Sage Garden Project is our California elementary age educational program, supported by a twelve year and fourteen million dollar investment of the Wild Wisdom Foundation, a San Diego-based philanthropic organization. My passion as its founder is to create equanimity, support & respect for all learning styles by employing our original experiential cooking and gardening program. Our program funds salaries and trains dedicated teachers and has currently funding programs in 64 California elementary schools. 

As a nation, we universally recognize the mental and physical health emergency that is impacting our kids. However, our educational systems do not reliably support programs that allow students to learn the practical skills of cooking and experience direct connections to nature in the garden, which nourish them both mentally and physically. In the schools we’ve supported, we see students who have had six years of experiences in the garden and kitchen, layered and reinforced year after year, build the skills and knowledge to cook and grow their own food- unlocking the possibility for positive health choices.

These students have also had their hands in the dirt, planting and harvesting while connecting to nature and learning in the deepest way possible about the importance and results of the choices they make. We teach every subject in the kitchen and in the garden, and the response from our students has been simply amazing. Schools, families and communities can experience true food culture transformation- the cascading results and potential inspires us!

Experiential learning crosses all human boundaries; culture, language, learning abilities and styles and is the best way, in my opinion, to create equanimity in our educational systems. 

We have tried over the years to engage school districts to step in, after years of our funding, to support the educators that we have trained and who have proven time and time again their worth to the students and school community. Unfortunately, most schools cannot find enough financial support from districts or other granting bodies necessary to keep programs like these afloat without our continued support. It is a rare success story when a school graduates from our funding with a sustained program. 

Dedicated teachers are the key to sustaining consistent programs. Volunteers, parents, teachers and students start many fantastic gardening programs- but, inevitably, they tend to fail over time without a dedicated teacher involved. It is also rare to find cooking programs in elementary schools where we do not fund- and we consider this to be an essential addition to gardening in order to help students develop real skills that build the self-efficacy they need to make nourishing choices. We provide every new school with a fully outfitted mobile cooking cart that can be used in the garden or in classrooms. This has allowed us to create a synergistic cooking and gardening curriculum that brings curiosity, wonderment, excitement and confidence to the students of our educational offering.

We are honing and focusing our program this year to collect metrics that schools can use to ask districts to obtain funding for their teachers and programs, and we hope this helps to close the gap so that all California elementary students can be on course to receive this essential experiential education. On a very hopeful note, many leaders in California politics value programs like ours and understand its potential for improving mental and physical health for our culturally diverse population.

“Survival of the fittest” is a harsh way to educate our students. Perhaps a thoughtful step back in our thinking is “thriving of the nourished.” We celebrate and appreciate all those who approach education with a focus on the need to provide nutrition to the minds and bodies of our children with equality.