The Formula Hasn’t Changed

I sat down with Josh Slotnick, one of the founders of Garden City Harvest, to talk about where we’ve come in 30 years. One of the things that emerged: a kind of formula for transformation, and what it means for those who live it. You can hear him describe it in the video above.

It started with Josh’s own experience. He felt transformed by his time as an undergraduate working at University of California - Santa Cruz’s (UC Santa Cruz) community farm, now the Center for AgroEcology. It changed his life.

"I just fell in love with the place with my fellow farm hands and with the whole activity,” said Josh. “I don't think I'd ever felt so attached to anything and so seen and so reached and just the best. It's truly in our DNA to feel like we're in a little band of other humans attached to where we live. You know how it is when you work together and then you eat together and you're in natural beauty, it's just such an incredibly powerful recipe."

He moved to Missoula and set to work finding a way to create something similar here — what became the PEAS Farm.

One of the lessons he learned as he went about the collaborative work of building this community farm, was this formula for a transformative experience.

Tim Ballard, who started the Youth Development program, had been bringing teens in the Youth Drug Court system to the farm — for many, their first job. He and Josh found that this formula was a kind of magic.

“The nugget of wisdom I got out of this, and this really came from my buddy, Tim Ballard, who's still my really close friend…Tim worked with me at the PEAS Farm and was studying to be a counselor and had been … taking troubled teens out into the wilderness and he saw something happen there and thought, ‘I wonder if we could do it here on the Farm.’”

Josh had noticed the same thing happening with the students at the PEAS Farm, “they like fall in love with each other, not in a romantic way, but in the best sense of it.”

Josh and Tim found over time that there was a recipe for this kind of transformative experience. One that he had lived at UC Santa Cruz, one that Tim had lived in the backcountry with teens, and now at the PEAS Farm for both of them.

“We kind of came up with the recipe and it was you take small groups of people doing humble labor with beautiful, tangible results equals a transformative experience and it works. You could do it building houses, you could do it clearing trails, you can do it growing food. Growing food is really great because you get to eat it as opposed to like the trail building might be a little harder or building a house, but it still could work. But work all morning and then go eat lunch on the food you've been growing, it's just like immediate.”