Nancy Redfeather was the one at the recent E Malama ‘Aina festival making cornhusk dolls with kids who stopped by her Hawai‘i Island School Garden Network (HISGN) booth. How unexpected, and fun, is that?!

That’s Nancy above in the brown t-shirt

Girls with their cornhusk dolls

The year-and-a-half-old School Garden Network program assists Big Island schools and teachers with everything they need to operate school garden programs. “Resources, curriculum, funding opportunities, volunteers, events, media and professional development,” says Redfeather, who is the School Garden Network’s director. In addition to planning, writing and assisting programs, she visits at least 10 Big Island schools every month.

She talks about how disconnected children have become from their food, from nature and from knowing about ecosystems. “Children today don’t know a great deal about where their food comes from,” she says. “Does it grow on a tree, or a bush, or? They’re spending a lot more time inside than ever before, and eating way more processed foods, and they suffer from obesity and early-onset adult diabetes, things that even 10 to 15 years ago were unheard at the rates we are seeing today.”

With this program, which is at many public, private and charter schools around the island, they learn to grow food and sometimes prepare it. “They are amazed at how good fresh foods taste,” she says. “Especially ones they grow.”

“Moving children into hands-on outdoor classrooms improves their ability to learn in the classroom,” she says, “and assists them in deepening their classroom studies in science, math language arts and social studies. The garden is a living laboratory where curriculum can come to life, and the lessons of life are experienced on every day. These changes in the children can lead to changes in their family, too.”

The School Garden Program, started in 2007, is sponsored by the Kohala Center. “The idea for the program began with the Rocky Mountain Institutes Whole Systems Report for Hawai‘i Island, which was prepared for the Omidyar family on O‘ahu,” she says. “It was one of 12 ideas presented to move agriculture forward on Hawai‘i Island.”

At the E Malama ‘Aina festival, she set up a “Hawai‘i Island School Garden Network Student Farmers Market.” Students came from Pa‘auilo Elementary and Honoka‘a Elementary, and the Hawai‘i Sustainable Education Initiative in Honoka‘a brought a big bus full of teachers, students and some parents.

“They all brought food, value-added products and plants to sell and they sold almost everything,” she says. “The public was very supportive. We also had a craft area where we made ‘corn dolls’ from cornhusks. I grew a lot of corn last summer and had saved all the husks. It was a lot of fun.”

She says it was really a neat event. And she speaks highly of Richard and his having put on the festival in the first place.

“Richard is a cornerstone of our agriculture for the future,” she says, “as he is looking at systems and the future – something not very many people dare to do. I have a lot of respect for his work!”