Workshops’ goal: end food insecurity
Planting ideas and planting crops are two very different things. For El Jebel resident Kim Doyle Wille, the best way to marry both was through gardening workshops.
Wille is the founder of Growing Empowerment, a nonprofit that hosts workshops focused on empowering the community through education, sustainable projects and gardens to foster independence and provide aid for people experiencing food insecurity.
“We are an organization that grows food for food pantries, and empowers people to grow food for themselves and for our food pantries,” Wille said. “It’s about teaching people how to be so successful that they have excess that they give to hungry neighbors.”
Wille has been hosting gardening workshops in libraries all throughout Garfield County since 2013. In 2016, she put together 64 workshops in all eight libraries from Aspen to Parachute.
How it started
Wille started her gardening journey by building raised beds on her lawn in 2007, right when the recession hit.
“I watched all my neighbors going into drug and pill bottles, so I started growing food for us because none of us had gas money to even get to the (food pantry) that was down in Carbondale,” she said.
However, the idea for Growing Empowerment wouldn’t be born until a few years later.
“It all started with an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile ride,” Wille laughed.
She had entered an Oscar Mayer contest called the Good Mood Mission, where participants were invited to pitch a “good mood” mission.
“I ended up saying that I would go to food pantries and encourage gardeners to bring their fresh harvest to the food pantry so we could prove to them that people wanted healthy, fresh produce,” she said. “They were here 10 days later.”
The competition also awarded her with $5,000, which she used to build 19 community gardens between 2013 and 2014.
At the time, food pantries in the valley like Lift-up didn’t have re
frigeration and mainly offered packaged goods. While traveling around the county in the Wienermobile, Wille told reporters to encourage gardeners to bring their fresh produce to the pantry, which they did.
“As soon as it came in, it was gone,” she recalled. By 2015, Lift-up, an organization that provides support to families experiencing food insecurity from Parachute to Aspen, had enough grants to purchase refrigerators and began accepting all kinds of produce, according to Wille.
“Now (that mission) has expanded to making sure that we get plants and seeds into the hands of Lift-up clients,” Wille said.
Wille brings gardening to Garfield County schools
Wille’s passion for gardening eventually took her through the teaching route. Though she was already working a full-time job at the time, she accepted a volunteer position as a gardening teacher for Yampah Mountain High School in Glenwood Springs.
“I am myself personally kind of a plant fanatic, so that was right up my alley,” said Mariah Perea, a former student of Wille who now volunteers at Growing Empowerment workshops. “When I got to know her more, I (thought), ‘This is something that we really can do together.’”
In 2014, with the help of some YMHS students and volunteers, the group built and planted approximately 102 gardens between Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, New Castle, Silt, Rifle and Parachute.
In 2017, she was hired part-time to teach a sustainable science class through 2021, where she would sometimes take her students to help teach gardening and cooking classes to children at Glenwood Springs Elementary School.
“My students grew plants, built gardens on terraces, and held an annual plant sale fundraiser for materials for my classes for seven of the years I was at YMHS,” Wille wrote. She emphasized that the food grown by the students was never laid to waste; Instead, Wille used it in her cooking classes, and even distributed what was available to the student body.
“I can actually keep my outside plants alive now,” Perea laughed, reflecting on how Wille’s teaching has impacted her life. “Sometimes my boyfriend and I will go up to her house and help her with her gardens there, and we help her with her plant sales. Anything that she needs help with that we’re able to help with, we do.”
Wille’s teaching didn’t end when the school year was over. In the span of one summer, Wille taught six Access Roaring Fork Boost Camps Rifle, where 18 children from low-income families met every Thursday to learn about gardening. She has also worked with summer school classes from Sopris Elementary in Carbondale.
“Garfield County has a huge hunger problem,” Wille said. “Summer is the hardest time for hunger. Everybody donates at Christmas, which is awesome … but the worst time for hunger in America is during the three months that kids are out of school for the summer when they don’t have access to their free or reduced school lunches. That can be the only meal those kids get in a day. So that’s why I really try to get this message out early in my workshop.”
Wille said that making sure children have enough food during the summer months is significant motivator for her, which is why she’s been partnering with Lift-up to fill up their food pantry with the food grown from Growing Empowerment’s community projects and library workshops, in addition to the food the participating families keep for themselves.
Lift-up
The collaboration represents a full-circle moment for Wille, who went from donating her own harvest to Lift-up’s pantries to hosting their volunteers at workshops.
“I think that this is a beautiful thing that Growing Empowerment does,” Lift-up volunteer program manager Hannah Snaza said. “I think that Lift-up on its own would have a really hard time doing all of this … the amount of effort that (Wille) puts into this is beautiful and I’m very appreciative that she’s doing that because so many people are going to benefit from it.”
Lift-up serves approximately 900 families in Glenwood Springs every month, according to Snaza.
High food prices have led to a 30% increase in Lift-up’s clientele compared to prepandemic numbers.
“This is very, very, very exciting for us, to not only be able to give them the produce, but to give them the means to produce it themselves so that they don’t have to come to us all the time for it,” Snaza said.
There is no one-size-fitsall for the kinds of people who attend her workshops. At every library, the rows are filled with retired home gardeners who want to know why their plants aren’t growing, children accompanying their parents for an educational activity, and community members interested in donating food to nonprofits like Lift-up.
“Outside of gardening, she has given a lot of people hope,” Perea said. “Low-income families can’t always afford to get fresh fruits and vegetables, and so she provides them.”
The workshops are completely free and provide instruction, materials and custom soil for the participants, who then are invited to continue tending to their plants at home.
“We package other seeds too, but right now we’re really focused on getting people planting tomatoes, peppers and eggplant so that they’re ready to go in their garden by late May or early June,” Wille said. “We’re encouraging a lot of people to start their plants indoors right now … until they’re ready to go outdoors.”
Upcoming projects
Wille said she’s hoping to launch a podcast and Youtube channel, called the High Altitude Gardener, which will teach Coloradans the secrets to successful gardening in a valley with short seasons and high altitudes.
“People learn a lot from how to deal with wildlife and the things that are peculiar to us high-altitude gardeners,” she explained. “Dealing with 92-degree average days all of June in our altitude is not normal, but it is our new norm.”
The channel will feature several guests, starting off with Dani Wesolowski, a Garfield County CSU extension agent and a close friend of Wille. She said the channel will also host live streams where viewers can submit gardening questions and get answers in real-time. The project will kick off once Wille has wrapped up this initial season of planting and workshops.
Dates for future workshops are available on Growing Empowerment’s Facebook page.
“What I’m doing is I’m trying to empower you guys to be good gardeners, that you’re such good gardeners that you share your food with your friends and for Lift-up food pantries,” Wille said to her group during a March Glenwood Springs workshop.