While a sophomore in high school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Sam co-founded a community garden located in an abandoned soccer field across the street from his school with fellow students Sarah Steadman and Natalie Akers. Project Sprout supplies their school’s cafeteria with fresh fruits and vegetables, helps feed the hungry in the community and serves as a living laboratory for area students.
photo: Sam Levin, Dakota Malik - students at Great Barrington’s Monument Mountain High School, June 2009.
Here are a few excerpts from Sam's November 11, 2008 blog post.
Exactly one year ago Monday, I walked through the doors of my public high school in Massachusetts planning on presenting the idea of Project Sprout to my Guidance counselor. And that’s all it was, an idea. I had not one detail worked out, only that I wanted the students of my school and the people of my community to begin paying more attention to their food, and in turn the natural world around them. I was already an avid naturalist, and when I wasn’t in the woods or swamps, I was spending time on the farm down the road from my house, playing soccer with the pigs or riding the cows. So, after talking to my guidance counselor, Mr. Powell, I connected with two other students, Sarah a junior who loved gardening and children and Natalie a sophomore who was desperate for delicious vegetables in the cafeteria, and together we began refining the idea and figuring out the details of the project. Within weeks we had a plan.
... On Monday, exactly one year after walking into my school to talk to Mr. Powell about this idea of getting kids to think about food and the natural world more, I once again walked through those doors. This time, I had just come up from the garden, where I had been looking at the lines that had been drawn out for the expansion of the garden, and the area that had been marked for a fruit orchard. I was going into school to talk to Mr. Powell, but this time, I needed to make sure that that the head of the cafeteria had received our thirty kilograms of potatoes for the Project Sprout Mashed Potatoes. I also had to confirm the meeting with students from the nearby school who want a garden as well. I wondered in two Octobers from now when I’m a senior, when I walk through the doors of the school, what I would be going to talk to him about. And I wondered who would be checking up on the garden before school in 20 years, when even Mr. Powell is gone. And I knew, that no matter who it was, someone would be there, and the garden would even more beautiful than it is today.
... It is not just what has happened in the past twelve months, although those things were incredible. It is about how it happened, and it is about what is going to happen. Because, the truth is, Sarah and Natalie and I are not special. We don’t have some awesome gift or power. We just have two things. We have youth, which is found in every town in every part of the world, and we have motivation, which is out there.
A lot of it is out there.
Mount Everett, the school in the town south of us, has asked for help starting their own Project Sprout. So has the school in the town North of us. As well as Lincoln Academy in Maine, over five hundred kilometers away. Youth Radio in California, almost five thousand kilometers away wants a version of Project Sprout, and even a school in Kedougou, Senegal all the way across the Atlantic wants to become our sister project, in the development of a Project Sprout Kedegou. That’s the most exciting part that—that it is spreading. There are kids all over the world who want to make this happen, all they need is a little hope and inspiration.
Speaking of, while trying to locate a YouTube video interview with Sam Levin, I stumbled across another community garden project called Sprout, founded by Connecticut College students in 2004, approximately 2 years before Sam Levin started his school's garden.
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