- [Narrator] Our love for food is something contagious,
and DeKalb County Community Gardens is a unique organization
that relies on volunteers and members of the community
to spread the love of food through teaching
and feeding both mind and body.
Their mission is to empower DeKalb County residents
to choose healthy and sustainable foods
through community education.
Their goal is ultimately ending hunger,
empowering individuals,
and growing community to work together.
- Well, we have many different gardens.
But the very first gardens were built in March of 2012
at some schools in the DeKalb School District
as well as Conexion Communidad
and some other community locations.
Well, the idea of the gardens started back in 2006.
In a way, I was working as an in-school suspension teacher
at a middle school in Dekalb
and I was working with students
who had very little experience
with knowing where their food came from.
And so we got a grant and we started to put in a garden
in 2006 at Clinton Rosette Middle School in DeKalb.
These gardens are important to me because
I used to lay awake and think about,
"How could we, in this county,
where we have the best soil in the world,
why do we have people who are hungry?"
And so that's why we started the community gardens
and that's why I feel that they're important.
Well right now, farming food that we eat,
that travels about 1,500 miles before it gets to our plate.
And that's not gonna be very sustainable
going into the future.
And so one of the things why teaching more people
how to grow their own food,
by working on what we call a local food security system
for our county, we are preparing for the future
when the cost of transporting food
might not be feasible anymore.
And so that's one way it's helping for the future.
The other way it's helping for the future
is that we are doing a lot of experimentation
on how to grow food year-round in a cold climate.
So one of the ways we're looking at the future
for growing food is using greenhouses similar to this.
These plants are growing here since February.
And in February it was very cold.
And so all through the month of March
we were able to grow these plants inside.
There's also many different ways we're experimenting
with how to grow food inside all year round
using hydroponics and aquaponics and other means like that.
Since we've started, we've produced over 175,000 pounds
of food that has been distributed
to people in need in our county.
Produce from the gardens are used by volunteers
who work in the gardens, or they are taken to food pantries
to be given to food insecure people in the county.
Right now, we have three full-time employees
and then during the season,
we have several other part-time employees.
Where we're video taping this right now, we are
at the Walnut Grove Vocational Farm,
which is a program of DeKalb County Community Gardens.
At this location, we work with individuals
who have disabilities and we train them
in horticulture and agriculture.
So all of the plants you see here in the greenhouse
were planted from seed in our germination room
and then raised here to be sold to the public.
And the people that are doing that work are high-school aged
and older individuals with disabilities.
We've established 56 different community gardens
around the county.
All the elementary schools in Sycamore,
the elementary schools in DeKalb,
as well as senior citizens' centers,
low-income housing locations,
community sites, many different locations.
We get our funding from many different locations.
Mostly we get our funding from
grants, donations, and fundraisers.
Well, we had a school board member approach us
about putting gardens at the schools in DeKalb
and asked us if we would do that.
And then, after we did that the very first year,
the second year, the superintendent of schools
for the Sycamore School District, Mrs. Countryman,
came to us and asked if we would consider putting gardens in
at the elementary schools in Sycamore.