After moving to Denver from Oklahoma, Matthew Suprunowicz and Isabelle Petersen noticed the surprising number of urban food deserts. Areas like Westwood, Barnum, Globeville Elyria-Swansea, Five Points, and Montbello lack access to beneficial, nutritious foods. So Suprunowicz and Petersen sought to change that by teaching young students how to produce their own. In 2018, the pair founded the nonprofit SustainEd Farms, which provides students with experimental, hands-on learning experiences.
“When I was doing Teach for America [in Oklahoma], I noticed the vast majority of my students lived in the northern area of town, no grocery stores, only Family Dollars and Dollar Generals to get groceries, and we got a small grant and we built a few garden beds as literally something to do,” Suprunowicz said. “We ended up building a garden and we got broccoli donated and my students had no idea what broccoli looked like because the only produce they had access to was literally out of a can, and so it was a shocking realization to me.”
SustainEd Farms has partnered with numerous Denver Public Schools, where they create and manage gardens on school campuses during the summer and school year, ensuring the spaces are well-kept and suitable for learning. Through SustainEd’s work with DPS and several other organizations, they’ve grown hundreds of pounds of produce that went directly to Denver families. The organization partners with community programs like Bienvenidos Food Bank, Huerta Urbana and We Don’t Waste.
“We’ll partner with a small food bank, so Bienvenidos Food Bank is a good one, and they focus on a very small community and we can make a large impact through them. One day a week over the summer our staff harvests, we organize it all together and drop it off, knock on their back door and pass it off to them,” Suprunowicz said. “We partner with Vive Wellness, which again supports a lot of refugee communities.”
With the discussion of fresh produce, comes questions of cost, as fresh produce can be expensive or unaffordable for many. Suprunowicz views healthy eating as customizable and flexible. He said eating well doesn’t have to be all or nothing, one can make small changes to be healthier.
“When someone is food insecure, they’re food insecure. I think sometimes we have this idea about what does the sustainable eater look like? Or what does a healthy eater look like? And that archetype in our mind, I don’t think is correct,” Suprunowicz said. “We should be thinking about what does healthy eating look like for me, right? But also, what does purchasing local mean to me?”
SustainEd Farms prioritizes customizing appropriate lessons for all students. The curriculum spans discussions of nutrition, indoor planting, sustainable practices such as intercropping, and lessons for younger students on what an egg even is. The broad audience of students additionally allows fundamental knowledge on sustainability, climate change and ethical food production to be planted in their minds from an early age.
“At early childhood and elementary, everyone gets everything, and then we try and offer opportunities for deeper learning,” Suprunowicz said. “At a lot of our middle schools, we have an elective, so instead of doing P.E. or Art, you can choose gardening or sustainability. In high school it goes deeper, where we’re focused on gardening and sustainability clubs—[and] what are paid and unpaid internships looking like for high school students.”
Nick Zuschneid, a program specialist for SustainEd at Denver Green School Northfield said the class is important because it helps inspire students to seek a career in agriculture and equips them for the uncertainties of food access in the future.
“I think what we’re doing in this class has really important implications for how we’re approaching climate change and food production in general,” Zuschneid said. “These kids are going to be inheriting the world that we’re creating, so they are going to be the ones addressing these issues ultimately.”
Teachers of SustainEd have been able to witness the optimistic response from students and how they take ownership of the program.
“When I first tried it, I’d never done it before and it was really fun for me,” said Ella Griswold, a student at Denver Green School Northfield. “I’ve been doing it all year this year and it’s just really fun to know more stuff about the plants and the animals, and getting to take care of them.”
Suprunowicz said it’s special to see the kids’ faces light up when they recognize an animal or plant.
“I think one of the other things that’s so special is hearing people’s connections—student’s connections—being able to say, my grandma has chickens, my dad has a farm where he lives or something,” Suprunowicz said. Kids can make connections like, ‘My mom has used this in cooking,’ or ‘I know what a radish is, that’s in my pozole.’ To have connections to what we’re doing at school allows students to feel more at home at that place, or part of their community.”
SustainEd provides students with hands-on experiences, from collecting eggs and harvesting produce to moving manure into the compost pile in the garden. The Denver Green School Northfield campus is also home to two goats and nine chickens that students get the opportunity to work and tend to, which is a highlight for many students participating in the program.
“It’s super fun to learn about sustainability because you just learn so many new things and you just get to learn a lot of real-life skills, like planting and trimming goat toes,” said Ellie Keyser, another student at Denver Green School Northfield.
The program allows students to try new things that adults often take for granted: trying a fresh tomato for the first time, getting their hands in the dirt, scrambling an egg from the chicken coop, and the happiness of giving back to their community. SustainEd is exposing students to fundamental information that will set young adults up for promoting sustainable living, food production and a healthier future.
“We try to think about it like we’re kind of receiving a field trip almost, without ever having to leave campus,” Suprunowicz said. “We shift our brains around what can a school building be for kids and to incorporate things outside of classroom walls because that can be a learning space too. We can do learning in every inch of our school building, including our gardens.”