(Un)Earthed Pain and Possibilities: A Place-Based Curriculum Toolkit For Forgotten Foods
This paper presents a place-based curriculum toolkit for Forgotten Foods, a youth-led organization on the North Shore of Staten Island. Grounded in decolonial planning, youth participatory action research, and placekeeping principles, the toolkit ensures that curriculum design prioritizes community self-determination, counter-narrative production, and youth-adult power-sharing. Using the Forgotten Foods and Youth (FFAY) program as a model context, this study demonstrates how community-based organizations can treat curriculum as a planning document that builds the capacity of those who participate in city-making. The toolkit integrates two tools: decolonial community archival research that recovers histories erased by dominant archives, and youth-adult partnership in co-design that institutionalizes youth decision-making authority. Drawing on autoethnography, interviews and focus groups with FFAY youth and adults, and literature across planning, archival research, and curriculum studies, it offers a replicable model for organizations seeking to develop the next generation of placekeepers, placemakers, and narrative change agents.
The introduction establishes narrative as the foundation of the toolkit and explains why a curriculum toolkit for Forgotten Foods is needed.
Methodology describes the methods used to build the toolkit, including autoethnography, interviews, and focus groups with FFAY youth and adults, and a literature review across planning, archival research, and curriculum studies.
Conceptual Frameworks introduces the three frameworks that ground the toolkit: youth participatory action research (YPAR), decoloniality, and placekeeping and placemaking.
Organizational Background and FFAY Program Background describe Forgotten Foods, its mission, and the multi-year youth leadership program that the toolkit is designed to serve.
Context maps the four dominant narratives that have shaped the North Shore alongside the counter-narratives, community institutions, and cultural production that refuse them.
Tool 1: Decolonial Community Archival Research presents a four-phase protocol for North Shore organizations to recover, document, and translate the histories that dominant archives have erased, with a four-week FFAY archival research intensive as a model program structure.
Tool 2: Youth-Adult Partnership in the Co-Design Process presents eight practices for institutionalizing youth-adult power-sharing in curriculum co-design, with a twelve-month co-design process for Forgotten Foods as a model program structure.
Closing and Future Directions reflection on the toolkit's contribution to insurgent and reparative planning practice, and identify five additional tools deferred to future work: organizational pedagogy, oral history as narrative change practice, curriculum content, curriculum implementation, and curriculum evaluation. Ultimately, the toolkit is intended to be flexible and adaptive, offering Forgotten Foods and similar community-based organizations a pathway to design curricula that center community self-determination, narrative change, and youth agency in shaping the places where they live.