Getting Going - Lessons Learned in First Three Years of Community Gardening

February 24, 2025

Benjamin Phillips

More Info

In this session, two community organizers will share their experiences leading grant-funded projects to develop gardening skills in their communities.

Nickole Keith is the food sovereignty coordinator for the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi, with a staff focused on cultural heritage preservation through growing and preparing food.

Ashley Hines, executive director of the Benton Harbor Community Development Corporation, started the Flourish Garden after a community asset mapping project identified the needs for a food sovereignty initiative, blight reduction, and improved social cohesion.

The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/

Video Transcript

Good morning, everybody. I'm still admitting people as they're coming in, but I got most of you at 9:00 here. My name is Ben Phillips. I work with MSU extension and helping putting on a webinar series this week all about vegetables and it's targeting an audience of people who are ranging from beginning gardening to beginning farming up to introducing new enterprises to an existing farm. Let's say you've never grown potatoes before, but you grow a lot of other stuff for market. Well, we're going to have a session on potatoes on Thursday. On Wednesday, we're going to have a session on asparagus and rhubarb, and tomorrow, a session on the vine crops. You know, pumpkins, squash, melons, that kind of thing. Then on Friday, we're going to talk about getting involved with direct sales. If you've not done that before, some tips to get started and some tips also for people who've been doing it a while. Today, however, I've got two special guests that I've worked with over the last couple of years. Nicole Keith from the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi and Ashley Hines from the Benton Harbor Community Development Corporation and both of them have been involved with getting community gardens off the ground within their communities. They're different in some ways and they're similar in some ways. I'm going to let them share what that experience has been like for them and where they're at currently with how they're doing these projects, how they're running them, and how they're going. We're being sponsored this week by AgriStrategies, LLC They help you grow. Well, thank you, Ben, so much for the introduction and also thank you for allowing me space to just speak to your group today. My name is Ashley Hines. As Ben mentioned, I am the Executive Director of the Benton Harbor Community Development Corporation. We do a lot of different things in the city of Benton Harbor. If you're unfamiliar, we are a small southwest Michigan community, waterfront community, predominantly African American, and there's a lot of great development that's happening in the city of Benton Harbor. And what we do at the Benton Harbor CDC is ensure that legacy residents have equity and ownership in the transformation that's happening in the community. And part of our work centers community led development, so projects that are led by the community, driven by the things that we say we want in our community. A lot of times we see that communities are surveyed and incorporated in processes, but the community engagement typically looks like a box of checks. So our responsibility is to ensure that the things that people want to see are actually coming into fruition. The reimagining community was a an asset mapping project that we conducted in our first year where we went around a neighborhood called the Empire Corridor, which has a very strong historical history in our community that traditionally has had this very thriving a commercial district, and now what we see is a bunch of vacant buildings and a liquor store. And so throughout that process, we were able to talk to residents about some of their desires and how we can leverage things that are already existing in that community to make our community better and people. There was this overwhelming desire to have a community garden in the neighborhood, particularly because the city of Benton Harbor does not have a grocery store within its city limits. And so we have to go to township and other areas in order to um, get groceries, get our basic needs met. And so this is this project was in response to that, where we purchased a vacant lot from the county's tax auction and throughout these three years have been stewarding the land in order to cultivate it to grow food for our community. The Flourish Community Garden is, like I said, in the Empire Corridor neighborhood and our main mission is to combat food insecurity and promote food sovereignty. So not just giving people access to food, but also ensuring that they are equipped with the excuse me, knowledge, skill, and resources to ultimately be able to grow their own food for themselves and their families. We also do a lot of work promoting physical and mental health as well. So there are a lot of other groups that use our space for different wellness activities like yoga, therapeutic painting. We do community dinners, which I'll talk a little bit about that later. And in addition to distributing at our current site, we also have open pick where people can come in and pick what they need. We don't sell anything, and then we distribute at the local high school's food pantry. We also have in our second year launched a program called homegrown where we help people start gardens at home, and we provide everything that they would need to essentially start up their garden. And so as you can imagine, there's been a lot of things that we learned throughout these three years, particularly because most of the people who stewarded the effort, we were not community gardeners. We were not farmers or growers. Personally, my experience with just growing anything that was limited to houseplants, there was a lot of learning that needed to go into what we do. The first thing was soil testing, just basic knowledge about how to test the soil. I didn't even know that that was a thing until I was on a call with someone and they mentioned, did you test the soil? Growing up, my dad, he grew things a lot. He always had a farm. And he had a small garden at his house, but then grew at a on a farm that he owned as well. And so he's very Southern and very old school. So he didn't do soil testing, right? And so that was something that was new to me. Also, just knowing crop rotation and things that you can't grow consecutive consecutively in various years and things of that nature. Till or no till till of the of the soil, I love to till. I feel like it makes the soil look so great, it makes things a lot easier. And then as we start to continue throughout the years and talking to other experts who may know a little bit more about it, just kind of um being open minded to other ways in which we could preserve our soil, and then protecting our crops. That was a big one for us in our first year because we had what I thought at the time to be this really beautiful garden, and I started noticing that our leafy greens like the collards and mustard greens and cabbages, they were getting holes in them. Although they were growing, they were getting damaged and I didn't know why. However, I noticed moths or butterflies. Um you know, just kind of fluttering throughout our garden space, and I just attribute it to it being the good energy that is in our space, right? And then we hosted a garden party and someone mentioned, Oh, you guys have cabbage moss. And it was like a light bulb moment where I realized that that was what was eating our crops. So definitely something that we've been able to implement throughout the years is better protective measures for the things that were growing, and then also knowing that even when you're protected, there's always going to be another thing that you have to combat next. So just being able to anticipate those things. Also, knowing when to ask for help. Like I said, most of the people who are in the neighborhood, we didn't have a lot of experience with community gardening. And so just being able to ask people who are more familiar and also using Google, there are a lot of times where I'm at the garden and if I don't know how to plant certain things as far as spacing or how deep a seat needs to be, I'll just Google it. Then the last lesson, I guess not the last lesson, but one of the last lessons as far as growing is just add water, you know, not having a lot of knowledge when we started, I realized very quickly that if you put a seed in the ground and you water it, it will grow. And obviously, there are a lot of other things that we can do to what we produce better. But just having that very basic standard of putting something in soil and taking care of it and nurturing it with water, you're going to see something produced from that and you can make commitments from there. And so we are a community garden and part of our work, it goes beyond just growing food, right? We want to build community's affinity to the things that we're doing and ensuring that we are properly responding to their needs. And so our lesson two that I've learned is to move at the speed of the community, ensuring that the work that we do always centers the community needs and their aspirations for what they would like to see. Um, and then start where you are. When we first launched the community garden, or at least had this concept of starting a community garden because there wasn't a grocery store, we had thought about starting a CSA, a community supported agriculture program, and we had to very quickly realize that it's okay to start small. First of all, we didn't have the community affinity to our garden space to be able to man a project of that capacity, but also we didn't have the knowledge to do that. And so we've been able to grow and support a lot of families on our one vacant lot in the community, and that's been really great. And since our first year, we have been able to scale in the things that we're producing and maybe one day we will see a CSA program, but we really have to honor where the community was and their knowledge and even interest in running a CSA program. Another thing about starting where you are is in our first year, we didn't even have a water source at our garden, but we didn't let that deter us. And so we would bring over buckets of water or barrels of water and fill buckets to water each plant because we didn't have a water source. We we now have a water source and also irrigation system. But our first year, we were able to really grow our garden and the support for our garden without even having an on site water source. So that was really great. Lesson three is to build community. In our first year, because of the assignment around our garden, which was unexpected for me, we were able to get all of our seedlings and anything we needed for the garden for free. And some of the things that we did to build community around the garden was to spread the word about what we were doing. So using social media, canvassing around the local neighborhood. It's also really helpful because you take a blighted and vacant lot and you clean it up. People as they drive by, they're also able to see the progress that was happening. And so that was a great way in which we were able to build community around the garden as well. We also did a press release which opened us up to a lot of other network of people that wouldn't have known that we were on the 800 block of Broadway in Benton Harbor. So using the power of social media and various news outlets, we've been able to connect with organizations like the MSU Extension Office, who invited us here today. The Harris Family Farm Foundation, which then connected us to a group of local farmers who, as they have extra produce, to distribute or even seedlings from different various sales that they may have, they donate every year to our garden. And so we have now started to start our own seeds, but even if we didn't do that, we would still have enough resources to be able to run our garden. We've also get a lot of things donated from community members and local stores like Home Depot. We recently got a huge seed donation from Home Depot now that has allowed us to grow another program through our garden, which would be a seed library that's launching this week. A lot of our volunteer groups come from the power of word of mouth. We have groups that visit us weekly throughout the summer, including Youth Works, which they are out of town organizations youth groups that come in to volunteer weekly at our garden. We've also been able to connect with various food experts through the power of a press release who saw a story about our garden a couple of years ago, and now as of last week, we were able to launch a program with them called the Savory Collective, which is an incubator for food entrepreneurs in the community. Just using that power of community to grow beyond what we are able to do on our city lot. Another thing that we do is connect with other gardens. That has been able to open an avenue of resource sharing as well and being able to leverage our community influence and affinity to be able to spread to other gardens as well. We've been able to host various events in conjunction with them, such as community garden tours and things of that nature. A Lesson four was volunteers are important. It takes a lot to run a community garden, and that is why it's super important to ensure that before you actually go about starting the garden, it is something that the community says that it wants and wants to be a part of. There's a lot of work, like I said, that goes into the day to day operations. So building a proper network of volunteers to support that is important. Additionally, equally important knowing how you want people to help. What type of help, what type of task, even beyond the actual physical garden site that you can use volunteers to help you build capacity and has been very helpful because a lot of times when you're busy running the garden and other programming and people ask you how to help, if you don't know offhand, it's hard to pull those people in your network. That's something that I really strongly suggest is that have some type of list where you can be able to point people to as far as things that you need assistance with. Or even if it's just a mental list that you keep yourself, and then make time to build the volunteer infrastructure, knowing when you meet or when we volunteer groups, how often these groups will take place, and how people sign up. I find that automating these things, particularly volunteer sign ups has been really great as far as capacity because you don't have to take the time to do things on your own. So we have a website where we're able to direct people to to actually sign up and then spearhead communication from there. Lesson five, be open minded. As we have grown in our knowledge, I think we're still pretty novice, but we're learning more and more every day. But we also want to be careful not to assume that the community is developing that same knowledge, particularly the people who don't interact with the garden every day or who are not regular volunteers. We've had certain incidents where maybe a crop is damaged because people harvested while we weren't on site and may have not know how to properly harvest things and just being patient with the community as you're navigating some of those things. And some of the things that we've done to combat that is to use signage. To be able to show people how to properly harvest things, whether you are writing it out to tell them or using a QR code that leads to a video that shows how to harvest collard greens. That was the plant in particular that was just completely cut off, multiple. Just being able to be patient with the community in order to get them to understand in a way that would allow them to better respect the space, and also providing educational opportunities so that people can be a part of the garden and learn by doing. Um. Another thing is be inclusive and open to change. You know, we have been operating our garden for a couple of years, and we had a community member who volunteered often at the garden, and she has a brother who is wheelchair bound, and they would do these really funny Facebook videos at the garden. And in watching them, I noticed that he couldn't interact with the garden at all. And that was, you know, this another light bulb moment for me because and thinking that we were including everybody in the community, it made me realize that we were not being considerate of that because he couldn't interact with our space. And this past summer, we were able to do a garden redesign project where we added the pathways that you see in this picture here that leads to pathways along the side where we have higher garden beds that will allow for wheelchair accommodations or people who may need to stand. Just being able to adjust as needed. Then the last thing is listening to feedback of As we've scaled and grown in our work, we've added different things to our garden. Particularly, one of the things that I really love is our irrigation system because we started with watering by buckets, and then we had a water source and that allowed us to use water holes, but it would get so hot in the summer doing that. And so we were able to implement an irrigation system, drip irrigation, and then One of our members noted that watering was her peace. It was her time that she found peace and was able to step away from her day by stopping by to do that. Still allowing space for people to be excuse me, be able to get the things that they need from the garden as you become more innovative or grow and have different resources like remembering why you exist. For me, it's a lot easier because we get to streamline that task. But some people do like some of those more tedious tasks and that's okay too. Lesson six is to be a hub. One of the things that I really enjoy about Flourish is that with the environment that it's in, it really feels it still feels like home. If it's a safe space for people in the community to come and they know that their needs are going to be met. We do that through several things, just having community events such as dinners. We have a dinner series called communion, which is pop up dinners that we have we invite residents out to talk about different topics that matter to them or maybe there's something that's happening in the community that we want to be able to bring awareness to. And so we use the dinner as a means of coming together for communion in order to talk about those things. We also do a seed starting workshop within where we work with residents to start their seeds for the upcoming season. Like I mentioned earlier, various wellness activities like yoga, therapeutic painting, meditation, things of that nature. And just again, creating a space where people feel like their needs are met. And as we continue to grow, being able to include the community in that process, You'll see in one of the latter slides, the project that we did do to at the pergola last year, along with the walking path, we partnered with our summer camp and brought our kids along. We had a two week summer camp where we partnered with the local school of architecture to teach our kids about basic design principles as it relates to community and economic development. They were able to participate in the design field project in that second week that included laying the foundation for the pathways and building the pergola on our site. And that picture is in the background. Heavily led by young girls, by the way. And then Lesson seven is access to funding, just being able to leverage the power of what you're doing and collecting the correct data in order to provide more opportunities and bring different resources into your community. You might think that what you're doing is small, but to someone else, it is really a big idea, it is really a big deal, the things that you are bringing to your community. I remember when we first started the Community garden and in relation to everything else that we were doing, I didn't I don't think I I had the right vision at first, you know, I didn't I knew that we were doing something important, but I think I thought it was just out of necessity. And so we know that it's important to be able to pool financial resources to your community. I was giving a tour to someone who leads the local foundation and she had asked me if I was applying to this grant that they have that's called the Big Idea grant. I said, for a garden and she said, Yeah, absolutely. This is a big deal. Just being able to know that people see and appreciate the things that you're doing. We later did get that grant opportunity in our community garden. It's probably, you know, we do a lot of work in housing and mentoring. And commercial district revitalization and our garden is probably the program that gets the most consistent funding. I've listed here some places that you can look for funding in the state. MDARD, local foundations, your local health care system, who's been a great partner for us in our research projects as well, and then ensuring that people who just want to give have a place to do that and they know how to do that. These are just some giving platforms that we've used in the past. Donately, Network for Good, and then Facebook, you can set your organization up as a nonprofit if it is a nonprofit. And the last piece of that is just collect data. You're doing some amazing things and just being able to showcase and tell your own story is really important. Um, so now going into our first fourth year, there are a lot of great things that are happening. We've since been able to purchase the home that sits next to our community garden that was blighted, fire damaged. And we have begun the rehab of that, have replaced the exterior, the siding, roof and things of that nature, and that will serve as a community resilience hub offering after school tutoring, cooking classes, meeting space for other organizations that may need better access to the community, increased access to other services. So if there are another grassroot organization that may be wanting to reach the local community, allowing them space to set up as a hub as well throughout the day and a business center allowing for printer access, computer access, things of that nature. We are also working with the School of Architecture at Andrews University to build an accessory kitchen to our garden space. In addition to washing and prep, it'll allow us to better store food on site and allow for different classes like canning and dehydration. That project is currently underway and the kitchen should be finished in the spring, but it'll be separate from the house. And then we'll also be launching a second site for Flourish. And so thank you again, Ben, for your time, for allowing the space to speak to everyone today. And I know we're going to do questions. Do you want to do that now or after Nicole speaks? Well, we do have one from Tina and she asked, What website do you use for volunteer sign ups? So we have it embedded in our actual website for the Benton Harbor CDC. And so on the web page, we're able to have a form where people can submit their name, address, basic contact information, and which program they want to volunteer for, the best time of day that they are available, things like that, and then some of their skill sets that they want to offer. Is it just like a Google survey that you've got embedded in the website? You can do a Google survey. We've done that for different things as well, but it's an actual form that's a widget option for the website that we use. Okay. You had another comment. The Greater Lansing Food Bank loved those girls in the picture leading up that volunteer project. Oh, awesome. Yeah. It's so funny to see how their attitude shifts as the weeks progress because they come in, like, Oh, I don't want to do anything. And then when it's time to get on site, they're not afraid to dig in holes and get dirty and it was really great to see. That's awesome. Thank you, Ashley. Let's move on to Nicole. Okay. Bozho, my name is Nicole Keith. I am a tribal member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, and I am the Food Sovereignty Coordinator. I've been in this position about four years. We received this grant, this particular grant that kind of launched everything about two years prior to my position or for me joining because I used to previously worked for the tribe. I took a year off And then I ended up going out for this position. And then I was at the end of the grant funding, and so I wasn't really guaranteed to continue this job. So I was kind of like in limbo, but it was really successful. The grant originated from the Administration for Native Americans. What we labeled it, what we called it, it was a tribal effort. So, there's things that are in the way of my screen. The Bodewadmi Food and Lifeways Restoration, which means Potawatomi, Bodewadmi. We are one of 12 bands. We are one of 12 federally recognized tribes in Michigan. And then there's 574 tribes. I'm sorry, I meant to do that in my introduction, but there's 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. We are one of those. This was a 36 month project. We were adapting and enhancing the five current NHBP programs. We are I don't know if everybody knows where our tribe is, so this is the Michigan Palm. We're at the bottom. We're in Athens 20 miles south of Battle Creek, between M60 and 66, if you guys know where that is. So what we did have was our community garden. We had cultural workshops, we had a lunch and learn that's been going on for over 15 years. We had ricing which has been going on since the beginning of our tribe. We always been into Sugarbush, which is maple syrup and then we had a tribal youth program that meets about two to three times a week. They do various activities. And so our job was just to enhance those lessons. And then we introduced four new programs, which is the Indigenous Lifeways Apprenticeship Program. And those individuals are Potawatomi are from a neighboring tribe, and they are basically experts in a field, such as cooking, foraging, hunting, fishing. And then we have the NHBP Food Pantry, which is we have a church on a reservation. Our current reservation, our original reservation was 120 acres and now we're up to over 1,000 acres, including our casino, which is Fire Keepers Casino, which is separate from our reservation, but is still considered a That's a whole other lesson. Then we have the Garden Container project, which I'm going to talk about even more in the cooking video series. So at the end of the grant, I was for the last year and I was basically directed to do a whole bunch of different deliverables because of When we got this grant, we were in the middle of COVID and so a lot of things a lot of the deliverables were not basically delivered. And so it was my job to finish it up and we were still in the middle of being quarantined, not being quarantined, coming back to work. I was just trying to figure out, okay, how am I going to get this done? And so we had previously launched because I was on the task force prior to my position, we had previously launched the NHBP Food Sovereignty and you guys are all welcome to join that. It's NHBP Food Sovereignty on Facebook. And that kind of tells our story from about it's been in the works for about five years. And it I mean, I'm like, on a roller coaster with this. I myself never been a gardener. We had a family I'm kind of like Ashley, kind of in Ashley's boat, kind of, um, This was all new to me. I work with the kids. I work with the elders for our tribe and we did a little bit of everything. My main job was to kind of get them for the elders, get them out of the house, have fun, do different things. We we visited botanical gardens, we visited farms, we did outdoor activities, and with the kids, it was the same thing. But never nothing like really having a garden. We have an environmental department that kind of takes care of that kind of aspect, I guess, and nothing that was kind of like our own, I guess. And in this picture, you can see how people started off. And a lot of these were first time gardeners. Even though they're Native American, a lot of us never really gardened. And so I had a ton of money to spend with this grant, and I didn't really know what I was doing and COVID was happening. I couldn't put things in people's hands physically. And so I got on Amazon and I was like, Okay, This is how I'm going to do it. I ended up sending them kits, and then our members live everywhere. We have 1,600 people in our tribe. The history of our tribe, we were forced to relocate out west. A lot of our tribal members are scattered everywhere. I'm talking about Washington, California. I have a list on here. So sent out a garden container survey asked what they wanted to grow. Well, I was like, okay, I got some information from different tribes that had already started this project and I went off of just from what elders wanted to grow. We offered different choices, a tomato garden, a herb garden, three sister traditional garden of corn, green beans, a squash, salsa garden, tomato onion, pepper, cilantro medicine garden, which is our sacred medicines, sage, tobacco, cedar and sweet grass. And we have a form system on our members only page, and they were to fill the members go there and they fill it out, but we didn't get a response. And so using our social media page, we did kind of like a campaign. Okay, so we got these garden containers. Do you want to grow your own garden? And then elders that lived in Michigan could receive a garden bed. So we contracted tribal members to go individually and ask, you know, if they filled out this form, if they wanted to raise garden bed, they would get one. We would build it from scratch and deliver it And like I said, a lot of our members live in North Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, so Nevada even Nevada and Texas. And so on our job form, we asked, you know, where they lived, what kind of garden they wanted. So if they chose a tomato garden, um, If they live in Nevada and if they lived in we listed what kind of house do you live in. And so if you didn't live in a single dwelling house, you lived in a townhouse, we would send you something for your balcony. If you lived in Nevada, we would send a hydroponic system, and those things were sold on Amazon. I I caught a little flak from our elders. They were like, what are you doing? Why would you do that? Why would you send them something from Amazon. But then as I explained to them, I was like, okay, I don't know how long my position is going to be. I'm in here, I'm trying to do the best I can do and COVID is happening, we're shut down sometimes. We're going back to work. And so it was easy and plus having a social media page, I would do a heartfelt letter like, Okay, I'm trying my best. We're doing this. COVID's happening. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Is COVID going to come back? Is something worse going to happen next week? And so everybody like, okay, yeah. So they started sharing their pictures and sharing in first time gardeners, a lot of first time gardeners. And believe it or not, some of the elders were first time gardeners. And then it gradually so we did that for two years, and then Ben came in on the third year and we actually started doing an online class with curriculum that MSU uses and Ben created, I believe. And so the medicine garden has cedar being one of the medicines, that was a tree. And so I'm telling them, like, okay, so if you live in Nevada and you live in an apartment, you can't have cedar. Like, you can't grow the tree there by your house or whatever. And so, like, certain things like that was a little complicated. And three sisters can grow really out of control if you're not able to put that in the ground or you live in a hotter climate like Texas or so explaining that to them. And then, um, you know, these are some of I believe I passed it, but that's where kind of the hydroponic system came in. And there were some other ones that we mailed to them. There was somebody in Washington, DC that lived in a townhouse. We really gave them something really nice and fancy that could sit in their windows because I asked for pictures. And there's some members that I knew that I know of. Like, I've been to their house before, so and so and then we there's members that I don't know. And so having those conversations, I was able to, you know, meet them and talk to them one on one. And so with the third year, this is the example that we sent out this year. And then Ben comes physically comes to us to our lunch and learn where we and that's another program of ours through the Food Sovereignty program, is that introducing our our tribe back to indigenous foods and being sovereign with the land. So with maple syrup, like introducing them different things to use that in vegetables are vegetables that they're not familiar with, like eggplant, how to better educate them using fresh vegetables and for our elders that live out here in rural areas harder to keep vegetables, how to maintain those vegetables, how to freeze those things, how to, um, It's a lot going into our program. This is only one little thing of our program. And then things that have built off of this is along with the Garden Seed Container project, we also had raised we offered the option of raised beds. I think I said that a little bit earlier, but that was such a success in not only for the elders that live out on the reservation. We have about 38 households on a reservation and then everybody is kind of scattered everywhere else. And then we call it for services for direct services. We have a seven county area that we reach. But for this case, we opened it all up to Michigan, which is about 250 elders. And so we were subjected to to actually have 250 elders asking us for raised beds. But I was like, there's just not going to be that many and it ended up being it was a lot. The guys are out for probably at least about a week about no, I'd say about 2.5 weeks delivering raised beds, but they really enjoyed it. They the guys that do this do different woodworking things for our tribe, do different workshops. They do maintenance work on our houses. And so they were familiar with building things, and it everybody enjoyed it, and then that made and they also are members so that they were building that connection with our members and knowing them one on one. And so that made them more comfortable coming to different events too. So everything was like, I don't know. Everything kind of came full circle for us with this garden boxes and a garden container project. With the success of this grant and our tribe, one of the initiatives as a whole for every tribe is to get land back, whether it's buying land back or getting gifted by someone someone or elder people that are in the community that know about your tribe, there are people that actually give gift land back to us or either put us at the top. They ask us first. With this particular parcel, it's a 22 acre parcel that is about 5 minutes from our reservation with the help of and I believe that from our social media presence and people that are active on our page, For some crazy reason, the State of Michigan reached out to us and was like, we got this grant. We're inspired by your farm and everything that's been happening on your social media. But we want to be able to share this with other tribes, but we need one tribe to actually house the grant, to be able to administer all the things, and we chose to house the grant and to administer it to three other tribes. And before we were able to even look at the grant and see what was the logistics of this grant, they said, What do you need? Like, what we see you on social media. What do you need for your farm to make this farm to get it to where it needs to be? And I was like, Well, we have HUD housing. We have different things on our reservation that we were fortunate to buy with casino funding, but at the end of the day, we can't fund everything with that money. And so I was like, we really need a tractor. We really need to get tend to this land and we have volunteers that want to come and just people off the street being on this highway. And so I said, we also need security. We need just different things. And so one of the main things was putting up the sign to know that we have a presence here, that this is our land. That it's part of our initiative is land back. And so we had other social media things that were happening in our community. They were wondering, like, you know, there's conversations going on, like, who owns this land? What is this? And so when we finally put up this sign, I was like, Okay, everything makes sense. This is their land. And so, farmers started donating seeds and, um, our relationship with developed, and we were able to visit other farms. We were able to hire two seasonal positions. We had to restore water at this particular farm and restore electric. And then we are beginning phases of putting in a teaching pavilion and a cooling center. We moved to a small workshop shed there, and it's just been ongoing ever since then. Like I said, the first phase, establishing ownership. And then just figuring out different grants. We do operate off grants, and I'm just going to be honest with you. We believe that the government still owes us, and so we go after grants day in and day out. And one of our garden boxes that is in the front of of the garden was funded by our courts. And so we work directly through our courts. And those individuals that are going through issues with the court system, we also have people that are in rehabilitation, people that are just not, I guess, qualified to a white collar job within our tribe or a corporate type job that is at our Fire Keepers that can come in and basically work the land. And we have a lot of people that list we have a lot of people that take that just want some part of the food sovereignty program. And then our third phase is planting permanent fruit fruit trees. And like Ashley said, I had no idea. Like, I'm more of a painter. I like art. I'm not a gardener, but it just came natural and working previously with the elders of our tribe and knowing some of their health problems came natural what plants that we needed like cherries, cherries, blueberries. Those are both good for diabetes and we have a high risk of diabetes in our tribe had cardiovascular issues, a holest of other issues. But that's kind of how we decide, and then how we decide on putting different trees in our permanent crop or just a regular seasonal crop. And this is how our food sovey Facebook group grew just Be honest and showcasing our members, not only just members of our tribe, but other natives. And there's also MSU folks on there when we did a presentation a while ago where I met Ben and just building those relationships off that social media and you'll be surprised on who you come across and who's interested. I swear everybody is always wanting to help and wanting to volunteer. Like Ashley said, I'm in the middle of trying to figure that out. Usually with members, I just tell them, come on in. But then we have the volunteers from outside where I got to run background checks just to protect our tribe. There are people that just It's it's it's a crazy world. We are a tribe. We are fortunate. We do own a casino, and there's people that just think that they can come here and just get enrolled in our tribe. And there's it's kind of like predatory. So we do have to run background checks. We have to be cautious on who we let in. I and still maintaining and developing relationships at the same time. And Indigenous Lifeway concerns are always at work. We have different ones from different tribes. Usually, they are from Potawatomi tribe. There are different tribes, but we try to keep them within our Potawatomi nation. Some of the things that launched off from this program, the social media impact, one of our indigenous chefs did launch a cookbook. We have different universities reaching out. I will be traveling in a couple of weeks to Auburn in Alabama to do a presentation. We've been we had an award from Harvard, Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana University helped us build a documentary that was released on YouTube about our rice, our wild rice and we launched a YouTube channel trying to put all those videos into one so that it's easier for people to search them. And here's our cooking videos where ANA actually came. ANA is out of Washington DC and just doing a little background underground. They normally do not go to their grand tours project or come to the location. And so we kind of did a whole episode on what our project does and one of the things that launched off from our food sovereignty is an actual cooking group. These are all tribal members. I was formerly a tribal youth program director, and so these are all the kids that I work with, and they all are moms and they live in our community, and they always help out with different events. So it was easy putting this group together, and this is one of the programs that I'm most proud of. In the Nnoshe, they're called Nnoshe, which means maternal aunt. They learn and teach others about food related illnesses and disease that stem from colonization and harm our bodies. Then we develop characters for our social media page. To the left is Dana. She represents the strawberry. Her job was funded out of our court system. She's our cultural resource worker. Not only is she a strawberry, she is a caretaker of our medicines. Then here's our elders, and then we have a cooking group that was formed for our tribal youth program. Nnoshe trains them, and then we also started a six month series for firekeeper chefs to train those guys also. And then this was a pilot program last year with our toddlers. I was really scared of that class. They had knives in their hands, but they really enjoyed it. It was just I don't that's something I would recommend, Ashley. We do have things at Chuabaro. We had their little hats, their little chef hats. They really enjoyed that. That was really nice. And then we for the toddlers that can join at the reservation, we do an online cooking class with our dietitian, and that's really successful. So she sends those ingredients via the mail or either if somebody lives close because we do have three satellite offices. And then one of our main things is visiting farms. We visited Ben's farm, got a lot of ideas, loved his irrigation system. These are all our seasonal workers, Wanda and Katrina. And then another one of our initiatives is bringing all the 12 recognized tribes in Michigan together to recreate our bartering system. Again, there's exchanging seeds and some of the tribes that are farther up north are a little bit more ahead of us. They have a lot more land, a lot more connected lands because some of our land is not always connected. And then coming soon we'll have a tribal strawberry house, and the hoop house will be strictly dedicated to strawberries. And strawberry is one of our medicines, one of our first foods that we introduced to our babies along with our ceremonial some of our ceremonial foods. I Then here's some of the links, NHBP Food Sovereignty page. We have, I believe, three videos on PBS. And then all of our other ones are housed on the YouTube page. But thank you, Ben. All right. Fantastic. Thank you, Nicole. Folks, if you have any questions, I welcome them to both Ashley and Nicole at this point. You can see how their programs have a lot of tie ins, but also how different they are and perhaps you're leading something up and you're at a level like them where you're coordinating stuff and you've got coordinator level questions. These two gals have got a lot under their belt now. I welcome your questions. You can unmute or put it in the chat. I also wanted to create space for one of the attendees named Julie Lehman from the Greater Lansing Food Bank Project and Garden Project. She's going to put something in the chat about services that they might have available if you're here looking for information for getting things started yourself. Ashley, there's a chat that asks, what did your soil test tell you? Did you test for heavy metals? We did. I know someone was asking for our volunteer link as well, but you can send your sample through the local extension office to get tested. There's also a really great kit that I feel is pretty effective that we've been able to get from ordering online where it'll test for different things that are in the soil and let you know what type of amendments you need to add. I can see if if I can find a link to it and drop it in the chat really quickly. Cool. Do you have more to answer on that, Ashley, or can I move to another question while you do the chat? You can move to another question. Okay. So here's a question for Nicole. Do you still coordinate with other tribes? If so, do you see more grants by doing this? Yes. That last slide, I believe it's been a year. We have met three times, all 12 tribes. I think we're missing one tribe I always call it the laka seiver tribe, the Lac Vieux tribe up in the UP. They were the only ones that didn't coordinate with us, but that has opened up different grant opportunities that other people are using or other tribes are using. Great. More questions for you, Nicole. Would you be willing to speak to how non native folks can do good relationship building with the tribes or tribal projects in a way that minimizes burden on the tribe and in a way that is reciprocal? Yes. If you'd like to email me or ask that way, that's fine. That's some of the initiatives that we do as a department to educate on how to approach tribes. So the chat is pretty hot right now. I'm trying to keep up. Another question for you, Nicole, can non natives volunteer? That's where we run the background checks. You have to do a background check. Okay. And we have our own police department, we have our own court department, so it will be a thorough background check. All right. Here's a question for both of you. Do you have one main coordinator in your programs, or are areas divided up and led by multiple people? So, Nicole, why don't you take this one first and then Ashley? So we have a task force. I'm the main coordinator, but we do have an environmental department which takes care of the water and the science part of everything. And then we have a conservation team, which is a team of police officers that kind of patrol our land, and they take care of the hunting, the fishing, the permits for those things. And then we also have wild rice that needs to be protected that just got recognized by the state as a state green. And so we're taking that to a new level with permit systems and just basically protecting our wild rice. And how about you, Ashley? It's a very loaded question. So we have luckily been able to grow in capacity to where we now have people leading different efforts. But we started off as a completely volunteer led initiative. I was actually I'm born and raised in Benton Harbor, and the CDC was something that I started when I was living in Baltimore, Maryland. That's where I went to school, but my career and just kind of stayed, but just had this longing, desire to move back home and do this work. And so when we launched, we didn't really have the luxury of you know, applying for a grant because in this area, you kind of have to show and prove first, especially with a lot of the longstanding foundations, you know, we just had to do. And so we were completely volunteer driven. And throughout this time, we've been able to scale in capacity where we have been able to hire people to maybe run our mentoring program. We have a home buyer education and counseling program as well and some other things that we do. But day to day, it looks like me wearing a lot of the hats. And so if we we're talking about lessons to learn when running a nonprofit, that would be a whole other list of lessons. But But we are anticipating some funding this year that would help scale our garden operations. Right now, I'm the person who manages our groups and kind of spearheads the work that's happening at the garden. But we're hoping by the end of the fiscal year that we'll have some funds that we'll be able to hire a food system coordinator. That's awesome. Tina Guajardo had not so much a question, but a call out to the chat for anyone in the region to let them know at the Bronson Healthcare in Southwest Michigan, they're starting a community garden with the North Side Association of Community Development in Kalamazoo and they're looking to hire a community garden consultant. Something like what you're thinking to do, actually, getting someone in a position to have decision making power over this part of probably a much larger thing. That's smart, Tina. Good. I'm glad you're looking for somebody. Maybe people in this chat would know and can pass it on. Thanks for putting your email in, Ashley and also Nicole for putting your email in. I think that would be the quickest way to get there's some questions I've been seeing about wanting copies of the presentation or getting a copy of the form Ashley uses for volunteer management. I think the best way to get exactly what you need would be to email Ashley or Nicole directly. I don't have immediate access to these things and their creations, please reach out to them directly for that kind of stuff. One other question for you, Nicole. Chris is wondering, since you have an art background, are you growing willows for basketry? No, not at this time, but the artist, I am a painter. And so one of the things that I'm looking into is natural paints. And then we also do clay. I'm a little bit of everything, but no, I haven't. We have specific families that do our basketry that we go to. But historically, we use birch, which is hard to come by in this area. And so that's where we depend on our sister tribes because they're not able to flourish in our area because of the I forgot what it is. Is it the beetle? Do you guys know? With the birch trees, I think I think they just don't really like it down south here very much. Yeah. So we do grow cedars and then we do have an artist that uses pine needles. So I haven't done anything with willows. Okay. Great. I had a question for Ashley, going back to your presentation in the section about funding, you said that you should be collecting data because it helps for funding. What kind of data do you recommend people start keeping tabs of if they're hoping to go for a grant? So I would obviously suggest being able to track as much as possible. It can get very difficult, but how much you are distributing or I guess where and who you're distributing to, like the number of people. We have an open pick concept, so it is a little difficult to manage that at times. But we also track how much we are growing, we have a scale where we weigh things and being able to track the pounds of food that we're distributing. And then The other things will be based on your actual program needs, or the aspiration for your garden. We have a really strong wellness component for what we do. Incorporating participant surveys to actually track, track, people's mental health progress or their ability to develop frustration tolerance, things like that. We'll gauge that through survey data. And then one of the things that we like to implement this year is because we have this strong emphasis on being able to promote a food sovereign community, tracking people's grocery bills, or their grocery spending. That was something that we knew about prior to this, but being able to gauge if people are actually saving money. I think so. I know I save a lot, but being able to put a number on that, it's going to be helpful for us. Wow, that's quite an endeavor, that last part there. It's really powerful information. The questions have slowed down. I think we hit them all. I don't see any lingering ones. I would just really like to thank you, Ashley, and Nicole, for joining us today. I think people got a lot out of it. You did a great job, and I wish you all a great season to come. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us.

MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With