Changing the World by Being the Change at Home - Part 2

Join us for our second part of our interview 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 two of a two-part episode. 

Transcript

Changing the World by Being the Change at Home – Part 2

Transcript

00:00:08 Rick

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how you thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook, and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools across the country, and the world.  I'm your co-host, Rick Sherman, along with me. As always as Michelle Markesteyn.  So thanks for coming by. What follows is a part two of our two-part interview of what we call changing the world by being the change with Kim, Macquarie and Kiera Byrne. With green, our planet in Las Vegas, NV. Let's pick up right where we left off.

00:00:49 Rick

Oh, I appreciate that... So you did the gardens, but and like we've talked before, this is it. This is a very harsh environment to grow outdoor gardens. And you found that well, there are other options if you don't want to do an outdoor garden, can you tell us a little bit about that foray?

00:01:06 Ciara Byrne

Yeah, for sure. So essentially,  And here we are. Go back to this idea that we listen to what the teacher said and we just help them, that being our secret sauce. Teachers started coming to us, Rick in about 2017 and they said to us we would like to do hydroponics. Can you help us and Kim and I said, oh, no, we only do outdoor gardens until one day..

00:01:29 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah, it was just kind of almost reflex because we go out to schools and tell about the outdoor garden program. So what about hedge funds? You guys do hide brings. No, no, we do the outdoor gardens. We don't do hydroponics, you go to another school. What about hydroponics? You do hydroponics? No, no, we're the outdoor garden people. We don't do hydroponics. And finally, I went to this one elementary school named Sandy Miller Elementary School. And I walked in there and they had a hydroponics lab In in one of their the science room. And just as I walked in, there was a group of 4th graders. And not only that, I said, well, if we ever did do hydroponics, sorry to. I told Kira. I said it would have to be at high school, you know, high school and middle school because it's too complicated for grade school, right. So we're gonna have to go for high school. If we ever do it. But we had no intention of doing it. So I walk into elementary school. They had a hydroponics unit set up. And then comes this 4th grade class and there’s this one little girl. She goes. Yeah, here's the you know the pH meter. And here's how you do the TDs and this kind of thing. And I'm listening to this. And I went back here and says we're gonna do hydroponics. We're gonna do it at elementary school. I I've just seen the the lights there.

00:02:23 Rick

Yes.

00:02:25 Kim MacQuarrie

And that's really what kind of kicked it off.

00:02:26 Rick

Yeah. Could you, could you explain a little bit for those that don't know what hydroponic system is, what it, what it would entail?

00:02:31 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah, hydroponics is when you, instead of growing plants and soil, you grow the plants, the roots of the plants and the nutrient solution. So the roots go down to the nutrient solution and they get all everything they need from the nutrient solution. So basically it's a plant kind of floating on a on A-frame on above water and the roots grow down the nutrient solution. So.  But.  It does a whole lot of things is one you can do that indoors very easily. So now you can control the environment. You don't have to have. You don't have to have agricultural land or anything like that. And so it's a great thing to do, obviously, especially in climates that unlike Las Vegas where you have, you have sunshine 20, you know, 12 months out of the year, it's a lot short growing season. So we actually kind of. What precipitated that was we were in contact with some schools in Reno, NV, which is Northern Nevada, and they have a very short growing season. You know, it's like may to October and they're finished, right, so. The problem is the school garden programs run ideally during the school year when kids are in school. So we thought, well, you know, it doesn't really make sense for us to help you do an outdoor garden. But what about hydroponics? We've been experimenting with hydroponics with.

00:03:26 Rick

Oh yes. Oh.

00:03:34 Ciara Byrne

Yeah. So that's essentially how it happened. We started testing hydroponic systems and we tested, you know, a good few of the systems that are even now on the market. And we ended up working with the company called Sun and Bio and yeah.  And what happened is bananas, because it took off like wildfire. So we started doing it up in Northern Nevada and then our schools, even here in Southern Nevada, and they already had gardens. We're like, we want to do this as well. And then we had a really big turning point in 20, the end of 2019, just before COVID when we got an e-mail from a principal in Vinita, Alaska, 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Bob.. and he wrote and he wrote this beautiful e-mail. He sent it to Kim. I think it was you, right?

00:04:23 Kim MacQuarrie

Well, I was on the receiving end of anybody that contacted the website and so, you know, it was, it was. And God bless teachers across the nation because we're always getting emails to this day from teachers. And it seems like most of them are doing on the weekends. So you think, Oh my gosh, they're doing it late at night after school or they're doing the weekends, they're on, they're taking their time to, you know, research this and find this online. And you know, we got kind of used to that. And the problem was always money like, you know, if they're writing, they want a garden program in Omaha or wherever, right. And we didn't have any grants for them. And so there's one I got this e-mail from this guy Bob him and said, hi, you know, we're in a Native American community 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And in the winter, winter lasts a long time. And it's like, you know. This is 40 below and the only fresh food we get here during that long period is by Bush plane and like a piece of ahead of like half frozen lettuce is like $10 and nobody eats fresh food up here. I found your hydroponics program online. Can you help us?

00:05:17 Ciara Byrne

And our whole, our whole team, we told our team and everybody's like, yes, we gotta do this. We're gonna make it happen.

00:05:17 Kim MacQuarrie

And so, so so you know that why I wrote here, I said I don't know how, but we have to help this guy, right. If there's anybody stands out, we have to help them. And so sure, weirdly enough.

00:05:29 Ciara Byrne

We got funding from actually from the Venetian resort to the casino they gave. We told them the story and they're.

00:05:32 Kim MacQuarrie

That's right. MMM.

00:05:36 Ciara Byrne

Like ohh we're totally gonna help you make this happen, but of course the challenge wasn't even the biggest challenge was on the money. It was. How do we get these huge hydroponic systems to the Arctic Circle? And so we figured it out. I mean, it did take two or three months to get it there, but once we did, it was amazing and to this day, the kids of 58 kids at John Frederickson School in the in that community and they are growing the fresh food for the entire community. It's a very small community, 200 people.  And since so much of Alaska's rural, you know, the teachers and, you know, they talk to each other. So within, I don't know, within a year, there's only five schools and.

00:06:12 Kim MacQuarrie

Whole massive district area within a year, all those schools had hydroponics, so we started bragging. We're working with entire districts now, you know like have...

00:06:19 Rick

I saw your map! There was a lot of activity in that on the North Slope up there. Yeah, yeah.

00:06:22 Kim MacQuarrie

Well, that's, that's since then. Yeah. so.  Obviously, Hydroponics is an awesome a solution to, you know, Alaska weather and also Northern Nevada and some half of the United States during winter time.

00:06:35 Rick

And yeah, and some of some of the neat things about hydroponics. I mean, I've seen hydroponic systems that take up an entire classroom. I've seen the rain gutter style that are against a wall. I've seen like the right in your lovely home. There's two countertop models right there, so you can, you know, depending on your space and your needs, you can adapt to what's going on. Do you do anything with aquaponics, with a fish or tilapia yet or anything like that?

00:07:01 Ciara Byrne

No, mainly because one of the School's positive things about hydroponics is that teachers can use it all year. Yeah, and then the end of May, they harvest, clean it out, turn it off, go off for the vacation. Right. As opposed to here in Las Vegas with our outdoor gardens, we have an awesome farming team of 12 people, and they work all summer keeping the outdoor gardens going harvesting the food, giving it out to the community because you know you don't want to close them down the outdoor garden. It's too hard to get it back up and running right? But so hydroponics are very efficient. 

00:07:29 Rick

Gotcha. Yeah. It happens, yeah.

00:07:37 Kim MacQuarrie

OK. But with aquaponics obviously have fish, so you get to the either vacation period and the school here go what are you gonna do with all the fish? Yeah. To keep them alive. Some of that that just a complication, but we'd love, we'd love to do that, but that's the reason why we haven't. 

00:08:05 Rick

OK, so you talked about the Alaska program, but I happen to know and you started out here locally in Las Vegas. So you talked about Alaska, but that's not the only state where these have gone and there's opportunities for people to get these, can you tell me about that a little bit?

00:08:09 Ciara Byrne

Yeah, sure. Part of the COVID story for us was that we realized with the hydroponics program that essentially what we had done is we had created some best practices around the hydroponics program. We had a curriculum. We have videos. It was all to next Gen. science standards. We had nutrition, entrepreneurship curriculum.  And if we could share that with teachers anywhere in the country, they could do our program, whether they have their own hydroponic systems or we could just ship them systems. And so that's when the kind of the light bulb went off for us like, oh wow, we're actually an Ed tech company. And so we are now 100% online since COVID.  And we built a magic Garden portal, and in that portal, whether you're a 6th grade teacher, first grade kindergarten teacher, you go into the portal, you can access all of your curricula for your, you know, grade level. And that has really brought teachers together because there's a Facebook type feed in there where teachers are sharing their failures, their guesses and then you know they're do not. You heard them yesterday at the farmers market. They're doing all kinds of cool things that we have nothing to do with, right, that they're able to share with other teachers across the country. So we're building this community. We're giving them the content they need. And then we're also training them and supporting them and coaching them.

00:09:24 Kim MacQuarrie

And I would say the same thing has happened with the outdoor garden program. You know for the first 6-7 years we did mainly that in Las Vegas and built those 200 plus.  But the question is, well, how do you scale that right and how do you work with other schools? So we started to have cities or satellite to Las Vegas like per rump is about an hour away. Moab is about an hour away too far for us to drive out to. But they already had gardens. Well, actually build a garden and put her on. But and I already had a garden. So we experimented, this is.

00:09:43 Ciara Byrne

Mesquite.

00:09:53 Kim MacQuarrie

I forget when this was, but some years ago about working with them online because again having best practices like what do they really need? They need a curriculum. They need to know how to take care of their garden. They need to know all the things that go into, you know, a good garden in school garden program. So rather than have them try to reinvent the wheel and maybe stumble and not know how to form a garden team and all that kind of stuff, we started working with them online.  And we call that program, which is now expanded across the states, the Garden Connect program. So we've kind of packaged all that best practices to work with school anywhere in the United States that has outdoor gardens, right, they get the curriculum and they get the virtual Academy videos. They get just all training. They get access to the Magic port. All that kind of stuff. So there's those twin programs. And when we have grants, we often subsidize those schools that apply for them. And depending on where they're where they are geographically, if they're kind of like coaching.  Have a long growing season. Now they will give him a grant for the garden Connect if they're more up in the North, north and states they we encourage them to have a hydroponic grant, right? So they have those available during school year.

00:10:57 Rick

OK. And so how do how does one go and find a hydroponic grant? Do you go to greenourplanet.org or..?

00:11:05 Ciara Byrne

Go to greenourplanet.org and there's contact US button. You click on that and it says tell us what you're interested in so you can be interested in the Hydro Connect program or Garden connect or both. I mean a lot of schools are interested in both.

00:11:17 Rick

OK, good. Kim and Ciara. You've come from nothing to where you're at today and you're continuing to grow. Where do you see yourself going in the future?

00:11:28 Ciara Byrne

With us, our team got together last year and we created our vision for the next 10 years. So by 2033, our goal is to have our programming in 10,000 schools, which is 10% of schools in the United States. And in order to do that, we need to obviously raise a lot of funding. And so we have created an interesting model I would say that I don't believe has been put into practice before. Sorry.  The vision is.. Let me just kind of give you a quick two cents. Look back right when you look at the history of school garden programming in the United States, it's been around for a very long time, right, Rick?

00:12:06 Rick

Yes, World War One. Yes, yes, victory gardens.

00:12:08 Ciara Byrne

Yeah, absolutely indeed we have victory gardens and even before that, right. So it's been around for 100 years. However, when you look at the,  you know,  what happened over the course of that 100 years, predominantly programming was done locally at schools was done by local nonprofits, and really, it's since COVID that unleashed this potential for organizations like Greener Planet like Big Green, like Kids Gardening. Because now teachers are absolutely comfortable and happy to be accessing all this kind of programming online, right?  So suddenly we've gone from very local.  Oriented programming to being able to create this and work together to build a movement across the United States, which I believe only empowers us because it allows all these organizations to really come together and align ourselves to create a national voice for school, garden programming. And so our role in that we feel is to empower at least 10,000 schools, and there will be other organizations you know helping the other 90,000 schools that are in the United States. And to do that, what we realized was when you look at the funding for school gardens. Historically, it's actually been extraordinarily low and it's always been very hard even for local nonprofits to be able to get enough funding to get every school in their school district funds. Right. And so when we look at that, we're like, OK, we're going to diversify our revenue streams. So our first revenue stream is philanthropy. Which will continue, but which we don't see growing large enough to support 10,000 schools. It will help, but it won't be the whole thing. It won't be the whole enchilada.  So the other three revenue streams are #1. At Greener Planet, we recently hired a sales team and this sales team is working with private schools with charter schools who can actually afford to pay the full cost of our programming. And with a little profit in there so that we can then use that profit to help other schools that don't have the funding, right.  So that's, but that's still not enough to get to 10,000. So then what we also did was thanks to the Andre Agassi Foundation who funded all our filmmaking during COVID and and also since then we've created a for profit called Green. Our Planet Studios, which is run by Kim and another for profit, Hydro health. And so they are the other two revenue streams that are going to help greener planet get to that next level. And Kim, I'm sure, would love to talk about those.

00:14:32 Kim MacQuarrie

Yeah. So and I would like to give a shout out to the invention of the Internet, which also facilitated this cause. Yes, school guards have been around for 100 years, but needed the Internet to be able to have a platform there. But it took a while for that to catch on. So all those things had to come together to allow you to do it online. But yeah, so we created a 2A spin-off companies, one is hydro health. And that occurred because corporations, local companies, start coming to us, and they saw the school garden programs and, you know, it's possible one of these units, like in our company, because our employees would like it so well again, it's kind of like that knee jerk reaction. Not the kids wanting to have hydroponics. There's no we don't do that. We don't. We just do the schools, right? Well, how about another company would come and say, hey, is it possible? Have one of those? No, we don't. We don't do that. We don't work with corporate. And finally. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit on the slower side. So finally the light went off well. You know what? Let's, let's try and we start with switch. Actually we set up a unit for where we were housed there they gave us.

00:15:13 Rick

Yeah.

00:15:14 Ciara Byrne

We're a bit slow, Rick.

00:15:24 Kim MacQuarrie

Just in case you have free office space for quite a long time and the employees loved it. And so we started tinkering with that. And then we started working with Western Alliance banks, which are in the western United States both here in Las Vegas and also in Nicks and United Way and volunteers in medicine and Thomas and Mack. Aristocrat. We start work at various corporations. We put a commercial unit in there and we started to develop employee engagement and health program so that they would get involved in planning seeds. And you know the harvest and then they love eating it and having online content, that kind of thing. So that's called Hydro Health and the whole idea behind it was that for every and corporations have money, obviously, unlike schools. So for every corporate Dale of Hydro health program, that would automatically pay for a one year of a hydroponics program at all schools, right? So that benefits directly. Green our planet is kind of the Tom's shoes model. One for one model. That was the whole idea behind it. So. So the companies working with here, they've done that and also, you know, corporations are not only looking at looking for how to engage their employees and make them healthier and happier, but they're also interested in how do they, you know, integrate with the community, how do they have a good presence in the community and how do they let their employees know that.  So that’s been very popular.

00:16:18 Rick

Perfect.

00:16:41 Kim MacQuarrie

So, and that's going to expand. So that's we started here in Las Vegas and we have a request to go out with the Western Alliance out in California and various other places. And the other company we spun off is a is a is greener plant studios, which is the was the film arm of Green our Planet, the nonprofit. Now we've created a for-profit and it does a couple of things. One, it allows us to spread the Green our Planet brand and another thing is it allows us to expand beyond the, you know, fairly narrow mandate the IRS has for the nonprofit, which is conservation education. Basically, and allows us to make educational films in in subjects like financial literacy and social emotional learning, which we're doing. And also in we're doing stem and that kind of thing. So it gives us kind of a broader we can do whatever and education for that. So and a portion of those profits goes back to Greener Planet, the nonprofit so that in the last it became official. I guess about a year, a year and a half ago it became a corporation, but since then we've done at least 100 educational videos. Both we expanded greener plants middle and high school hydroponics programs. We did. We wrote all the curricula for that and also did all the films for that that go in with the lessons. And then we're working on financial  literacy or work on social emotional learning, conservation, we're doing all kinds of video content creation.

00:18:00 Rick

OK, fantastic. Well and I think of my life in, in the farm to school movement and we've done that before too. We have the harvest for schools program, but there's a lot of people like you said, well, we're a bank and we think this is great too. But you know to get that message. No, no, it's only for kids. But of course you can participate in this too, but. yeah, we've, we've had the movement being changed at time. We still like farm to school because that's the message that's a brand, like you said too, but you can certainly bring that message out to the rest of the world too. So wow, that's really great. Well, you guys, thank you so much for allowing me to interview you and get a glimpse into your world and just thank you for being available. I really appreciate it.

00:18:47 Ciara Byrne

Thank you. Thanks for your interest and your unwavering support since pretty much the beginning.

00:18:52 Rick

I'm always there for you guys always, so I will have links to all the things we talked about including green, green, our planet.org in the show notes and as well as all the other fun tidbits that we've talked about. So thank you so much.

00:19:06 Kim MacQuarrie

Thank you, Rick. I appreciate it.

00:19:07 Ciara Byrne

You.

00:19:13 Michelle

Changing the world by being the change at home. That's a powerful story.

00:19:18 Rick

Yes, very much. What resonated with you.

00:19:22 Michelle

Well, just exactly that you know, you can have big dreams of changing the world, but really it's ourselves and our communities and the work that we do at home. And digging deeper.  And I think makes the difference.

00:19:35 Rick

And in their case, changing the world far away and then realizing we need to do this at home, you know, in Las Vegas.

00:19:43 Michelle

Well, I hope this inspires everyone listening to do the change you vision in the world and Justice One act.

00:19:55 Rick

Yeah, I totally agree, yeah.

00:19:57 Michelle

So thanks. Thanks for that interview and thank you for sharing your story.

00:20:01 Rick

Yeah, we'd like to thank Kiera and Kim for being guests on our show today.

00:20:05 Michelle

The farm to school podcast was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, with production support from Leanne Locher, Oregon State University Extension was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:20:17 Rick

The content and ideas on farm to 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, ODE and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:20:35 Michelle

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information and much more by Googling Up Farm to school podcast, OSU. It'll take you to our site.

00:20:44 Rick

We would love to hear from you. Stop by that website that Michelle just mentioned and say hello or give us an idea for a future.

00:20:51 Rick

Podcast.

00:20:52 Michelle

Bye.

00:20:53 Rick

Thanks everybody.