support the program approximately 2 days per week. Please note: Fresh Roots is unable to provide EAs or one-on-one aides outside of what is provided by the school district as part of the course.
How to Join SOYL
Applications for the 2025 SOYL season will be available in March.
I think that I was able to understand the food system more and I think this has helped with my personal diet. Before SOYL, I wouldn’t really eat much let alone have healthy options. SOYL was not only kind enough to provide lunch for us, but the program made me appreciate these healthier foods a lot more and I was able to eat more than I usually did. I would like to use what I learned in the kitchen at home, and cook for me and my younger brother so that he’s eating better food than I did.
— 2023 Vancouver SOYL youth
To learn more about the SOYL program in the youth’s own words, check out the SOYL posts on our blog! Got questions? Send us an email to soyl@freshroots.ca or call us at 778-764-0344.
Discover SOYL in one short video: