Why We Don’t Garden: Big Green’s Story

All over the country right now, people are putting their hands in the dirt.

There was a time when our desks would have been empty this week. Our bags carried sunscreen, extra water bottles, and garden gloves, and planting season ruled all. Today, things at the Big Green office look a bit different: our office is full of people in seats and hands clicking on keyboards, while the real work, growing food, is at its peak across the country.

These days, the only gardens you‘ll find us in are at our own homes. The question I get most often from people who know our history is the most natural one: “If you’re not building school gardens, what does Big Green do now?”

The short answer? If we wanted to do great work at scale, we knew that scale wasn’t going to come from us alone.

Big Green spent a decade building and running Learning Gardens in schools, expanding city by city, district by district, school by school. In every single one of those cities, we kept finding local organizations already there who had been doing this work for years, often with deep roots in the neighborhoods we were rolling into for the first time. These local orgs had already cracked the code on the local version of growing food and changing lives.

So, we made a different bet. We wound down our robust school garden program and turned the org inside out, from running gardens to backing the people who already were. That’s been our version of scale ever since, and it looks like more food, in more places, led by more local leaders.

Has that cost us along the way? Sure it has. Visibility is the obvious one. Every national food nonprofit you‘ve heard of got there by building a program with its name on the side, and the reason is that those programs are easier to see, easier to photograph, easier to put in front of a funder. Backing other people doing the work is quieter and harder to explain. The story of a school garden tells itself, but the story of a grant to a small organization asks you to trust us, to trust them, and to trust that this work goes further.

That trust is what we‘ve been building, and the math is revealing. This year marks our fifth year holding firm in the best pivot we’ve made: move real resources into the hands of those who know their community best and then get out of their way.

So no, you won’t find me in a Big Green garden this spring. You‘ll find me at my desk, supporting and celebrating the people who are out there. Planting season still rules; we‘re just rooting for it from a different seat.