Interview with Community Activist and Disrupter Tomas O'Grady, Co-Founder of Enrich LA

 

Website/Blog: http://enrichla.org/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EnrichLA/

Summary

Every child in every school in this city ought to experience the joy of growing, harvesting, preparing and eating simple whole foods. We are making that happen.

Describe what your organization does

Enrich LA is a non-profit, we build edible gardens for public schools throughout the city and then we have our garden ranger program within those gardens so basically we are bringing edible gardens to kids all across the city and as of last Saturday we are at garden number 97 in the city and we have our program in 62 schools, that means we have a garden ranger, a garden educator, a garden hippie in the school every week for half a day delivering all of our stuff which is gardening, eating healthy, being out of the classroom, reconnecting with earth and having a little bit of fun.

What was it like when you first started?

Actually it all started over at King Middle School in Los Feliz, we were all at Franklin Elementary and Justine (his wife) and I went over to the Principal at King and we said our daughter is graduating Franklin and we need to get a middle school and frankly yours sucks and she's like thanks for that but why don't you help us? It was Dr. Kristen Murphy at the time, so we brainstormed a little and we came up with the idea to build a garden to improve the schools image. We got a few grants from the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council, put it together on a Sunday and Council Member Tom LaBonge showed up and we had about a hundred people there and we built the garden in one day and it was that edible garden that became the warning shot for the Renaissance of King Middle School to sort of say we're going to start making it better, we're going to start building on the successes it already had with its first magnet and lo and behold, a few years later King is one of the most popular middle schools in the city, all magnet which includes Arts and Tech, Film / Media Arts and Environmental, you have in my opinion a pretty super staff and parent involvement and of course a thriving edible garden. Edible gardens not only do no harm they actually in some cases cause disruption and cause enthusiasm and sort of involvement where there might not have been there before. With Enrich La. we don't advertise, principals call us, I remember one principal saying to me at Alta Loma, I want an edible garden, I don't know if I want an edible garden but maybe that's what we should do to get a little spark back in our school.

Did you hear about anybody doing this anywhere else in the country or the world?

Well of course, I read "The Edible Schoolyard" by Alice Waters and know about their edible garden project in Berkeley and of course they're ahead of the game but then again they're ahead of the game with everything and about this thing of having schools be less concrete, less asphalt and a little bit more green, a little bit more leafy, it's no accident that UCLA looks as beautiful as it does in the middle in the quad because obviously they're very smart people over there that recognize that green educational institutions don't hurt education but they help it and I would say that building schools like prisons clearly hurt the experience for students. I am from a farm, I grew up on a farm in Ireland so for me it's just that given the beautiful weather that we have here in L.A. it seems ridiculous that kids are not gardening because basically you want to be an idiot if you can't garden in the city, all you need to do is add water.

Did you have any idea when you started the ramifications it would create and how big it would get?

I didn't think it would get this big, but I did have a feeling that the ramifications would be large because there's a lot of apathy within the school system, I felt that schools needed some kind of disrupter, something to cause a little bit of trouble, to cause the would be innovators on the school sites to sort of see, if they see an edible garden being built and growing then they feel well if they can do that maybe I'll try this particular thing again or I'll try something else. And I really think that at King Middle School that has happened. I remember after we built the garden a teacher there came out and said "wow, there's a garden, well, you know what, I'm going to bring my class out to the garden." And then 18 months later we had created the Environmental Studies Magnet which was the second magnet at the school. I didn't anticipate it but I feel that any of these things that are disruptive by nature on a school this size are only helpful and God knows disruption is needed.

The interesting thing is that it's disruption by introducing nature.

By turning it back to where the site used to be before we built on it. In fact at King Middle School today there's a teacher called David Egeler who was plotting and searching for the original dry stream bed that are on that site and has been rebuilding them. He's found old maps and watching the rainfall and he's trying to bring back the site the way it used to be.

How do you bring it back and then what happens?

Think of Los Angeles before it was paved, we had rain, the land would take that rain and it would filter into the aquifer and that's why Los Angeles was settled, because it was an oasis, we had lots of water in the water table, then we paved it and then we had the floods of the 1930's and then in their genius they decided to pave the river itself and so basically any rainwater gets directed to the river quickly and then all that water rushes into the ocean, we lose all that rainwater and it takes all the garbage along with it and then pollutes the ocean. So, as we start to rip out the asphalt and create more porous places along the city and school sites are perfect, you have almost a 1000 sites in the city, you are creating porous areas where the rain goes in, that water is filtering into the water table, then you're creating plants right there and you're literally beautifying it and don't forget by doing all this you're wilding up these school sites and you're making it a little bit softer. I mean you take one child sitting in a prison landscape, chain link fence, wall to wall asphalt and you take another child who is in this lush, leafy, shaded landscape with shrubs and even some water after a rainstorm, I mean who do you think is going to be happier for goodness sakes? To me it's a no brainer. Also as you introduce gardens and do all these things you are reducing noise. We have a lot of schools along the 110 corridor and I remember when I was sketching the garden for West Vernon Elementary I remember there was something that was upsetting me there and I didn't know what it was, finally I stopped for a second and I realized it was the freeway noise you could hear it, it was constant all the time and a continual sound like that can only hurt you over time and I can only imagine how it affects your sense of peace and well being.

You were on the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council and you ran for Los Angeles City Council twice, do you think you'd ever run again?

I don't think so, first running for political office (laughs) is pretty tough, it's really tough and the problem is it's so easy to run for political office a lot of folks do it and when you're in the middle of it, it's crazy, so much work, it's an extreme invasion of your privacy and your family's privacy and it's very difficult to win unless you're, you have to play the game for years to be part of the inner circle of politicians and they assist you as you run for office, if you're running as an independent, in as you haven't been playing the political game for years, you are somewhat shunned, you don't get any of their help and you are on your own. It's kind of stacked against neighborhood people who simply want to run for office to serve, you don't have the infrastructure in place. However I do encourage lots of people to run, it's a privilege and people should run, they should engage and mix it up a little and disrupt it a little.

What has surprised you most about this endeavor?

I wasn't surprised to find out that this city does tend to talk too much, talk about what a child's education should be, talk about how green Los Angeles should be, how innovative we should be, how world class we should be and I'm afraid to say that in contrast to New York city they're a little bit less talk with more execution. I am simply a farmer from the West of Ireland and frankly if it took me to come to build, me and a group of people that I gathered together to come and build the school gardens that's a little bit strange, we've been talking about it forever. So, the first thing is a little too much bureaucracy, a little too many people wanting to get credit and too few people actually want to do the fricken work, which is really all it is. It's not like the kids are stopping you from building these gardens, it's just work. what surprised me in the positive is that I found the bureaucracy pretty darn cooperative once you worked with them according to their rules and regulations.

What does the future hold for your organization?

Well a few things as you know there's somewhere between 700 and 1000 public school sites in this city and we'd like to have a garden in every school and we're at 97 so we have a ways to go that's one and two, we'd like to eventually have an honest to goodness farm somewhere in the middle of the city so kids can visit with a tractor and some goats and chickens and crops and stuff to use that as a test farm. We'd like to help schools turn more green and take out asphalt and all that stuff. I'd like to be a part of bringing back wood working and other crafts into public school education to make it a little more broad based, it ought not to be everything you're learning to get a job later, there ought to be some stuff in there that you're just educating yourself for the joy of it. We're going to try and introduce some of that as outdoor woodworking benches and then get people to start using their hands a little bit, just even for the joy of it.

You were involved in the proposed transformation of turning a working bridge into a public park space, tell us about that.

In Glendale they have a different project where they're trying to take a freeway and put a cap on it and convert that into a park. So it's a great idea, I support that project, there's also a project to cap the Hollywood freeway and turn it into Hollywood Central Park, it will join the Westside to the Eastside which the 101 freeway cutoff. I am completely supportive of those efforts, I am particularly supportive of efforts where you doing that by converting an existing structure. So in that case we had a bridge downtown, beautiful all steel bridge, and we wanted to convert it into a park somewhat like what they did with the Highliner in New York city and I don't know, what can I say, little bit of lack of vision in my opinion and just a waste, to summarize they're building a new bridge and throwing away the old bridge that could have easily been used for pedestrians just to have a park on top of the river. We could have reinforced it and we would have had a piece of history left forever.

Are you involved in efforts to naturalize the Los Angeles River?

I am not but I'm completely supportive of it, I hope they get it done. And I just hope that there's not a lot of money wasted in doing that, that would be a shame because the cheaper they come in on these things the more the public will support them. And by the way, changing the river to a natural stream again will literally cause this area to explode, we will then have our own beach, Westside has the ocean, we will have the river, it will change everything around here. We will then be looking to the East not looking to the West like now. We'll be walking over to the river it will be amazing. What we truly need to do in addition to unpaving the river, is stopping the water that falls on these streets from making its way to the river, it should be going into the ground right here. The site that we're on, the house that I built and designed, a lot of the rainwater gets stuck here, it doesn't leave the site. So for example around the lawn that we have the sidewalks are tilted a bit towards the lawn, so the rainwater first floods the lawn before it floods and leaves the site. It's just a simple thing to do to keep more rainwater it he site.

What do you love about this neighborhood?

Community Restaurant in my mind has some of the most exceptional food in Los Feliz, Yuca's burgers are wonderful, Little Dom's, a wonderful bistro and, let's see, I think most folks in this neighborhood go to the public schools, we don't have that many private schools around here and it's kind of cool, most people actually go to Franklin and King, most people go to Marshall High School so everybody kind of knows everyone. People are very down to earth here, we have a nice kind of economic diversity, I know that's cliche to say it, but we actually do, not everybody's a millionaire, it's kind of cool.

What is something most people don't know about you?

I will never leave Los Feliz. I will have my wake on the front porch, that's where my wake is going to be, if you want to see me you have to come to visit me. My porch is designed where my coffin is going to be laid out there and you can walk through, it's going to be a very nice flow, cause there's nothing worse than being at a funeral and you don't have nice flow. I don't want my last obituary to be God, a real nice guy but terrible flow at his funeral.