Impact Spotlight: Rachel Black and Garden School Foundation

Almost 20 years ago, parents at 24th Street Elementary had an idea. A large area of blacktop at the school was worn out and needed to be repaved. But why replace asphalt with more asphalt when green space was already scarce in the neighborhood? 

The parents successfully lobbied the school to replace the pavement with a one-acre garden to be used not just to grow food, but as an educational and mental health resource for students. That was the beginning of the Garden School Foundation (GSF).

What started at one school has expanded to 10, all Title I elementary schools—meaning that at least 50% of their students qualify for free and reduced lunch—in LAUSD, reaching almost 3,000 students. Through Angel City’s sponsorship model, which reallocates 10% of each club sponsorship deal back into the LA community,  ACFC’s collaboration with Sprouts Farmers Market has supported GSF since 2022.

“We really work at the intersections of food justice and food access, training the next generation of environmental stewards and raising community health more broadly,” says Rachel Black, GSF’s executive director. “We do that with a bunch of different programs that are centered around the school garden.”

At the core of those programs is Seed to Table, a garden-based science and cooking education initiative that every child at GSF schools attend every other week. They spend one lesson in garden, learning garden science and social-emotional skills, and the other in the kitchen learning a recipe involving the produce grown at the school.

Altogether in the roughly two years of the ACFC/Sprouts/GSF partnership, the program has supported 476 garden and cooking classes, totaling more than 16,000 hours. 

“Public education is a great equalizer for us,” says Black. “The way to make sure that every student gets access to programming is by embedding it into the school day, so it's not an after-school program, it's not opt-in/opt-out. Every student comes through the garden twice a month.”

The Seed to Table curriculum includes grade-appropriate science, which for the youngest kids might include learning about the five senses, while older kids move on to lessons about plant anatomy, the water cycle, and human impacts on the environment. The science aspect is often what schools and teachers like most about the program. But for Black, the emotional and mental health components are just as important.

“A lot of our students don't have access to safe green spaces outside of school,” she says. “We do a lot of social-emotional learning in the garden—a lot of breathwork and meditation—and we also end all of our lessons with unstructured garden time. There's a lot of research that shows that time in nature can have a huge impact on people's mental health. So during that time, they can just sit and do absolutely nothing, they can be chatting, they can be digging for roly polys, they can be sitting under the mulberry tree—we’re really just giving them that time to connect with nature.”

In the cooking and nutrition classes, students learn a different seasonal recipe each month, based both on what’s available from the garden and on observances like Black History Month in February and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May.

“We try to make sure we have a wide range of recipes that are culturally affirming, but also allow us to introduce new things for students,” says Black. “We really try to get them to be brave tasters. There’s a lot of research on how many times a kid has to try something new before they like it, and for our community, it's not realistic to spend some of the money they've set aside for groceries on something that their kid might not like, so we try to hit some of those points in our classes, where it's exciting to try something new, but it's totally okay if you don't like it.”

Black didn’t necessarily envision herself doing this work growing up, but in retrospect, it was an obvious career choice. She grew up in Vermont with parents she says “were pretty much homesteaders.”

“We always had a big garden growing up,” she says. “There’s this picture of me as probably a five-year-old, and I'm just, like, naked in the garden, eating things. It's one of those things that explains so much of the trajectory of my life.”

She wasn’t exactly an avid gardener as a kid. “‘Forced family fun day’ was always going to work in the garden,” she laughs. “So while it wasn't my favorite activity as a child, it is something that I had a lot of knowledge about. All these things that I took for granted, not realizing that not everyone lives that way or is privileged enough to have that access in their backyard.”

When she moved to LA ten years ago and started working for GSF, she was forced to admit her parents were right. “My dad, I think, loves that all my skills from childhood are now being used in my career,” Black says. “He’s like, ‘I told you it was worth it!’”

Being outside in GSF gardens is what keeps Black grounded in the hustle and bustle of the big city. “With students in a garden space,” Black says, “you just kind of forget that you’re in this massive city.”

Seed to Table, as well as GSF’s garden work days—where adult volunteers pitch in maintaining the gardens—and the organization’s biweekly free farmers markets at 24th Street and 99th Street Elementary Schools, are supported by Sprouts Farmers Market.

New this year, Melissa’s Produce is supporting the distribution of produce to school staff, who weren’t supported by the existing farmers markets.

For Black, the best part of the job is seeing firsthand the impact GSF’s work has on kids. “The kid that comes in and is like, ‘I hate cauliflower. I will not eat it.’ Then you make a cauliflower curry together and he eats four bowls. And I'm like, ‘wow, look at you. Cauliflower is now your favorite!’”