The Hawai’i Island School Garden Network

Have you ever wondered how the next generations will learn about where their food comes from? Or who will teach our kids how to grow their own food? Did you think that perhaps parents and families would teach their children these things? Think again: all evidence demonstrates that over the past century fewer and fewer parents even know where their food comes from or what a healthy diet is, let alone how to grow a backyard vegetable garden.

Although this tragic trend is starting to change in small ways, there is a dedicated group of Hawai’i Island farmer-educators who have thought about these questions for years and not long ago decided to answer them with an idea and program that is innovative, effective, and powerful. It’s called the Hawai’i Island School Garden Network (HISGN).

In 2007 the Omidyar family sponsored a research analysis and report by the Rocky Mountain Institute that recommended expanding school gardens throughout the island as a means to strengthen capacity to grow food locally. The Kohala Center in Waimea, in conjunction with island educators, developed the Hawai’i Island School Garden Network. In September 2007, Nancy Redfeather, a local sustainable farmer, food activist and educator, was hired to direct the network.

Redfeather was uniquely qualified. She had been a public elementary school science teacher for ten years on the mainland in the 1970’s. She had played a leading role in a very successful and innovative hands-on, non-textbook curriculum that integrated science subjects with the “3 R’s.” She had lived in Kona for 30 years where she first owned a native plant nursery. She then taught elementary school and gardening at the Waldorf School in Kainaliu for ten years, and, more recently with her husband, managed an unusually diverse and sustainable small homestead farm. But most of all she was dedicated to developing a wholistic hands-on science, dietary, and gardening education program that would give school kids of any age the well-rounded practical and character-building skills necessary to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world.

It is a challenging task to integrate a whole new hands-on outdoor program into the Hawai’i Department of Education school curriculum. Teachers are overworked, administrators are accountable to rigid state and federal performance standards, students are accustomed to read textbooks while sitting quietly at desks. But in Hawai’i since the late 1990’s a few principals had supported local volunteers and teachers who wanted to bring gardens to the schools. By 2007, of our island’s roughly 75 schools, about 20 already had started gardens. There were a few shining examples, such as Mala’ai, the Culinary Garden of Waimea Middle School and the Pa’auilo school garden program coordinated by Hamakua teacher Donna Mitts. But mostly, to give the HISGN program a running start, Redfeather, along with Uluwehi Van Blarcom and Mitts, went from school to school talking to principals, scoping out possible garden sites, identifying local agricultural resources, recruiting volunteers, figuring out innovative ways to merge the gardening program with the school’s curriculum, and brainstorming funding ideas.

Today, two and-a-half years later, out of Hawai’i Island’s 75 schools (public, charter and private; pre-school through high school), 58 now have school garden programs, with over 3,500 students participating. Although each school’s program is tailored to that school’s particular curriculum and educational philosophy, all subscribe to HISGN's mission:

The goal of the Hawaiʻi Island School Garden Network (HISGN) is to help island schools build gardening and agricultural programs that will significantly contribute to the increased consumption of locally produced food by involving students, their school communities, and their family networks in food production.

In addition, The Rocky Mountain Institute report identified many direct and indirect benefits from the establishment of school garden programs in our island schools. These include

• Giving students basic skills of gardening and farming for a lifelong avocation or career.
• Providing opportunities for hands-on learning about science, ecology and the environment.
• Creating a sense of pride associated with farming and local food.
• Providing a place for exercise, outdoors time, and nutritional education to assist with Hawai’i’s high rate of obesity.
• Providing alternative learning structures where, compared to a conventional classroom setting, some students thrive.
• Create lifelong consumers for locally produced food by giving children direct food-growing experience and by giving them a relationship with fresh local foods. School gardens also teach them to appreciate the reality of the food value chain and to consider the origins of their food. If the students eat what they grow, it gives them a taste for fresh, locally produced food.
• School gardens make locally produced food fun, and that association remains through life. This form of education will have more of an impact than any poster or media education campaign.

Because of the state budget crisis, funding for many of the schools’ garden programs has become more difficult. One of HISGN’s initiatives has been to sponsor free grant writing workshops for the teachers and volunteers leading the programs in each school, and many of the schools have secured year-by-year funding this way. For example, last year 14 school garden programs received grants which served 1,591 students and supported the cultivation of over 4 acres of productive gardens.

Another initiative is designed to implement HISGN's primary objective, which according to Redfeather, is

to create hands-on living laboratories for students to deepen their understanding of the sciences and nutrition, tying social studies, language arts, and math into meaningful activities in an outdoor setting.

This July, in order to address this challenge of merging this outdoor, hands-on type of education into the conventional curriculum, Redfeather has organized a summer Garden Teacher Curriculum Conference in partnership with Hoa ‘Āina O Makaha of West Oahu and the mainland-based Center For Ecoliteracy. The conference brings HISGN garden teachers, volunteers, and classroom teachers together with other Hawai’i garden teachers to examine and discuss established successful models of school garden programs that have been integrated into traditional curriculums.

HISGN is answering the questions we posed at the opening of this article. It is teaching the future generation about the importance of fresh, locally grown food for our health and for our island’s long-term sustainability. For more information, visit the HISGN site.

A listing of all the schools participating in the Hawai’i Island School Garden Network is found here.

Pedro Tama is co-director of The Hawai’i Homegrown Food Network.