Entrepreneurship

Vocational agriculture teacher Rose Ormsby-Krueger (North Hollywood, California) uses a cut flower garden and farmers’ market enterprise to teach North Hollywood High School students valuable life skills. “Flowers don’t tell you they’re hungry every day, but they tell you they’re thirsty,” she says. “It takes responsibility to make sure they get watered and taken care of.”

A former classroom teacher with a passion for raising healthful food, Arna Caplan was volunteer director of a winning seed-to-table school garden program at an inner city K-8 school in Denver. “The Fairmont garden was always a special and accessible place where all students were welcome and involved,” says Arna. But as in many such projects, finding volunteers to maintain the garden through the summer was a huge challenge.

For nine years, students at Steele Elementary School in Denver have been cultivating, cooking, and consuming chard, carrots and more from their campus garden. Then five years ago, garden manager Andrew Nowak, a chef and volunteer from Slow Food Denver, began to think beyond the fence. “We’d had lots of positive feedback from parents about our gardens and produce.

“When a farm market customer asks for an item, the kids go out and pick it fresh from the garden or greenhouse,” says Jon Thurston, agricultural coordinator at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast, Maine. But selling garden- and greenhouse-raised goods at an after school farm market is just one of the ways students in the school’s ecology academy bring in funds and spread the word about healthy foods and sustainable systems.

“You meet a lot of different people from society all in one place when you sell at a farmers’ market,” says Sam, a young leader in a year-round youth market garden program in Boulder, Colorado. “People seem to come back from week to week to our stand, most know my name, and many want to more know about our program.”