Changing the World by Being the Change at Home - Part 1

Join Rick as he visits with the co-founders Ciara Byrne and Kim MacQuarrie of "Green Our Planet," a non-profit based in Las Vegas, Nevada that uses school garden and hydroponic STEM programs that teach students about sustainability and financial literacy.  They have an amazing story of how they transformed what did as successful videographers to end up creating this nonprofit to better their part of the Southwest.. and the country! 

This is part one of a two-part episode. 

Transcript

Changing the World by Being the Change at Home, Part one

Transcript

00:00:02 Rick

Hi everybody, if you're a regular listener you've realized this is a different opening to our show. We're doing something a little bit different for the next couple episodes.  This episode is entitled Changing the world by being the change where I interview two very special guests: Kim MacQuarrie and  Ciara Byrne of Green, our planet in Las Vegas, NV. This is part one of a two-part series.  So here we go.

00:00:43 Rick

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local food and schools.

00:00:53 Michelle

Where your host, Michelle Markesteyn.

00:00:55 Rick

Stein. And I'm Rick Sherman. We are farm to school coordinators.

00:00:58 Rick

To the state of Oregon.

00:01:00 Michelle

And this week we have another special episode of Rick being on assignment.

00:01:06 Rick

We did. I was as if you heard the last episode. We talked to some amazing elementary age kids in Summerlin, Nevada at the world's largest student farmers’ market and yeah, we talked about that was the brainchild of a nonprofit called Green our Planet. Well, today I'm going to interview the Co-founders and the executive directors of Green our Planet and that is Kim McQuarrie and his wife, Ciara Byrne. Ohh, and this it just it was probably my favorite episode to record first of all.

00:01:42 Michelle

Amazing.

00:01:50 Rick

They're professional videographers and…. when you interview a professional person who's very well versed with the microphone, you just have to sit back and let them go. They would take over and go well. Kim, what did you think about this? And you know, and it was. It's just what really wonderful.  But they have such an amazing story. They worked for years doing professional videographer things like, I'll put it this on the show notes, but they have IMDb pages, which is Internet movie database pages. That's where anyone like actors or movies has write ups on them.

00:02:31 Michelle

You don't. You don't have one yet.

00:02:33 Rick

No, I don't. I we probably should do that for our farm to school videos. But Ciara and Kim, like they have, shows that you've probably watched like the history detectives on PBS and yes. And they were at places all over the world. And they'll get into that. And so one day, they just decided to shift and move from a pretty successful career. And to do something local at the farm to school level and it’s just an amazing story.

00:02:45 Michelle

Yeah. Well, and that's why I was really excited and grateful that they are willing to share their story because the reality is that the world we live in only exists because of the dreams people have and the actions they take to manifest them. So here's an incredible tale from someone sharing their story and being willing to so thank you in advance to what their journeys been so far.

00:03:18 Rick

Yeah. All right, well, so without any further ado, we will listen to Kim and Ciara. Thank you, everybody.

00:03:38 Rick

So I'm in Summerlin, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, and I'm here with two very old and dear friends Kim MacQuarrie and Ciara Byrne. And they are the Co founders of Green our planet in Las Vegas, NV. So Kim was telling me, Kim, where are you from originally?

00:04:00 Kim MacQuarrie

I grew up in Las Vegas about. I moved here when I was in 2nd Grade,  was here until the first few years of college. And then transferred out.

0:04:07 Rick

And Kiera you are…?

00:04:09 Ciara Byrne

I am from Dublin, Ireland. Dublin. Emigrated to the United States in 1993.

00:04:16 Rick

My favorite band growing up was The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldoff. Yeah, yeah. You guys have such an interesting story. And first of all, I know, like, care, especially I have links to all of your other podcasts that you've done. 

00:04:19 Ciara Byrne

Oh my God, I love the Boomtown Rats! Bob Geldof.

00:04:36 Rick

You've been on the air a bit. You have a very windy Ted talk.  Very breezy, not windy speaking-wise but very breezy. Your hair was blowing everywhere and it was very breezy. But there's lots of good content and I'm going to link to all that in the show notes, but I'm really interested in what you guys used to do before you were in Green Planet. Can you talk about all that?

00:04:58 Ciara Byrne

Yeah, sure. So Kim and I met actually through filmmaking, so Kim was a or is an Indiana Jones-type filmmaker, meaning that he goes out into the wild and makes films of grizzly bears and Kamchatka and made a lot of films in the Amazon Rainforest and I when I immigrated to the United States first I worked for a company called Devillier Donegan Enterprises, a documentary filmmaking company that was owned by Disney, and they funded film makers like Kim to actually go out to the most beautiful places on the planet.

00:05:16 Rick

Ohh my gosh.

00:05:32 Ciara Byrne

… or the harshest or the most interesting where you know people don't get to go and to make really interesting films. And so Kim made a bunch of films for Devillier Donegan, and that's how we met. And then we got together and we made films together for like 20 years. So before green our planet.

00:05:51 Rick

And I have a link in there to up to your IMDb page. If for those of you that know IMDb is Internet movie database and lots of really neat titles and stuff that we've all seen before like history detectives, correct? And all that. Yeah. PBS stuff. So really neat so…

00:06:04 Ciara Byrne

Yes, that's right. Yes, Yep.

00:06:08 Rick

How does one have a thriving videography career? And that's, you know, a fun, rewarding, exciting career. And how does one all the sudden probably wasn't all of a sudden, but stop doing that and decide I want to create a nonprofit to better our planet. How does that happen?

00:06:33 Ciara Byrne

Kim, do you want to take that one on?  There was no plan. Let's just put it that way.

00:06:38 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah, that's a very good question, Rick. I mean, from my perspective, as Ciara said, you know, I got a degree in biology and masters in anthropology, lived down Latin America. I spent a lot of time down the Amazon rainforest. I was always really big into Natural History and science. So I've always had that background conservation. So that's always been and then made a lot of Natural History films around the world. As Kira was saying. And so I was very fortunate. I grew up in Las Vegas, NV. I read a lot of books when I was a kid, I knew I wouldn't go out and explore an adventure and find these fantastic places I'd read about. And I was fortunate enough to have done that and so we reached a point here where we were working in television and we came up with this idea about it's a long story. Sorry we got data.

00:07:23 Ciara Byrne

I think you have to go to Africa. Let's go to Africa.

00:07:24 Rick

we got time!

00:07:25 Kim MacQuarrie

OK. OK. So we're, you know, making films. So we ended up at one point in Africa, in Kenya, and we were working with the Paleoanthropologist Doctor Richard Leakey of the Leaky dynasty, Mary Leakey Lewis Leakey this is with one of her sons, Richard Leakey Paleo…

00:07:38 Rick

Mary leakey. Yeah.

00:07:43 Kim MacQuarrie

Villages and we're up at Lake Turkana, up in northern Kenya and.

00:07:46 Rick

By the way, that's Zinganthropus and Homohabilis, right?. Yeah, alright.

00:07:50 Kim MacQuarrie

Right! So we were up there. Lake Titicaca. Really. World famous, you know, fossil human fossil site. And we were sitting around and he was always trying to raise money for he's big into conservation too. Was big and content unfortunately passed away a few years ago. But he we're discussing how can we use like filmmaking, you know what's going on online and raising money online to raise money for conservationists, you know, conservation projects around the world, which are always scrambling for money. And he kind of planted the seed in us and we didn't come up with an answer.  Then but we...

00:08:25 Ciara Byrne

Well, his question and I think all of our questions, when we sat around.  And like we were actually filming him because he wrote a book in the 90s called the Sixth extinction. And of course, this was really the first time for that massive story, the 6th extinction to come, you know, into human consciousness and essentially Kim and I have always believed that the biggest story happening on the planet right now is the fact that by 2050 potentially 50% of all species that are on the planet in 1900 are going to be extinct, which is extraordinary. We are in this same level of extinction as when the dinosaurs went extinct 65,000,000 years ago. And so Richard spent most of his career not just uncovering amazing fossils and telling the story of humankind, but also traveling around the world and sharing the story about the six extinction. So he was a massive conservationist. He saved the elephant from going extinct In Kenya during the 1990s, and so on and so forth. So when Kim and I were sitting around with him, what we talked about was how can everyone on the planet become a conservationist? That was a question that he posed to us.

00:09:23 Rick

OK.

00:09:35 Ciara Byrne

He said, listen, he said we are in such dire straits. What climate change and what we're going to face in the years to come, he said. Everybody on this planet has to become engaged. How are we going to do that? So that's the question we left Africa with them. We were noodling on it. And Kim then took a journey, right, Kim.

00:09:53 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah. So I was working on a book at the same time, which is just called life and death in the Andes.

00:09:58 Kim MacQuarrie

This, uhm, a non fiction book. And it was a story about traveling from northern South America along the Andes, 4500 miles all the way down to the tip. And doing stories along the way and at this point I was down in Patagonia on the very tail end of it, and Kira came down to visit, and we were sitting in a cafe on the Beagle channel of all places, you know, going to an island off there where we're hunting down the last speaker of the Yamuna language. The last native speaker of the many languages going.

00:10:25 Ciara Byrne

Navarino island.

00:10:27 Kim MacQuarrie

And so we were waiting for this Zodiac boat. Take us across this channel and we were just noodling on this idea about how can what can we do, how do we mix film and, you know, raising money and that kind of thing and cure had been researching and was looking into, like crowdfunding platforms and Kickstarter and that kind of thing. And so I was like full of ideas. And I was like…

00:10:48 Ciara Byrne

And Kim will tell you that there's a famous phrase associated with me, and it's called a cunning plan. And I'll say I've got a cunning plan. These plans may be cunning, but they may also not be very cunning. Right, Kim? So Kim's eyebrows always go up when I mentioned.

00:10:59 Kim MacQuarrie

Umm, they can become disastrous if not if not handled very carefully, if not vetted very carefully.

00:11:08 Ciara Byrne

He's like uh, what are we gonna do now? So the cutting plan was “OK. Kim. Remember, Doctor Richard Leakey said. How can everybody become a conservationist? Well, I've been following Kickstarter, and Kickstarter has unleashed all this potential for artists around the world, right? These are artists who didn't have time or money to make their comic book make their single do whatever. And I think we can do the same thing.”

00:11:33 Ciara Byrne

For conservation, what if we create a platform where any community anywhere in the world can go online and raise 500 bucks to change out the light bulbs in their kids? School can raise money to do a community compost, whatever it takes.  And Kim was like, yeah, I kind of like that idea. So that was that, right, Kim? Then we came back to Las Vegas.  And we met with a friend of ours who worked at Zappas- Jeff, and we were telling Jeff this idea. And we were like, hey, you know, we have this idea. We could create a crowdfunding platform, and that was that, right? We just had breakfast with them.

00:12:06 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah, he's a he was an engineer and he was just quietly sitting there. He didn't really say much and we're kind of making a pitch to him about what our idea was and he was kind of nodding. But, you know, he couldn't tell. He was interested. Not then we shook hands at the end and he said, oh, nice to meet you. And about four months later, he got an e-mail from him and said, I've got your website ready. Your crowdfunding platform, we said what? And he says, yeah, I've been organizing. It's built now. So how did you do that? You have a full-time job. He goes. “I'm an insomniac. So I was doing it between 2:00 AM and like 6:00 AM every morning for the last four months.” And lo and behold, you know, here was this platform he had built, hand-built and so that we started to think, OK, so we need some projects now we need to find some people want to put some projects up here, some green projects to raise money and we…

00:12:54 Ciara Byrne

And initially we were all like, Oh yeah, let's save the lions in Africa because we'd met a scientist who was doing who wanted money for line collars to protect lions. And Jeff was like, no, no, no. We need to do something in Las Vegas. Let's do something local. I don't want anything that I need to be tracking out in Africa. Let's do something here. So we had a friend who knew a principal who wanted to build a school garden and she had no money. And so we were like, OK, we'll come out to your school, we will because we're film makers. We'll make a short little film. But with your students telling the community why they want this garden, we'll put it on our website. That will be our first project, and we'll see what happens. What happened, Kim?

00:13:16 Rick

Ah.

00:13:31 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah. So that was successful. They raised a bunch of money, build a garden and then, you know, word of mouth got around so other principals started to contact us before we know we'd raise money for five or six school. And then, uh, you know, strangely enough, you know, the first guard and the teachers came to us says you have a curriculum. And he said what he said, do you?  Have a curriculum.

00:13:53 Kim MacQuarrie

He said. Why? Why are you even asking? I mean, you're the teacher because you need a special curriculum. We need a special curriculum to teach outside, right? For hands on. And we said well…  Well, no. You know we don't, we just help you raise the money, you know, and built your garden and then another teacher asks it's the same thing. Another school.  And then I forget. Ohh yeah…

00:14:12 Ciara Byrne

And then we learned that essentially they needed lessons to Nevada State standards at the time.

00:14:16 Rick

OK. Yeah, no, what, what year was this when you were starting that first Garden 2013? That's not too long ago, really. But how many, how many school gardens do you think they had in Vegas back then?

00:14:16 Ciara Byrne

This was 2013.  Oh, only six or seven.

00:14:31 Rick

Yeah, this is for those of you out there, Ciara hired me to keynote at one of their state conferences, and my message was basically “you guys have no business doing gardening down here. It's not a very hospitable place to garden,” but Oh my gosh. Yeah, I'll let you continue. How? 

00:14:51 Ciara Byrne

When was that? 2015. Yeah, that was our second school garden conference.

00:14:54 Kim MacQuarrie

We said, thanks Rick.

00:14:56 Rick

Yeah. Well and well, that's. That's the good thing is what you've done and how thriving it is now. And I'll let you get there. But continue on, yeah.

00:15:06 Ciara Byrne

Yes.  So essentially we listened to the teachers. I mean, that's really what happened. Because remember that the question in our mind was how do we ensure that everybody in the planet can become a conservationist can help protect the planet. That was the question we left Africa with, and we started to see these teachers cared about connecting their kids to the planet. That's what they were doing. And the light bulb immediately went off for us were like..  Umm, there might be something in this, you know, and so maybe we can help more schools get gardens like we had no sense of curriculum. You know, we we're not educators. We're not gardeners. You know, we were just helping the teachers get where they wanted to go. And I think that's absolutely the secret to our success that we didn't come in with this grand plan and strategy for creating a big school garden program. We allow the teachers to, you know, we just help them. We did whatever they needed. And so when they said to us, hey, we need this curriculum, it has to be to Nevada state standards. Great, because our principles won't give us the time to be outside teaching, unless we're doing standards, and that's when we were like, oh, we had, because this is our first introduction to standards. We didn't know what they were. And so at that time, the Food Pantry 3 square came to me and said, hey, we heard that you're doing these gardens and we want to apply for a Honda Foundation grant and it's to create STEM curriculum for school gardens in Nevada and then I said Ohh Wow Kim, this could be a good opportunity.

00:16:36 Kim MacQuarrie

So we applied for that grant and then part of the grant, we got down to the finalists. And if you're a finalist, they would fly somebody out from the from the Honda Foundation to come vet you visit you. And so The funny thing is that we happen to own a Honda. We only had one car there. We had Honda Civic. And so we went to pick this lady up at the airport from the Honda Corporation. We said we're not, you know, it's not like we rented this. I don't know if that swung it in our favor, but the fact that we owned a Honda, OK, it we won the grant and so that allowed us to hire teachers and create a the first curriculum, really Nevadas first curriculum for outdoor gardens with the Nevada State Standards. And that was really kind of launched the whole thing.

00:17:14 Kim MacQuarrie

And light bulb went off for me. Is that having spent a lot of time in the Amazon? I realize that you know, you build a garden bed out there and you grow plants, you know, it's there's all the same principles. The Amazon jungle are happening this this garden box, you know, all the biological principles, predator prey, pollination, all that stuff. There's no difference. It's just on a smaller scale. So you know, we're kind of building these little miracle boxes with, you know, all this life going on right at the school. So that was that was kind of a realization there. So why not do more of this?

00:17:43 Rick

And at some point you were able to get a grant to establish a whole lot of gardens.

00:17:52 Ciara Byrne

Correct, that is correct. So in 2015, I think that that was when you met us, Rick, right, that when you came down to the conference?  At that point, by 2015, we were already in about 50 schools actually.

00:18:03 Ciara Byrne

And that's when we were looking enough to get a grant from the corporate of extension. So that was thanks to Commissioner Kirkpatrick, who's still a Commissioner here in Las Vegas, she's a huge supporter of the garden. She could see it. And the joy that they brought to kids, that how happy they made teachers and she could also see the beauty that they brought to neighborhoods. Like all those things. And so she helped us get a multi $1,000,000 grant from the Cooperative Extension, which launched us into like having our own builds team. So at that time. Yeah. So we built them all together here in Clark County. We've built 200 school gardens.

00:18:37 Kim MacQuarrie

200 school gardens. But I was saying a big part of that was that money is always a big problem, right for school districts and for nonprofits. And so we're from the very beginning, you know, we had this crowdfunding platform. It was hard to raise, you know, 10 grand or whatever for, Garden and Gardens gradually became more expensive, and so the Southern Nevada Water Authority was very aware of the drought situation, so they started offering a rebate roughly around 2015, 2016, I think around 2016 they raised it from like $2.00, a square foot for removing grass to $3.00 a square foot. And so we had spent a few weekends trying to figure out, well, golly, what if we go to the schools and take out grass? You know, water intensive grass and then get the rebate and build a garden for that? Yeah, which nobody else is doing. And we trial we piloted it and sure enough, went to a school pulled out 5000 square feet of grass, got $15,000 and built them a garden. So before I know we're going to schools and saying we can not only build you a garden, we can offer you our garden program for a whole year and the garden will have these outdoor garden beds. It'll have a, you know, a mini orchard. They'll have a pollinator garden. They'll have an outdoor garden classroom.  And it's free. What do you think about that? And that launched us. We built 100 gardens just from the water rebate being offered.

00:19:53 Rick

It's so amazing. It is. It's so inspiring. And I when I interview guests and I find a common theme, when I get people and if I could bottle you guys and sell it, you know, it's just…  or you guys have a vision? You did it. You had a vision and you attacked it and you did it. And I just it. It is so great for this, this community, who, like I said, really didn't have any gardens here before. And yes, the school garden movement happened too. At the same time to help your cause, but it really wouldn't have happened without. Without you two, and your vision……

00:20:40 Rick

Hi again everybody. As I mentioned at the start of the show, click on the next link to listen to Part 2 of this conversation with Kim and Kiera, we'd like to thank you so much for listening today. Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, and was made possible by a grant by the United States Department of Agriculture. The content and ideas of the Pharma School podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon Department of Ed, and the Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers. Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information and much more by Googling “farm to school podcast, OSU.” And that'll get you there. We will love to hear from you. Stop by the website that I just mentioned and say hello or give us an idea for a future podcast. Love to see you next time. Bye everyone.