The day’s heat felt sweltering, but it didn’t stop the gardening crew—or G-Squad—from getting weeds picked, plants watered, and “good food bags” packed for their West Philadelphia neighborhood customers.

A garden filling a courtyard at Sayre High School serves as one of the home bases for the Penn-powered Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative’s (AUNI) high school summer internship program. Through the program, high school-aged youth learn how to grow healthy food, cook, and even become social entrepreneurs.

Inside a Sayre classroom, the cooking crew—or NMW (Nutrition’s Most Wanted)—is chopping away. The day’s lunch recipe? Stir fry, made with fresh vegetables.

“When you’re cutting, think about what a bite size would be,” instructs the AUNI’s nutrition education coordinator Shivon Pearl Love.

Penn students, paid through work-study, help supervise alongside the AUNI staff. The AUNI is a component of the University’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The youth are taught to cook with the “AHEAD” mantra: Affordable, Healthy, Easy, Accessible, and Delicious, explains rising Penn senior Matthew Krebs, a philosophy, politics, and economics major.

A flew blocks away at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Center for Culinary Enterprises, high schoolers are working with Rebel Ventures, an organization that sells healthy snacks in the community. It’s best known for its Rebel Bar, a simple, whole grain granola bar that’s organic and supplied in local public schools as an affordable, healthy snack.

“We make granola bars, we package them, distribute them, and run a business,” says 17-year-old Corinthe Hamilton. “What we’re doing right now is being young entrepreneurs. It’s prepping me for the future.”

The summer program also has a College And Career Readiness (CACR) crew, gearing up students for life after high school. That means: a 15-hour per week external internship at a business Monday through Thursday, with résumé writing workshops, college visits, and other activities on Fridays.

Samantha Shea, a soon-to-be sophomore at Wharton, said she got involved in the AUNI’s CACR group after hearing about it in a class.

“I felt it fit me because I knew how important it was for me to have a mentor when I was applying to colleges and navigating the college process,” she says.

Penn students spent three weeks training and preparing before the program officially kicked off on July 6. The six-week summer program runs through Friday, Aug. 14.

About 75 youth are enrolled in the program this summer, says Laura Crandall, the AUNI’s director of programs and partnerships. The students also work out of Bartram’s Garden and Paul Robeson High School.

More than half of the high school students this summer are returning participants.

One of those students is Andre Platts, a 16-year-old who has mastered giving garden tours. He says he never knew what he wanted to do in the future before he started working on the G-Squad with the AUNI.

“Now I know that in college I kind of want to do something with agriculture,” he says.