135. Planting Change in San Antonio through Community Gardens

Cory Ames [00:00:03]:
Welcome to Big City Small Town, the podcast about the people who make San Antonio go and grow. I'm Corey Ames. Today's guest is Stephen Luckey, the founder and CEO of Gardopia Gardens, San Antonio nonprofit using gardening to improve community health, expand food access, and create safer neighborhoods. In this conversation, Stephen shares how he went from almost going to med school to building one of the city's most innovative education nonprofits. Using soil, seeds and a lot of patience, we talk about land justice, the economics of local food, and why San Antonio's future health may depend on what's.

Stephen Luckey [00:00:42]:
Growing in our backyards.

Cory Ames [00:00:43]:
Let's get into it very quickly for.

Stephen Luckey [00:00:45]:
Folks who might not be familiar. Could you introduce yourself and the work that you do?

Stephen Lucke   [00:00:50]:
Thank you for having me. My name is Stephen Luckey, and I'm CEO and founder of Gardopia Gardens. I. I am here from San Antonio, born and raised, went through the public school system, went to a local college in Kernet Word studying biochemistry. And I became aware of the health epidemics impacting our community. We were notoriously the fattest city in the United States at one point. South Texas, and the south in general has a disproportionate lack of public health support, or maybe not support, but maybe infrastructure to support healthy living and. And education and literacy.

Stephen Lucke   [00:01:28]:
And so I wanted to do something to solve that problem. And so my solution was nutrition and exercise. I have a background in nutrition. I also studied that as well. And I was a certified strength and conditioning specialist. I played collegiate sports. And so I was always really into my health, and I wanted to teach others how they could be healthy as well. But not everybody wants to go to the gym and eat salads, Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:01:50]:
So what do you do? How do you make people healthy? You can't force. Force people to eat healthy. It has to be an internal desire. And so the way that I wanted to cultivate that, I found was through nature. So I became an environmentalist. I thought that gardening was sort of the marriage of healthy eating and exercise and earth care and health and wellness and community building. And so what did I do? I started a garden at my house. I don't want to go too deep into it, but essentially that led me to starting Gardopia.

Stephen Luckey [00:02:20]:
Well, and. And you mentioned you're born in San Antonio and you decided to stay in San Antonio.

Stephen Lucke   [00:02:25]:
Yes.

Stephen Luckey [00:02:25]:
Was that ever a conscious decision for you? Was there ever a point in which you were evaluating whether you leave San Antonio, pursue work and building a career somewhere else, or did it just kind of happen that you decided to Stay?

Stephen Lucke   [00:02:38]:
Yeah. I mean, even to this day, my wife is in San Diego right now. I was just talking to her. She's on the beach. So I think about it often. Right. I don't have to be here. We don't have to be here.

Stephen Lucke   [00:02:47]:
She's not here. But, you know, I was born here for a reason, quote, unquote. And before I leave here, I want to hopefully improve it.

Stephen Lucke   [00:03:01]:
Right?

Stephen Lucke   [00:03:01]:
They say leave it better than when you found it. The golden rule is treat everybody the way you wanted to be treated. I believe in maybe the Diamond Rule of treat people even better than you want to be treated. So I want to treat my city very, very well. I believe that sometimes it's difficult for people not from the community to make that change, although there are so many people from outside of San Antonio who have had an impact on San Antonio and across the globe. But just, I guess being a hometown kid, I feel like I have a special opportunity to make that change in my lifetime. And so, you know, I may not be in San Antonio 12 months a year for the rest of my life, but it's always going to be a home base. I'm always going to have my roots here.

Stephen Lucke   [00:03:42]:
And if I can come back or if I can live here and have a healthy culture, because it's not that difficult. There are a lot of problems on our planet. There are a lot of problems in San Antonio around inequity. But I think solving the food problem is a solvable problem that many people may have the appetite for.

Stephen Luckey [00:04:01]:
Well, and before we dive into that, I'm interested about that sense of service, of contribution. I don't think everyone just comes to that. I mean, maybe people will assess like, yeah, you know, I abide by that Diamond Rule or the Golden Rule. And then, I mean, you've taken it to another level, the Diamond Rule. But was there anything in your experience growing up, or maybe it was in college or something else that you feel like instilled that sense in you to want to do something for the city that you live in, the community that you live in?

Stephen Lucke   [00:04:31]:
You know, I can't necessarily point to one thing that said I need to say San Antonio. But I'll say this. When I was graduating college, I wanted to go play collegiate sports, right? And I wasn't like a five star recruit athlete out of high school or anything. Options were limited and I didn't really even know how to navigate like the collegiate athletic sector or anything like that. But luckily, incarnate word was starting a football team. So it was easy Enough for me to walk on to the football team. It was still a D2 school. And so I went ahead and said, you know what? There's only one football team in the city, because UTSA hadn't even started theirs yet.

Stephen Lucke   [00:05:07]:
So I was like. And it was pretty close. Close to me as well. So I said, you know what, I'll go there and see if I can go ahead and play collegiate sports. So that was one thing that kept me here is having the opportunity to play college sports in my hometown and, you know, see where that goes. In addition to that, not knowing how to navigate like FAFSA and collegiate scholarships and all that type of situation. Like, I wasn't applying to out of state schools because like I said, I didn't even know the whole college industry, right? So that was another thing that probably kept me here is having a college that gave me a scholarship, right? I got the Dean scholarship one day and then I'm like, oh, dang, they're giving me money to go. It's pretty close.

Stephen Lucke   [00:05:46]:
So I guess the stars really aligned for me to go to college in San Antonio rather than going out of city or out of state. In hindsight, it would have been great to go to college in California or East coast, west coast. And I would love for other youth to be able to get out of the state because I do think you get exposure. But luckily, San Antonio is a growing city. There is opportunity here, right? And so I saw opportunity. The other thing is, when I was a little younger, I got in trouble, right? And so when I got in trouble, I sensed a lot of things that were wrong from like a legal standpoint in the criminal justice system. And so I wanted to change that, but I said, well, you can't just go and run for president one day, right? Because how do you make change? A lot of times it's through policy. I was like, before I can go to these heights, I need to prove it where I am, right? Like make.

Stephen Lucke   [00:06:36]:
Make a change in your community before you start going out and doing all these other things. So I knew that I had to follow a path of success and of proven results before I could get there. So I said, you know what? Let me make some change in my community before I go out and try to change the world.

Stephen Luckey [00:06:52]:
And so you went from football player to gardener and environmentalist. Was that change smooth for you? And did friends and family have any peculiar questions for you or went on board that?

Stephen Lucke   [00:07:07]:
Well, so I did the first year football and then I decided that I wanted to maybe protect my body a little bit longer. And so I switched to track. So track, nobody's hitting you, you just run, Right. So I switched to track my sophomore year. And when you're playing football, it's all about being bulky and eating as many calories as you can, right. And when you switch to track, you actually need to be a little bit more lean. Right. So then I actually started switching my diet to more of a plant based diet so I could be lean and mean and fast and all that type of stuff.

Stephen Lucke   [00:07:39]:
And so when I was changing my diet, that made me be more conscious about the plants that I was eating was a big part of it. And then in 2010 I took an Introduction to Nutrition class and that's when I learned about the obesity epidemic.

Stephen Lucke   [00:07:54]:
Right?

Stephen Lucke   [00:07:55]:
Learning that generation, yeah, actually generation Z. So like the 20 year olds right now, they had a lower life expectancy than their parents. And so for me that's tough. Being like a 10 year old and being behind the eight ball from birth. So learning about the health disparities in black and brown communities in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, I wanted to do something for my community. And I decided that health, specifically eating, was probably one of the biggest issues. I learned about the standard American diet and how we have highly processed carbohydrates, saturated fats, all these preservatives that are essentially are destroying our body slowly. We're spending all this money on our healthcare system, but Americans are very sick.

Stephen Lucke   [00:08:45]:
We spend the most per capita as a nation on health care. So we should have the best health, right? And changing this notion that you can't make money off of health and wellness, right? Because our healthcare system is actually a sick care system. It really doesn't address, it's not preventative. Once you're sick, you go to the doctor versus going and doing health and wellness practices, right? And we're not a Miami, we don't have a beach, we're not at Denver, we don't have the mountains, we're not a California, we don't have the redwood forest, we don't have very nice bike lanes. Maybe like in Portland, like it's very difficult to be healthy. And in San Antonio, right. There's not a culture, a built environment around health here. And it's, you know, the food, the Tex Mex, which I love breakfast tacos just as much as the next guy and gal.

Stephen Lucke   [00:09:30]:
But our diets here are essentially detrimental to us. So that's when I started to make this shift more into nutrition. But as I started learning about nutrition and where Our food comes from, and to this day is very much industrial agriculture that uses a ton of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, right? So these synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, 1 are accumulating in our body, leading to all different types of side effects, including cancer. And we also have high amounts of nitrogen that are going into the San Antonio river, making their way out to the Gulf coast and creating these dead zones and algae blooms that are destroying our ecosystem. So it went from public and physical health of the human body to realizing that we were also impacting the health of the planet. That's when I was like, okay, we have a problem, right? How are we going to solve this problem? And that's when I said, you know what? The best nutritionist is actually going to be a farmer. So I said, I need to learn how to grow food.

Stephen Luckey [00:10:32]:
And so what was that process like? Was that. Was day one something where you envisioned an organization like Guardopia, or was it first and foremost you just kind of needed to walk the walk, so to speak?

Stephen Lucke   [00:10:44]:
Yeah, well, there was two parts to it. So I was biology, pre med. I didn't have the best advisor, switched to biochemistry, was going down. Still, the med school route didn't do the best on my MCAT scores. I applied to schools probably I shouldn't have, like Yale and Harvard, and unfortunately, I did not get accepted into med school. So between not getting accepted into med school but still wanting to make a positive impact on health, I said, well, what else can I do, right? There's other things besides just being a physician around health. And so that's when I knew about food and learned about the obesity epidemic. And through a little bit of meditation and prayer during the winter break of 2011, I was like, what would I enjoy doing for the rest of my life, right? Just asking that question and be happy about.

Stephen Lucke   [00:11:32]:
And boom. Plants and gardens just popped in my head. I said, I could be a gardener. That would be fun, right? I would enjoy that. I love plants, I love nature. You know, getting out into different regions in the tropics and beaches and jungles and rainforests, right? I could really enjoy that and propagating that. And so what did I do? I started looking for jobs in nurseries. So there's Fanix Nursery and there's Rainbow Gardens and there's Milburgers and even Lowe's and Home Depot, right? So applying, applying, applying, and.

Stephen Lucke   [00:12:05]:
And then I go to UIW's website just to see what's for a work study, right? And guess what? They're Hiring a student gardener, I'm like, it's meant to be, it's meant to be. So I applied for that. Luckily I had a friend who already worked in the landscaping department and they hired me and I worked under the chief gardener starting in January 2012. That's when my nature journey began of like putting my hands in the dirt for about six months. From that point in time, I said, okay, I think I got it. And coming from a science background, I picked it up really easy because it's a lot of chemistry, it's a lot of biology right in the soil. And so I started building a garden in my front yard started and I had no clue really about like vegetable gardening mainly. Most landscaping is ornamental, right? So you have all these different types of shrubs and annuals and trees.

Stephen Lucke   [00:12:55]:
You know, most landscaping is using like steel edging and hardscaping with like stones and pavers. And so I believe that raised beds with gardens was like the way to go with vegetable gardening. So I started using like two by fours and plywood. Like it was crazy. Like, thinking back to my first garden, I was like, what was I thinking? But essentially I was able to start growing some plants. And my first plant I grew was a tomato. And I didn't even like tomatoes, but it's just growing and growing and I'm trellising it. And I had like a hundred pound tomato plant that was like 10ft tall at one point.

Stephen Lucke   [00:13:35]:
And I was like, okay. I started to see these little red things in the plant, like, what is that? Pick it off. Oh, it's a tomato. Pop it in my mouth. And at first you make that little squinty face and you're, I don't think this tastes. But then I was like, ah, it's not too bad. That was definitely when the light continued to get brighter. Realizing that I think there is a niche for, for gardening around healthy, sustainable living.

Stephen Lucke   [00:14:02]:
And I started a community garden at Incarnate Word. How I was able to do that was asking the landscaping department and the administration if I could do it. And they said, sure, you know, here's a little space that you can do. It's a little alley between two buildings. It was sort of not being taken care of very well. And I started coordinating volunteer days and doing some mini fundraising. Students started to show up. And then I saw the garden being used by, by professors even when I wasn't in the garden, right? So like the religious department and the education department and science teachers and professors were starting to use it.

Stephen Lucke   [00:14:37]:
I said, okay, this is interdisciplinary, right? Any subject can use the garden. And then I go to my professors and I say, I want to serve outside of Incarnate Word, because you're usually in a bubble when you're in university versus the real world, right? That is actually a lot of poverty and a lot of injustice going on. And they connected me to United Way of San Antonio, where they had a grant through the Housing and Urban Development hud, I want to say, with President Obama, designated promise zones. And so San Antonio is a promise zone. There's promise zones in some of the most disenfranchised, impoverished communities. I think there's one in la, I think, like Kansas City, some Native American reservations. San Antonio was one. So the city of San Antonio, United Way, San Antonio Housing Authority, Trinity University and many others had a collaboration.

Stephen Lucke   [00:15:29]:
They received $52 million, 26 million for housing, 26 million for education. And one of their metrics was health and wellness. And underneath health and wellness was access to fresh fruits and vegetables and physical activity. And so that sort of gave me my launch from being in a college atmosphere, sort of experimenting and getting small community support to getting outside into the San Antonio community and expanding the initiative. Guardopia was the idea because I guess bringing it full circle, you know, when you're in college, you have sort of this idea of making the world a better place and, you know, trying to do all these things and, and it's, it's a good idea, but where does the rubber hit the road, right? And so I said, well, when I'm in the garden, I feel like I'm in a utopia, right? Like outside of the garden it's harder to control, but inside of the garden, like you can tend to your garden every day and a lot of the worries of life sort of dissipate while you're creating your little mini utopia. And I brought it together as Gardopia.

Stephen Luckey [00:16:28]:
And so how do you feel with the way you answered that question for yourself, what you could do for the rest of your life? How do you feel with the answer that you gave yourself when you were still in college, that it and it would relate to plants, that it might relate to gardening today, especially considering, from what I understand, you're not there yet, but nearing 10 years into Gardopia, a very significant milestone. How do you feel about that answer you gave yourself now, looking backwards?

Stephen Lucke   [00:16:54]:
Yeah, well, I think it was a good intuition for sure. There are many organizations like Gardopia throughout the nation. So I didn't make up garden based learning. I didn't make up urban agriculture. You know, it happened 10,000 years ago, right, in the Tigrison Euphrates river with the Fertile Crescent and agriculture, when we went from hunter gatherers to, you know, agrarians. But that's where I think, you know, whether you, you say you know universal knowledge or universal truths, clearly this idea is recurring over and over and over again. And so I'm just thankful that the idea in the universe popped in my head. I knew that people enjoyed being outside and being in nature because we're inside all the time, right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:17:42]:
We're underneath these fluorescent lights or LEDs now, recycled air over and over again in between, you know, these small walls. And that's not natural. Humans have been outside for a long time. Like we just came in about 100 years ago. And so I knew that there could be a niche of starting a multimillion dollar organization that impacted youth and adults around education, health and the environment. I felt very confident about that. And I think it's, you know, reaffirming now where we are to this day. And we have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

Stephen Lucke   [00:18:19]:
I meet people every day who don't know about Guardopia. And so organizations like you who are helping us spread the word is important. But yeah, I think overall youth have, I think, a really unbiased perspective on life.

Stephen Lucke   [00:18:31]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:18:32]:
We haven't been inundated as much by the media as we are now, but a lot of times something that you feel as a young person, I think is maybe the right idea, but you don't necessarily have the resources and maybe the experience behind you to amplify it. Luckily, I had many professors and administrators who believed in me and really helped elevate the work that I was doing.

Stephen Luckey [00:18:56]:
So universities, I think are delightfully, in a way, like insulated. Like, it is an exciting.

Stephen Lucke   [00:19:02]:
They're little utopias, like centers. They have everything. You don't even have to leave the college, right? Yeah, you can eat at the college, you can sleep at the college, you can buy your clothes at the college, you can hang out with your friends at the college, you can go to sports games. You don't have to leave if you don't want to. And a lot of students, international students, things that sort of like, you know, that's the. It's a bubble essentially, but it's not real. So I think you learn in that bubble and you're very protected and to fail and trial and error, but then when you get out into the real world, that bubble and that, that soft landing isn't necessarily there anymore.

Stephen Lucke   [00:19:36]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:19:36]:
And people aren't as forgiving as they may be in the educational and the academic world.

Stephen Luckey [00:19:41]:
Yeah.

Stephen Lucke   [00:19:42]:
But luckily, United Way and they connected me to the Ella Austin Community center, which is a historical community center on the east side of San Antonio that has a mission of uplifting the community. So Ella Austin and the St. Phillips College, you know, allowing us to work with the youth. So they had an after school program. They have an after school program. You have United Way, who has some funding to support these initiatives. So we were able to build a garden, and we got the football team out, we got the sustainability club out, we had the landscaping department out, and we built them a garden. This was in the fall of 2013.

Stephen Lucke   [00:20:19]:
So a year later. So in fall of 2012, I built the UIW Community Garden. One year later, we built the Ella Austin's Children vegetable garden. Fall of 2013, I volunteered there for about two years. So just volunteering myself. And Dr. Jeffrey Crane, one of the professors, he's an environmental historian who had done a lot of this work in Houston, and he's actually from Washington as well. He had been very well involved in this work for decades, published, you know, written books.

Stephen Lucke   [00:20:48]:
And so he was able to sort of be a mentor for me as well and show me how we could continue elevating this work. After I volunteered for a couple of years, St. Philip's College had a grant for the after school program. And they said, hey, you want to teach science twice a week using the garden? And I was like, heck, yeah. So those little victories kept pushing me along, kept pushing me along to be able to still be a student. So I graduated and I became a graduate student studying nutrition. I was a graduate student in the athletics department. I was a strength and conditioning ga.

Stephen Lucke   [00:21:24]:
So I worked with all of the teams providing nutrition education, stretching, you know, aerobic improvement. And then from there, in 2015, I was personal training and I bartered with my lawyer. Not my lawyer, actually. I was personal training him. He was a lawyer. So I said, hey, man, if I train you for free, will you do my paperwork? And he was like, all right, let's do it. So in 2015, he helped file my paperwork. And again, just little things came together that I think whether you call it God, Allah, Brahma, chi, the universe, whatever you believe in or don't believe in was aligning well for me to be able to succeed and be able to push forward in this goal of mine, of this life mission, of turning around the health of San Antonio.

Stephen Lucke   [00:22:14]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:22:14]:
If I can take San Antonio from Being one of the least healthiest cities to being one of the healthiest cities, you know, that would be an achievement and it would be a model that maybe could be replicated right throughout the nation. I can't speak for outside of the United States because every country has different dynamics, Right. But I do understand, I think, American culture pretty well. And so if we can create a culture shift, you know, the idea is it can happen, and it is happening. But in regards to your initial question about that installation, sort of dissolving. It did, but at the same point in time, the community really embraced this work, really from the get go.

Stephen Luckey [00:22:53]:
Do you feel like that the solution you're offering is really developed some new curves, some new nuance, some new colors. Since you started Guardopia on day one, what's changed in your understanding and therefore what Guardopia provides based off of what you've learned over nearing a decade?

Stephen Lucke   [00:23:11]:
Yeah, it has changed. When it first started, it was really more wellness based, right. And wellness has different dimensions, right? So there's like your physical health, your spiritual health, your emotional health, your financial health, your family. Like there's all these different components. There's like between who you talk to, like 8 to 12 dimensions of A, of a human.

Stephen Lucke   [00:23:31]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:23:32]:
And we're supposed to be balanced in that wellness wheel. And if you have really good financial wellness, but your health, your physical health isn't good, that's an unbalanced wheel, Right. So we have to make sure that we're balanced in both of those. And I guess, you know, where I am trying to go from this is it was more wellness based and then it slowly shifted into education, Right. Because in order for you to understand wellness, you need to be educated. And I had amazing board members. I can also speak to my chief operations officer, Dominic Dominguez, who I met at Ella Austin.

Stephen Lucke   [00:24:10]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:24:11]:
And so he and I spent countless evenings here in Geekdom on the seventh and eighth floor in the Duck Hunt room. I forget what it's called now. I think it's called like the float me room or something, you know, till 2, 3am at night. I would be up there for a while. I'd finally just be so tired sleeping on one of these tables. I would go down into my truck, pop the seat back and just sleep for about four or five hours, wake up at 8am, drive to drive to work, wherever I had to go. So it did evolve, but at the core of it, it's always been health and the environment. I think the educational component really became well rounded, especially as I Became more educated.

Stephen Lucke   [00:24:50]:
In 2016, I took the master. Was it 2016? I want to say yeah, 2016, I took the master gardener course, class of 61. And then right after I finished the master gardener course, I enrolled at Palo Alto College and I took their organic farming certification. So I continued my education so that I could be more knowledgeable. And as I became more knowledgeable, then I could become more that professor of giving people that knowledge as well. And came to the point, you know, in 2019, we got a contract with Morgan's Wonderland and ACOG, Alamo Area Council of Governments, and we partnered with Alamo Colleges where I essentially was an adjunct for them teaching a ten week learning course.

Stephen Lucke   [00:25:33]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:25:33]:
So that was a good validation. In 2018, Commissioner Tommy Calvert nominated us and we won a non profit of the year award. And then the pandemic hit in 2020, and my phone starts ringing off the hook for people who want home gardens, because the kids are at home, the adults are at home, and they're looking in their backyard and they're looking for things to do. They want to get outside.

Stephen Lucke   [00:25:55]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:25:56]:
Get fresh air. And validation after validation, year after year, it continued to grow. And so we have evolved. In 2015, the San Antonio Housing Authority reached out and they said, hey, we have a vacant lot.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:08]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:09]:
So I went from being able to build gardens at schools and community centers to having a physical micro farm, and that's grown as well. So as we have grown as an organization in like the theoretical or in the intangible side of things, we have a physical property also growing with us.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:26]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:27]:
And you can see that change if you go to Google Maps of what we've been able to do.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:31]:
Very cool.

Stephen Luckey [00:26:31]:
And I'd love to talk more about the physical space in a second. But I'm curious, why do you think it was your phone ringing and you know, is Commissioner Calvert nominating your nonprofit? It's not like these things just happened by. There's a bit of serendipity that happens in all of this.

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:48]:
Right.

Stephen Luckey [00:26:48]:
But why do you feel like you and Guardopia were really well positioned to one get these opportunities and then execute on them in such an effective way?

Stephen Lucke   [00:26:58]:
Yeah, well, you know, sometimes people say, what? I'd rather be good than lucky. And I understand that. I like being lucky. And I saw. Yeah, yeah. Well, I saw a definition of luck. Luck is preparation and opportunity. You can be super prepared and never get that chance.

Stephen Lucke   [00:27:17]:
You can get that chance and you're not prepared.

Stephen Lucke   [00:27:19]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:27:19]:
Like somebody could be like, hey, you know, the spurs need an extra player, you know, if you haven't been shooting your free throws and training, you got the opportunity, you're not ready to ball. Or you could be one of the best ballers in the world, but maybe you're in Del Rio, Texas, or maybe you're freaking, you know, in South America, in the Amazon and nobody knows about you, right? It's going to be tough to make it to that, that highest level. So I have been preparing myself, right, over time. I went to college, I continued my degrees, and at the same point in time, when Saha called me, I was ready.

Stephen Lucke   [00:27:50]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:27:51]:
When Commissioner Calvert nominated us, we had our website. People could see our track record. When the news channel calls, I have a school that they can come to and see the progress.

Stephen Lucke   [00:28:01]:
Right?

Stephen Lucke   [00:28:01]:
So I think that those two things combined. And I was always persistent, understanding that even though the money wasn't there, I still believed. So never losing the faith that it was a good idea and it was just a matter of time. And if you can be patient, and that's, I think, something that garden teaches you is the patience to not want something to happen immediately. And when you plant that seed, not every seed grows. But if you're patient and you keep watering that seed, before you know it, you could have, you know, a tree that is huge and is providing shade and nature and habitat and ecosystem services. So nature taught me to be patient, but nature also showed me that there's failure and there's success. Success.

Stephen Lucke   [00:28:44]:
And so we can learn a lot from nature. Nature, I think, is the greatest teacher.

Stephen Luckey [00:28:48]:
Absolutely. Well, and let's talk about the micro farm. Can you tell us a little bit about the location specifically? And I understand you didn't have the farm location since day one of Gardopia. How did it come about acquiring the property? And we can talk about the evolution since then.

Stephen Lucke   [00:29:05]:
Yeah. January of 2012, 2013, 2014. I'm doing this work. My friends in college are seeing it. My friends that I grew up with, they're seeing it. Everybody's like, man, you're doing good work.

Stephen Lucke   [00:29:17]:
Awesome.

Stephen Lucke   [00:29:18]:
You know, I'd love to come and see Guardopia. I was like, well, unless you're like a second grader or a third grader, you can't really see Guardopia, right? Because Guardopia wasn't a physical space. Guardopia was a program happening in educational institutions. But I knew we needed a place, right, for people to come to. I knew that was necessary. So I would be driving around town and I would see vacant lots and like, man, that would Be a good place for Guardopia. That would be a good place for Gardopia. And luckily, very soon, five months after we officially were founded as a nonprofit, I get a ring like, hey, is this Stephen with Gardopia? We want to start a community garden.

Stephen Lucke   [00:29:53]:
We heard that you might be the guy to help us with that. I was like, heck yeah. You know, so this is about 12, 13, 14. So almost four years in. Almost four years into the idea that now a physical space is sort of starting to manifest. And SAHA had got a grant from the Department of Justice to reduce crime along some of the east side corridors. New Braunfels, Geever's, Walters, right? And they had a burn grant and it was about $600,000. They got more police officers, boots on the ground.

Stephen Lucke   [00:30:27]:
They did drug raids with councilman Alan Wark. They did a shot spotter technology so they could track a gunshot within a one mile radius. And somebody, not somebody, but William Miles and Brooke Crenshaw had the idea to implement crime prevention through environmental design, also known as cpted, which is an evidence based practice that's used internationally. They're Septed International. They brought down some trainers to train some local leaders in septad. And some of those concepts are just cleaning up vacant lots, right? Maybe planting some trees, putting in some benches, putting some lights in, maybe doing a movie night activation cookouts. It's a pretty simple idea. It's community building really.

Stephen Lucke   [00:31:07]:
And so they said, let's do it with a community garden. At one of the highest crime intersections in the city on Nolan and New Braunfels. I believe a young man was shot and killed after MLK March in 2015. You know, all the symptoms of poverty that exist, right? There's a lot of symptoms of poverty. And so, you know, trying to address prostitution or trying to address gun violence or trying to address homelessness, right? But really these are symptoms of poverty that have been created actually. There's enough housing, there's enough food, there's enough education, there's enough money for everybody. But these symptoms have been created mainly from the genocide of the indigenous population and the enslavement of Africans, right? And black and brown folks are still in the most poverty in this country. Not to say that there isn't rural white Americans that are also poor and.

Stephen Lucke   [00:31:58]:
But a lot of them may have land, right? And be land rich as well. So even those resources are decreased. In the black population, 97 to 98% of agricultural land is owned by white Americans. And so because of that disparity, a lot of times Folks on the east side, maybe west side, maybe don't have a place to call home, right? And so that leads to different things, and it leads to more and more problems, starts to propagate on itself. So this vacant lot was an example of that, right? And it's in Miami, it's in, you know, New York, it's in la. Like, poverty exists everywhere. So it's not specific to San Antonio, but because it exists, they wanted to address it. And I said, all right, y', all, let's.

Stephen Lucke   [00:32:39]:
Let's start a community garden. And Gardopia was not started to fight crime, right? That was not. That's not the goal of Gardopia, but it is a side effect of putting in a garden. It creates a safe space. It does. It creates a safe space for families and youth and adults to come to and to enjoy. And essentially, we are encouraging a healthy habit, a healthy behavior, right? Instead of maybe hanging out in the back alley and doing drugs, you're hanging out, which is used to be an alley, but now there's bees, you know, and you're. You're in a bee suit and you're harvesting bees, or you're in a greenhouse and you're propagating seedlings.

Stephen Lucke   [00:33:17]:
And that transformation of that property and actually has reduced crime or calls for service by 90%. So this is a ecosystem service, but actually this is a human service to SAPD because now they're having to come to that lot 90% less of the time, right? Which is allowing them to focus on real crime, right? To focus on people who are maybe stealing or shooting and all that type of stuff, right? Where they need to be, versus a call for service because a guy is in the back maybe causing some mischief, right? So that physical space started out as a couple of raised beds, and then it started out with some more fruit trees and then composters and then an outdoor kitchen and then a greenhouse. And little by little, we sort of patchworked it together because I didn't have any money. That was the biggest thing. Again, talking about bipoc communities, not owning land and not having access to land, I fell in that category of not having money for land. And so it was just an idea. It was a good idea. But unless you have the tangible assets to manifest that idea, then people are, oh, cool idea.

Stephen Lucke   [00:34:21]:
So Saha coming in and negotiating a land use agreement with the owners, allowing me and my team to be able to implement what we knew we could do. And we had already. I had already done at Incarnate Word. I had already Done at Ella Austin. Now we could do it on a bigger scale. And that was, yeah, really, I think, a game changer for all of San Antonio to be able to see it with their own eyes and feel it and touch it and plant it.

Stephen Luckey [00:34:49]:
Well, and, I mean, it seems like the facts and figures seem to speak for it as well. Do you feel like that is well known enough?

Stephen Lucke   [00:34:59]:
I think it's getting there. But San Antonio is a big city, right? 1.5 million, maybe 2 million in the metro. We started out at one spot and then two spots, three spots. I still meet people who don't know about Guardopia.

Stephen Lucke   [00:35:12]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:35:12]:
Not everybody's on social media, not everybody watches the news, not everybody's on the east side. So we still have work to be done. But I feel like quite a few folks know about us. I think a lot of the institutional folks and organizations and public sector knows about us. And little by little, the private sector is learning about us as well. And. And then the community also. So we're there.

Stephen Lucke   [00:35:37]:
But I would say we're. We're scratching the surface. Maybe 10 to 20% of San Antonio knows about us at the moment. We still have work to do about that crime data I talked to you about. Like, we haven't published that anywhere. We're hoping to be able to meet with SAPD and, you know, the Bexar County Sheriff's Department and look at getting funded for crime prevention.

Stephen Lucke   [00:35:58]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:35:59]:
Because we can work hand in hand to reduce crime and create a healthier, safer community.

Stephen Luckey [00:36:05]:
But you mentioned that wasn't the primary reason that go to RP was started. So what are the measurements of success for y' all as an organization? What sort of impacts are you looking at year after year?

Stephen Lucke   [00:36:16]:
Well, of course, people impacted.

Stephen Lucke   [00:36:18]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:36:18]:
So we want to impact as many people as we can. So number of volunteers, number of students that we are teaching are critical components. Another part is green space stewarded.

Stephen Lucke   [00:36:31]:
Right?

Stephen Lucke   [00:36:32]:
So we're taking spaces that were maybe lawns and maybe would have been paved over at some point, and we're preserving that green space. Right? So essentially, ecosystem restoration and biodiversity is really key. Another component of that is food grown, right? How much food are we growing? And most of our plots are little. So we don't have, like, acres and acres and acres of land. So it's not feasible for us to grow 100,000 pounds of food, you know, but growing a thousand or 10,000 is more than there would have been in those spaces. And then healthy cooking demonstrations.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:08]:
Right?

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:08]:
So teaching people how to cook food and how to eat healthy items is important. Physical activity.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:15]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:15]:
So getting the kids outside.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:17]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:17]:
Sometimes recess is taken away, especially once you get into middle and high school. So making sure that our kids are getting more physical activity is really important for us. You know, even 30 extra minutes a day makes a difference. So those are just a few of the metrics that we're looking at currently. We create a lot of content also on our social media platforms and so at a national or a global level, expanding our reach.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:42]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:37:43]:
The more educational content that is being absorbed by people, hopefully we're empowering them and educating them to create a sustainable society.

Stephen Luckey [00:37:52]:
And so is anything changing for you as to what the North Stars are for Guardopia? What feels like the next level for y'? All? Yeah, well, we actually nearing a decade.

Stephen Lucke   [00:38:01]:
Yeah, we're about to hit a decade. Yeah. There's two big things. We just got a USDA grant, so our first federal grant. It's called a farm to school grant. And so essentially the USDA of course is promoting agriculture and they want school systems to be buying more food from local farmers. But you have to start upstream.

Stephen Lucke   [00:38:18]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:38:18]:
We need to start teaching people food literacy, food safety, where their food comes from, tying it to the teks, which is the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. So our curriculum, which essentially we took multiple evidence based curriculums because University of Cornell, Texas A&M AgriLife, the edible schoolyard, the University of California system. Right. There's a ton of really vetted curriculums and we created something that we felt culturally appropriate for San Antonio, for Texas and fit within the TEA as well, Texas Educational Agency. And it's worked out well. And so we applied for a grant essentially to take that curriculum that is mainly text based and picture based and make it into videos, very short videos. Our inspiration was sort of Ms. Rachel, if you've ever seen that.

Stephen Lucke   [00:39:05]:
You said you have some songs.

Stephen Luckey [00:39:06]:
I'm familiar.

Stephen Lucke   [00:39:07]:
Yeah. You know, Ms. Rachel, she's, she's banking. So if we could essentially create very high quality entertaining videos for kids, then that's going to expand our impact. So that was a validation and affirmation that we're on the right path and that's going to allow us to work with over seven school districts. We're actually working with 11 school districts currently. But we're going to be bringing together seven school districts to curate this content. And then that should be able to be scaled citywide because there's over 16 public school districts in Bexxar County.

Stephen Lucke   [00:39:37]:
That's not including the charter schools and the private Schools and the daycares, Right. So our curriculum essentially could be deployed and impact maybe 300,000 plus children by the end of the decade. So that's really fun and exciting to see because that would be the goal every kid in San Antonio is receiving. Garden based learning. The second component to that is land justice, which I spoke about a little earlier, and helping urban farmers and bipoc farmers begin to find a space and create an ecosystem and really industry of farming in the San Antonio metro.

Stephen Lucke   [00:40:11]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:40:11]:
So within Bexar county or the surrounding counties, we want to see could we grow 10 to 25% of what we consume in the city. So the city of Austin has done multiple food system reports showing that most of the food, 99% of the food consumed in Austin or more is imported into the city. So that means that this region is food insecure. And so from the climate adaptation and action plan, from the SA Tomorrow plan and even the essay forward with Metro Health, all of them have food security, protecting local food security, making sure communities have access to healthy, fresh food, reducing food insecurity by 5%. We know that food and the prices of food are inflating over and over, right? So something that used to cost a dollar could be $1.69 or more. Now that's a really high rate. When you start thinking about if you have four kids or two kids or a grandma or uncle or whoever, you know, if you're taking care of your food bill went from $100 a week to 200. For folks that don't have an expendable income, that's tough.

Stephen Lucke   [00:41:11]:
And so we want to grow more food locally. We're going to drive down the prices, we're going to increase the nutritional bioavailability of those concentrated nutrients. We're going to reduce food miles, which is essentially reducing our carbon footprint. We're going to keep money in the ecosystem, right? So we're going to create the circular economy and we're going to bring the community together. So us owning land is really important so that we can hopefully stimulate the opportunity for urban farm incubators where people essentially apprentice us for maybe 16 to 32 weeks. We like to pay them maybe 15 to $20 an hour for about 20 hours a week. And that will allow them to learn underneath us, create a little bit of income. And then at the end of that apprenticeship, they would be able to get a plot of their own, you know, maybe a quarter acre, maybe an acre or even more.

Stephen Lucke   [00:41:59]:
And now these farmers markets that are really artisan markets would actually have Farmers that could have all this produce. And I think we could create a really robust local food system.

Stephen Luckey [00:42:09]:
What do you feel like are the biggest barriers for us to getting there to a more localized food system? Is it just purely execution for you or do you think there's other things that we aren't considering that are standing in the way?

Stephen Lucke   [00:42:20]:
It's land and money is what it comes down to. So becoming a farmer is, is. Can be expensive. I couldn't afford that land, right?

Stephen Luckey [00:42:28]:
Especially land within the city.

Stephen Lucke   [00:42:30]:
Within the city, yeah. It's very expensive. And then I couldn't have afforded the tools, I couldn't have afforded the materials. So if it wasn't for Saha, I couldn't have done it. They gave me. They gave us year one eight thousand. Year two, they gave us seven thousand plus close to $5,000 in tools. So that was $20,000 in startup costs.

Stephen Lucke   [00:42:49]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:42:49]:
That I didn't have. And in this day and age, that 20,000 startup cost is maybe 40,000 in startup costs. So there needs to be the startup costs paid for and then there needs to be the land component. I think the education is here. There's Guardopia, there's Agri Life, there's the Food bank, there's Palo Alto College. So I think we have the educational infrastructure. I think we need to have the tangible assets and the financing behind it to get folks started.

Stephen Lucke   [00:43:15]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:43:15]:
And so if those two things can come together with private landowners and public land, which it is. The city of San Antonio actually gave the Food Policy Council $60,000 to provide grants to aspiring or existing urban farmers. They were looking at land. What we found is that the land that the city has the price tag to get that land up to shovel ready is could be six figures or more because it may not be connected to water. There might be some cleanup of it. Right. You may even need to pave in a road or something to be able to access it. So.

Stephen Lucke   [00:43:46]:
So we're still figuring out that piece, but I see the city dipping their toes in it. And then Commissioner Calvert actually received almost 12 million to start a 10 acre urban farm on the east side as well with Texas A and M AgriLife. So it's called the Greenies. And they are essentially going to have they, as in Texas A and M AgriLife, their headquarters are going to be located in there. And it's going to be a state of the art farm where we can really showcase that San Antonio can be a leader in urban agriculture because of the amount of sunlight that we get. And Moderate rain and water conservation techniques. We can grow a lot of food. And we used to actually, we used to grow a lot of food.

Stephen Lucke   [00:44:23]:
There is a lot of farmland around us. The temperatures, even though people like it super hot okra, southern peas, even watermelons and pumpkins, they can take the heat. And so I think the ingredients are there. We just need the chef to start cooking more and more. And the chef, it can't just be one chef. It's going to be multiple chefs. And then it's going to need to be restaurateurs, AKA the leaders in the community, who really have access to the purse.

Stephen Lucke   [00:44:48]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:44:49]:
And have access to the land. They can say, hey, let's let this move forward.

Stephen Luckey [00:44:53]:
And as San Antonio is growing and changing so much, Stephen, from the context of our food system, do you feel like on a wide scale, city wide scale, there's questions that aren't being asked that you think people should be asking more? From the perspective of how our food system changes and it develops with likewise very rapidly changing population.

Stephen Lucke   [00:45:15]:
In San Antonio, I think the general population is unaware of the food system. I think most people think, oh, I go to HEB, I get my food, I go to McDonald's, I get my food system. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Like grocery stores. And so because we've been disconnected from our food system, we have no clue where it comes from. And so there needs to be an education about that is really important. If people know about the food system and they know how food impacts their body, then I think San Antonio will make more conscious decisions on how we consume. Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:45:45]:
And the consumption of food from getting it from California, from growing corn for ethanol, from growing corn for. And sorghum and wheat for animal feed.

Stephen Lucke   [00:45:54]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:45:55]:
From having the cattle and having to ship those cattle all around the world.

Stephen Lucke   [00:45:59]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:46:00]:
If we start to become more aware, there's a very low awareness right now. So we need to raise the awareness is probably the biggest component of it. In addition to raising the awareness, I think there also needs to be massive campaigns around what a circular economy looks like, what a sustainable economy looks like, because a lot of us are spending our dollars in a way that encourages the continuation of unsustainable lifestyles. So education is really the key part to it, civic engagement as well, because we need to show up. The city has the budget survey every year, right. How many people are really participating in that survey? How many of the same people are submitting over and over and over again and swaying the. Swaying the vote, right? You probably have like the police union and the fire, union and other organizations who are very organized.

Stephen Lucke   [00:46:55]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:46:55]:
And they're like, yo, all of us, Boom. So now the police budget is the biggest budget.

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:00]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:00]:
In our general budget. When. Well, why not our food system?

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:04]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:05]:
The food system in the city of San Antonio budget is very small. Why is that? Well, maybe the government says the food system isn't our responsibility, but if the people tell you it's their responsibility, then it is your responsibility. And I think we, the people need to get up and have our voice be heard a little bit more, get more organized. Organized, yeah, it's very. That's the point. San Antonio for city Politics has a 10% participation rate in the voting.

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:31]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:47:32]:
In 2017 and 2019. So if 10% of the people are making decisions for 90% of the people, it's going to be very skewed in the way that dollars are budgeted.

Stephen Luckey [00:47:43]:
Absolutely. Well, Steven, I appreciate you taking the time. I'm sure there's a lot more places we could go, and perhaps this is the first conversation of many. But for folks who are interested in getting connected with Guardopia, what are the best places to go to? What do you recommend they check out first and foremost to keep up with you and your organization?

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:01]:
Yeah. Well, if you're on social media, you can follow us. Ardopia Gardens, you can go to our website, gardopiagardens.org we got YouTube. We're on LinkedIn. In addition to that, we're on the east side of San Antonio, right by the HEB on Houston and North New Braunfels on 619 North New Braunfels. We are at a ton of schools. We're at over 55 schools. Schools.

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:22]:
We're at about five community gardens. Volunteer opportunities every single Saturday. And if your company or civic group wants to volunteer with us, we can set aside a special volunteer day for you to get your hands dirty. Because I think it's about touching the dirt.

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:36]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:37]:
There's a. There's this idea of grounding. Earth has an electromagnetic field from that iron core.

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:42]:
Right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:48:42]:
And so sometimes that can't make it through our shoes. But when you start touching earth and touching the soil and there's actually scientific evidence pointing to the reduction of stress, there's bacteria in the soil that affect our microbiome. So I would say just plant something. Don't be afraid. A lot of folks, you know, I say they don't have a green thumb. But again, talking about that patience to grow, literally and figuratively. And yeah, hopefully we'll see folks out in the garden sooner than later.

Stephen Luckey [00:49:11]:
Awesome. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for the time.

Stephen Lucke   [00:49:14]:
All right.

Stephen Lucke   [00:49:14]:
Adios, y'. All.

Cory Ames [00:49:19]:
Thanks for listening to or watching this episode of Big City Small Town Town. If you enjoyed it, please send it to a friend, share it with a colleague, helping us to keep telling San Antonio's most meaningful stories. And if you haven't yet, sign up for the San Antonio Something, my weekly newsletter where I share things to do, places to explore, and people to get to know in this city. Just head to coriames.com to subscribe. Also, be sure to check out Monday Musings, Bob Rivard's weekly newsletter at bigcity small town.com Big City Small Town is brought to you by Weston Urban Building, the city our children want to call home, and by Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses.

Stephen Luckey [00:50:02]:
Thanks again. We'll see you next time.