Growing food changes lives: A discussion with Big Green’s Sam Koentopp

00:00:08 Michelle

Welcome to the farm to school Podcast, where you will hear stories of how you thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook, and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools across the country…

00:00:20 Rick

..And the world. Hi everybody, we're your hosts, I'm Rick Sherman.

00:00:24 Michelle

And I'm Michelle Markesteyn, and we are super excited today. We have Sam Koentopp. He is the senior director of programs at Big Green. Hi, Sam.

00:00:32 Sam Koentopp

Hey, how are you guys doing?

00:00:34 Michelle

Great. We're excited to talk to you today on this and I don't know is it sunny where you are at the time of this recording?

00:00:41 Rick

And where are you?

Yeah.

00:00:43 Sam Koentopp

So, I'm in Chicago. It is sunny right now at this moment in Chicago. It's a beautiful day here. It's hot. The green is based in in Denver, Co though, so we kind of we, we do. We're expanding the whole country.

00:00:57 Michelle

Oh my gosh. Well, tell us about Big Green. You know. What is it you do? How do you do it and why?

00:01:04 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. So we're a we're a national organization, we do our work through sharing gardens, grants, and gatherings in all the places where we work and our mission behind all of that is the just the idea that growing food changes lives. And so we want to give everybody the opportunity to grow food and explore that and build on that in all of the ways that make sense to the people themselves. And in the context of the communities where everybody is so kind of how that's done isn't really the Green's kind of, it's not our interest. What we're really excited about is just creating those opportunities and opening up doors for people to do more of it.

00:01:49 Rick

You said that growing food changes lives and it says that all over your website. If you go to your website, which will leave a link in the show, notes everybody but it the first thing it says that I saw that jumped out of me. It says let's get everyone in America growing food, and the second thing is what we were calling this episode of growing food changes live. So our podcast we are into the specific school garden world and farm to school. Do you deal with that too? School gardens, but also teaching people to grow at home too. Can you share a little bit more about that?

00:02:25 Sam Koentopp

Yeah, for sure. So. And the school guiding side, that's really where our organization started. All of our work back in 2011 are the first gardens we built. We were focused on specific parts of the country. I joined the organization in 2013 here in Chicago to support us, to build 200 gardens in Chicago Public Schools. And we were doing that work in cities all over the country, and so in that work, we developed some a model for school gardens that is super easy, super simple, that can be built like by a third grade classroom, for instance, in a couple of hours, like something that is not gonna be an extra hard for schools to be able to take on, for teachers to be able to use like the easy button of a school garden.

00:03:11 Rick

Yeah, but like what makes your model so much easier than a different model? I'm curious about that. How does it make it so simple?

00:03:20 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. So we manufacture our garden beds. They're a really accessible shape and size for young people for really for anybody. They're about just over knee height. It's really easy to use. They are modulars so they can be configured in all kinds of different shapes to fit different spaces available in different school yards. They have an irrigation system that is, that comes with the garden and is really simple to install. We provide all the like detailed instructions and kind of somebody who's never dealt with an irrigation system before. Can put it together the same way you would install, like put together a Lego kit or something. And then also we source like just amazing beautiful soil and fertilizer and we help to curate seeds that work in local environments like we just helped to solve all of the most common problems that arise in the garden and we do it in kind of the right size, right. So our gardens aren't huge. Either you know they're, you know, maybe 100 square feet of growing space at a school environment. So enough so that a classroom could be in and use as another classroom space, but not so much that it actually is a chore and a challenge to maintain and manage and keep it from becoming overwhelming.

00:04:41 Rick

There's something to be said about that, because I've seen it happen before where you bite off more than you can chew, so to speak, and people have this grandiose plan and it's like we're going to do an acre or and then it's like maybe we should start with some containers and like a raised bed and see if we can do that well before we go crazy. So I appreciate you saying that.

00:05:06 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say that that idea of making gardens easy is how we is part of how we also support community and home gardens. So, Rick, you were asking if I could talk a little about the home Garden piece. Yeah, during COVID, nobody was at school, so the school gardens that we were growing, you know, they were some of them were in production to help support food access. And it's so critical like always and especially kind of was a was a really pressing issue during COVID. But we also wanted to help serve people where they were, which was at home. So we distributed small 5 gallon like grow bag garden kits. That kind of it's the same philosophy as our larger container gardens easy to go. You just.. here's the container. Here's the soil. Here's the seeds. Here's the guide. Like get to it, add water and go. We distributed them through our school network so that teachers could be growing something at home and then, you know, on their zoom classes, students would be able to, you know, go by the school and pick up their kids and bring them home. And from that, we kind of continue to just expand on that idea and people are still it's still critical for people to grow in home and in communities. Something we really try to do in our work is to build a culture and a place to support a culture in a place that it connects us all to food. So if a young person or a family is seeing a school garden in their school and then they're at their local library or at their local park, and there's another garden that's the same as the one that's at school. And they're at their church or, you know, their place of worship. There's a there's a garden there, and then there's opportunities depending on where we're working and who our partners are for people to sign up and get a garden at their house. And so just this idea that we can all work together in our community to grow food for ourselves, to help connect around food, to keep our food, car, individual and community food cultures alive. Like really just to feed into that opportunity to have us all be more directly connected to growing food. And of course, with food doesn't just come the food, which is the best that's why I got into it in the first place, but also our connection to nature, our connection to each other. Our connection to our heritage, our ancestors, our connection to our bodies, like all of these, these really valuable and important pieces that we can we all can get from our relationships to food.

00:07:47 Michelle

So much good things happen when we grow together. Doesn't it?

00:07:52 Sam Koentopp

It does. I mean that's exactly It right?

00:07:56 Michelle

Yes. And I'm just wondering, you know, you solved.. you looked at patterns and barriers and solved for them through these turnkey solutions which thank you for putting your creativity in the green route is huge actually. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the impacts…

00:08:11 Sam Koentopp

Yeah, yeah.

00:08:18 Michelle

..You've been able to have so far, and what you're hoping for in the future?

00:08:22 Sam Koentopp

Yeah, so I can talk about like some specific work that we've been doing. So just this past year, we were able to form a really great partnership in Savannah. Working with and local nonprofit called Loop it Up Savannah and the local school district and a whole network of early childhood centers, and we built, we built 40 gardens in Savannah, which is the majority of the schools that are there in the district. Plus 10 early childhood centers and had additional grants to schools that already had gardens and as a part of that work, one of the things that was happening in Savannah at the same time was different. Organizations were coming together to kind of reactivate their food council, their local food council, and so what, like the network of school gardens, was able to become like a part of and like some energy that helped to support kind of the direction and activation and energy that's happening around local food policy and connecting more people to food access opportunities. And so that's opening up more worlds for us to then talk to our supporters and think through, OK, so now the community is organizing around farmers markets around different food growing opportunities around different food access ideas. How can big Green again continue to invest in and support that that energy with some continued ideas around people growing at home, people growing in different community spaces that are supported? Yeah, we're doing similar work in San Antonio where we're working with the AME Church there. Elder Brian is the Raymond, Brian is the leader of that church and kind of he's brought in the entire kind of community around the AME church in San Antonio at the same time that we're building school gardens in San Antonio Independent School district. And so just like as we've been talking about those opportunities to help connect people across school districts across like community, different places and community where people gather is really this great opportunity. And so when you ask about outcomes, it's a little bit different in each place because it has to take on meaning and value to the people who are doing the work in their community. So, for Elder Bryant, his focus is addressing chronic, really, food related illnesses within the African American community in San Antonio. So talking diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, all those things that we know are our problems directly caused by our food and trying to build and support a culture there that helps people grow and eat healthier foods to directly address that and kind of obviously there's the connections of the school district and then in Savannah it's more about a larger food policy and organization in the communities to support community health and in the schools their focus is literacy and career and college education, career, technical, agricultural education. And so all of the initiatives that they're doing in the schools are connected to supporting those larger district goals so, our outcomes really are around the connectivity piece and supporting the specific outcomes and kind of visions and goals that our communities are bringing to the table themselves.

00:11:58 Rick

And so talking about your goals and things that you're doing now, are you able to reach out to and have your program in all states or are or do you have to be more selective of that you said? Also on your website that you know so far, you've been at a number of schools, and it might be out of date or something about 270 schools, 700 educators. 881,000 students. Where can you go with your program?

00:12:33 Sam Koentopp

Well, so we're in the really interesting place programmatically as an organization. In the past, all of our work really was focused in areas where we had financial support. So a lot of our donor network would raise their hands and say, hey, this is beautiful, amazing work. We'd like to bring it to Miami. We'd like to bring it to Las Vegas, you know, wherever it is that we have those connections. And so we were able. To do the work and connect with the people in those places and bring it to life. We are really excited this year to start creating more of an open process like an RFP process almost where different organizations can work together in their community and say, hey, we have a vision for how we'd like to expand growing food in our community. We think that green would be a great partner. Here's what we would like to present. And so one of the one of the other pieces of our work that we haven't talked about yet, it's called the big Green. Now it's a network of about 200 organizations who have issued grants to them, like have opened up grants and they have recruited the people in their community who are doing they're doing this work to apply and then the community of people who have already been granted are the ones who vote on and decide how those grant dollars for the each grant round will be spent. So you know that every time there's a new grant round the community grows because the first 2-3 groups, organizations, groups of organizations that came into the Dow were the ones who then promoted and decided who would be granted in the next round and then that larger group then did the same thing in the next round? And so now we're at this point where we have this amazing like collaboration, this amazing relationship with organizations all around the country doing grassroots work and food, and for us to be able to make some deep connections between our programmatic work in schools and homes and in communities with this network of organizations that are really doing this work in all the places around the country and try to find those connections and build on those relationships to be able to better resource everybody to be able to help connect the dots where maybe people were focused in one way and hadn't had chances to do some new partnership work in ways that you know would connect with Big Green. All those opportunities are gonna be starting to open up for us so.

Some that's some work we're doing now to be able to really dig into and launch this fall.

00:15:17 Rick

OK, thanks for sharing that, Sam.

00:15:19 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. So we're not in 50 states yet, but you know that I think long term that's something that we'd like to continue to expand and grow towards.

00:15:27 Michelle

Hey Sam, one of the things we run into with school gardens and we hear about this is called three-year love bubble. Basically, people get so excited about starting it and they get going. There's a lot of momentum and about after three years they move on or there's something else. And I'm just wondering, I'm wondering what your experience is with the long term longevity or sustainability of the different growing spaces or like what your what your thoughts are around that?

00:15:43 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. I mean, long term sustainability is, I mean definitely the like one of the big challenges in the school environment schools are just so fluid. There's teacher turnover, there's administrator turnover, there's turnover and district leadership. It's a very high stress, high pressure job. Like, you know, we've already talked about that. So you know that like that like honeymoon phase in the garden, it can get tiring and overwhelming for one person as they're just trying to do too many things and keep them going and also people can leave and so to address that our school program model really relies heavily on strong partnerships with school districts and the buy in and support from the leadership team. And that's, you know, for instance the, you know, department of teaching and learning identifying. We have gardens at a third of our the schools in our district or half of the schools in our district. We are going to intentionally create opportunities for schools to use these gardens in similar ways and support them in ways that align with our goals. That way, whenever there's change that's happening at the school, there's an understanding that like in 3rd grade in their science unit, at this time of year, everyone is using the garden in 8th grade. As part of this unit, everybody is using the garden and it's something that's looked forward to. It's built into the systems and the structures of the of the district. So really, whenever we're working in a new place, we, the one of our top priorities, is building that relationship with the school district, understanding what their goals are and helping to support them, to start to build in some of those systems to support long term sustainability of the gardens. That can also happen with a nonprofit organization as well, who has, like, a school garden support organization who has a very deep relationship with the school district, they're with a large network of schools and they're kind of taking on network on behalf of the district. But either way, there has to be some systems, some strong systems in place to build that sustainability and then you know, of course in the nonprofit side of things, burnout and overwhelming lack of funding and kind of all of those things are always pressure on all of us. So that's something we also like. We have an event every year, we call it the annual where we bring organizations together and kind of programming built on that to support capacity building and just care in the Community so that we're not just providing funding, but we're also kind of building a foundation of support and connectivity to help us get through some of those more challenging issues that just come with like digging in and fighting for your passion every day.

00:18:43 Michelle

I really appreciate that because that is where it comes from too. Is every piece of the system of sustainability, human sustainability, individual community. It seems like you're really intentionally working on all those different levels.

00:19:00 Sam Koentopp

Yeah, I mean, right, you don't have to do this work for that long to see where the struggles are, right? You don't need a ton of a ton of research to just see this is this is how the systems are operating and where some of the challenges are. And so yeah, definitely we put our attention on making things easier and making things better for people so that we can continue to do this work together.

00:19:21 Michelle

And one of the things I've noticed that's so different about you too is that scale. So I mean you at the beginning of this podcast said Ohh, we put in 200 school gardens in. Like, yeah, that's a lot. That's like working at that scale. And so what's some thinking behind why 200 and not 2?

00:19:43 Sam Koentopp

Well, I mean, you kind of just said it. If we're gonna be making, if we're gonna be making changes.

00:19:48 Michelle

I spent my life researching school gardens.

00:19:52 Sam Koentopp

Yeah. No. Like we're making changes. I've already been talking about in our conversation about culture. Culture isn't something that you can shift one person at a time, right? Culture is like a phenomenon, right? It's a movement. It's a it's something that affects whole communities of people, whole cities, of people, whole nations of people. And so we're really trying to think about shifting the culture of food and food access and what food is and how we grow it and what our connection, all of these things that are so powerful and so deep and so meaningful. It's great when that happens. You know, 110, a hundred people at a time. But if we're gonna be addressing some of these larger systemic issues with our food system, we need to address our culture and kind of you know it's almost countercultural, right, because we're what we're what we're pushing back against. Is this industrial food system? That has it causes so many problems. It is the definition of unsustainable on so many levels, and so to be able to push back against something that's that massive, we really need people like the people our people, to have a different understanding of food, to have a different relationship with food. To increase their food literacy to the connections they have with their neighbors around what food is, and that that's that cultural piece isn't something that you can do at a small scale that is only achievable when you're, you know, talking about, you know, half the schools in the district or all the schools in the district, right. Like, let's work towards let's work towards those big numbers where the systems can be put in place to help counteract some of the pressures that we see from, you know the marketing and you know just hugely influential systems that we're currently, you know surrounded by.

00:21:55 Michelle

Sam, Rick and I work on school gardens across the state on a statewide level every day, and hearing you talk about this again just has really reinspired me, so thank you. I really appreciate you making the time to tell your story. And before we go, I wanted to ask you one question because I know you are so passionate about growing food. I was wondering what's your favorite thing?

00:22:16 Sam Koentopp

My favorite thing to grow is something new like right? Like I have a huge garden and I'm always like I'm a seed catalog junkie. So you know, I'm always excited about, like, a new perennial variety of kale or a new I don't know, like variety of calendula that you know I could put into a over. You know what I like? Like, I'm always looking for, like, what is this, this variety that's gonna grow great in my Chicago garden and bring a new flavor to my life.

00:22:56 Rick

Love that, I can appreciate that. I just had a dinner with you a while ago and we had watermelon radishes. And I don't think I've ever seen those before, and it's like, I've so I started growing them in my garden. After that dinner. You know, so…

00:23:10 Sam Koentopp

Ohh totally. It's so hard to pick just one. Ohh my god, there's. Like I love the variety.

00:23:20 Rick

Well, Sam, we want to thank you so much for sharing your story and being our guest today and yeah, thank you so much.

00:23:26 Michelle

Yeah. Thanks Sam.

00:23:29 Sam Koentopp

Thanks to both of you.

00:23:30 Rick

Yeah. And we'd like to thank everybody else for listening today. Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn and was made possible by a grant by the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:23:44 Michelle

The content and ideas of the Farm School podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, or the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA Department of Education and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:23:59 Rick

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information by searching Farm to school podcast, OSU.

00:24:09 Michelle

Yeah. We really want to hear from you. So stop by and give us an idea for a future podcast.

00:24:15 Rick

Thanks, everybody. We'll, we'll be here for the next time you tune in.

00:24:19 Michelle

Thanks again Sam.

00:24:20 Rick

Thanks Sam.

00:24:23 Sam Koentopp

Thanks, bye.