The Food Ed Coalition Spotlight Series highlights people and organizations doing amazing work in food education and access in NYC. Find more from the series on the Food Ed Hub.
Interview with Kathy Park Price, Founder, and Betty Feibusch, Co-Leader at Garden Train. Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about Garden Train: What led you to start the organization and why?
Kathy: We launched in November 2017 with the eye to advance school gardens and all of the values that come with school gardens as being critical, hands-on, outdoor classrooms for all subjects including food and food education and nutrition in all grades. We felt that there was an opportunity to uplift school gardens… They are often outside of the school building and are a living link between the community and schools. In 2017, with the support and partnership of the district superintendent, our elected officials, and community partners, such as the Old Stone House in the district, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, we launched the school gardens network. We have hosted workshops on subjects including grant writing and finding grants, food education, and really a range of subjects that support school gardens and food and nutrition education.
What impact, skills, behaviors, or knowledge do you hope Garden Train offers to the community?
Kathy: We started out as a district-level network to support school gardens and we continue to do that but during and after COVID, our perspective on the work definitely shifted. One big reason was that there weren’t school gardens to advocate for because schools were shut down, but we also shifted to advocating for outdoor learning because there was that direct connection to public health and school gardens which are primarily outdoors. We shifted into an advocacy space for outdoor learning because it overlapped with our values around being outdoors and being connected to the environment, as well as all of the benefits of utilizing the outdoor spaces that we have. Something else that came up during COVID is that we need to properly invest in our school gardens and food and nutrition education rather than leaving it up to volunteer organizations like ours, which in fact feed inequities. As wonderful as groups like ours are, schools should not only have to rely on people like us to fill in areas of critical need. If we value food and nutrition education, which is connected to climate, to the environment, to so many social justice issues, then we need to call on our leaders–school leaders, our elected leaders–to invest systematically in programs. We shifted to a more advocacy perspective during COVID realizing we could do even more in that role. For example Betty led an effort to call on Mayor Adams to create a school gardens task force so that we could look at and prioritize a Prek-12 curriculum that involves school gardens. Something we looked at as a model and potential template is the Civics for All program from the NYC Department of Education, and that’s something that teachers can pick and choose from depending on the age, the grade, the interest, and so as we shifted during COVID our scope became more about systematic investment and advocacy.
If we value food and nutrition education, which is connected to climate, to the environment, to so many social justice issues, then we need to call on our leaders–school leaders, our elected leaders–to invest systematically" -Kathy
Tell us about one of your favorite Garden Train lessons or program activities and why it’s your favorite?
Kathy: There’s two things I’d like to talk about, one is our School Gardens Crawl and the other is the Garden Train Tool Lending Library. The School Gardens Crawl idea was that school gardens in the district could participate in a day when they opened up the gates to the community, offered programming, and offered tours of the school gardens. [It was] one day of the year when anyone could go in and learn more about the school garden that they might pass every day on their way to work or just as a neighbor passing by. That was really successful in that it was literally opening up the gates to our schools, which are not just buildings on a block but parts of a community, and to connect and to grow community through that process and to highlight the importance of school gardens in a way that you don’t usually hear about. With the media coverage that ensued, there was a way to promote the values and benefits of school gardens. That also represented one of the core values of Garden Train, which is connecting schools to each other and to the community. We did that for three years before COVID and we will evolve and see how it shapes moving forward.
The other project I wanted to mention was the Garden Train Tool Lending Library, which also reflects the values of Garden Train in a physical way through a free library that’s available to any of the public school gardens in the area to help grow their school gardens and address some of those equity issues we were talking about earlier. If a school does not have access to the funding and the tools you would need, the lending library is that resource. Schools don’t always need to have 10 wheelbarrows or leaf blowers year round, so it’s a way to be more sustainable by having that sharing economy set up so that we’ve gathered our resources together as a collective. That project was funded by our former councilmember Brad Lander in partnership with the Old Stone House which is in the middle of the school district, and it also reflects our partnerships within the community and within the district which are so important. We are definitely not doing this work alone, so having actual real estate in the district and having the financial ability to create something like a physical shed with a system for checking out tools all came together because of our partnerships.
Some of the work is in the soil, in the ground, growing vegetables, and the rest is growing a contingent of people that are passionate about this work" -Betty
How can people support your work right now?
Betty: The primary thing for people who haven’t heard about us and want to find out more is to sign up for our newsletter. We anticipate in this budget cycle a lot of advocacy work with our electeds. We have electeds who are very interested in climate change and the ramifications of climate change, so school gardens fit into that. The idea of who owns all the roofs of the schools, and how do we get more green roofs and school gardens up there? There are so many issues: the equity issues come up, schools that have parents who have the time to participate, have skills in grant writing, and have organizational skills, connections, and networking. They’re able to do that in their schools and the gardens flourish… We think that this is a very fertile time for this type of advocacy and we’ll be posting on our social media if there are petitions to sign, meetings and hearings to go to, etc. So some of the work is in the soil, in the ground, growing vegetables, and the rest is growing a contingent of people that are passionate about this work.
Who is one of your food (s)heroes right now?
Betty: I love Alice Waters. Through Garden Train, I was able to get a grant to go with some other members of Garden Train, [including] teachers from other schools, to the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley where we had this unique and wonderful opportunity to be part of the garden classroom, the kitchen classroom, and the conversations about the food system and racism and all of the different aspects. Not only did [Waters] create her restaurants and cookbooks but she has been a remarkable advocate…creating a structure to invite educators from all over the world every year to partake of the information and the model. And then she has loads of lessons and resources online! And beyond that, she’s creating this nation-wide interest in universal school lunches, that every child not only has a right to a lunch but that the lunch should be delicious. When we went to Berkeley we actually saw the prep kitchen where they cook the meals for the whole school district. Now I know it would take a lot to scale up in New York City, but the fact that these children have meals that are prepared for them with healthy, local food, that is the essence of nutrition education because those children, not only are they well fed, but they are learning through the experience.
Learn more about Garden Train:
Sign up for the Garden Train Newsletter
Check out the Garden Train Tool Lending Library
Follow Garden Train on social media