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Kimbal Musk Plans to Bring “Learning Gardens” to Scale

Danielle Holly
January 22, 2018
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Picture from Inhabitat.

January 17, 2018; Business Insider

Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, is bringing his mission to expand access to fresh produce and nutrition to scale. His Denver-based nonprofit, Big Green, is opening 100 “learning gardens” in Detroit in April, after successfully expanding to Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other cities across the country.

Big Green was launched as Learning Gardens in 2011, partnering with local Colorado schools and philanthropists to build outside gardens that served as classrooms for children to learn about science, the environment, and nutrition. Studies have shown that these types of outdoor experiential learning programs improve student social and emotional development, test scores, and overall health. Despite the broad sweeping positive outcomes, they are still a fairly rare component of classroom learning. Often considered outside the core curriculum, they are the last programs to get funded. If they are funded, it is often by parents in private, wealthier schools, such as The Waldorf School in Boston. They’re rare in the underfunded public school system, and an afterthought in test-and-results driven charter schools. Local nonprofits, such as Learning Gardens and Boston-based CitySprouts, have tried to make these programs more accessible to public school and low-income students.

In Musk’s opinion, those are the students who need these programs the most. Junk food, he states, is “funneled to low income communities” as cheap calories, and results in early unhealthy practices and severe long-term health issues for kids.

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In some low-income communities, nearly 40 percent of kids will go into kindergarten [overweight or] obese. That’s just unforgivable. That’s not something they did to themselves—it’s something we did to them. It’s time that we realize that it’s a human right to understand what we are putting in our bodies.

In Musk’s recent announcement of his ambitious plans for Big Greens, he shares the story of a Chicago girl who, after “getting her hands dirty” in a South Side learning garden, reversed the pre-diabetic diagnosis she was given by a doctor earlier that year.

Musk is setting his sights on all 100,000 schools in the country, appealing to donors, educators, and parents to support his vision of real food education. To date, his expansion has been fueled by local companies and donors, such as Gordon Food Service, the Pistons, and philanthropist Carole Ilitch in Detroit. One of the largest questions facing Musk on his determined path will be how to soften the mold of the public education system and integrate this garden-style learning so it may sustain itself beyond the energy of impassioned donors.—Danielle Holly

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danielle Holly

Danielle Holly is dedicated to strengthening the capacity and leadership of the nonprofit sector through meaningful, value-driven partnerships. Over the past two decades, Danielle has worked with hundreds of nonprofits and companies to support the conception, design and implementation of cross-sector approaches that address community challenges. She is a frequent contributor to several social sector publications on nonprofit capacity building, governance and corporate social responsibility, as well as a member of the NationSwell Council and host of the Pro Bono Perspectives podcast. Currently, Danielle is the CEO of Common Impact, an organization that designs skills-based volunteer, pro bono and corporate community engagement programs. She has served on the Board of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network and Net Impact NYC, and most recently as a fellow with the Presidio Cross-Sector Leadership initiative. Danielle lives in Brooklyn, NY and loves to explore the nooks and crannies of NYC’s endless neighborhoods, and end the days cooking with her husband and two children.

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