About Us

Cultivating connections

Youth thrive and producers prosper when we grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools and at home.

Being connected to local foods is less about distance, and more about relationships. It is about being connected to place and the passion people have for sharing the products they grow, gather, hunt, raise, catch, or make.

Plus, research shows that growing, cooking, and eating healthy foods with kids leads to a whole lot of good things — from health and academics to civic engagement and well-being.

Rootopia is a branded category solution for school garden programs created by Michelle Markesteyn, OSU Extension Farm to School Specialist and incubated by the OSU’s Advantage Accelerator team.

Photo: Joelle Chizmar

Creating characters

For youth by youth

From five years of field observations and focus groups, we know that many middle schoolers aren’t interested in gardening, claiming “gardening is for little girls.” Our content analysis of marketing materials and garden-related products backs up these findings. Much of the marketing is for Pre-K and lower elementary students, and that can alienate slightly older kids.

We facilitated a youth-led iterative process with engaged partners to develop 44 uplifting and botanically accurate Rootopia characters. We engaged youth and did our research at each step:

Engaged a youth artist for 5 years to create illustrations.
Trained youth to conduct focus groups with youth to get feedback on characters.
Reviewed taxonomies of eyes, mouths and noses across different races and ethnicities.
Facilitated multi-year iterative reviews with youth, educators and 50+ engaged partners nationally.
Conducted cross-disciplinary literature review on facial perceptions from biology, communications, marketing, psychology and neuroscience.
Piloted characters on seed packets in ES Meals and OSU Project PLANT home-gardening kits.

Currently, we work with OSU’s Advantage Accelerator program to create a robust and successful growth strategy for decades to come!

Explore Rootopia

Developing gardening tools

This binder ruler can be used as a seed-planting hoe!

Photo: Stephanie Russell

All adult gardening tools are designed for adult bodies. Adolescents in grades 3-8 want gardening tools that work for them.

Co-created by youth, Rootopia developed physical tools – from fun garden tags to the School Garden Binder Dibble. Then couple these tools with edutainment (books and videos).

Photo: Joelle Chizmar

Interested in hearing more?

Partners and collaborators make the Rootopia magic. Do you want to work with us? We want to hear from you!

Let's connect!

Partners

We grow better together. We are so appreciative of our many friends including:

Oregon Department of Agriculture - Amy Gilroy
Oregon Department of Education - Rick Sherman
Oregon Farm to School & School Garden Network - Melina Barker
FoodCorps - Aaron Poplack
Ecotrust - Angela Hedstrom
Oregon Dairy and Nutrition Council - Crista Hawkins
Oregon Beef Council - Will Wise
Oregon Potato Commission - Gary Roth and Marcy Parker
and so many more. Thank you!

Seeded by

OSU Accelerate
Prototype Development Lab at OSU
Oregon Healthy Schools
Oregon Harvest for Schools
OSU Food Hero

OSU Extension Service

Rootopia