Farm to School: Growing Food, Education & Hope in Southeastern Massachusetts

by MAXX FIDALGO

Imagine, for a moment: a red-brick schoolhouse-covered in trellises full of cucumber vines and beans. Out front, large raised beds sport flourishing kale, ripening tomatoes, bulbous onions, and hardy stalks of garlic. Classrooms tend the garden in shifts—using it for science and math projects or writing essays about gardening and the benefits of consuming fresh food. Families flit in and out during harvest. Children take home produce that they helped ease into the world. A community nourished, educated, and supported.

The Marion Institute (MI) is working to make this dream a reality for school districts across the South Coast through its Grow Education (Grow) program. eSEMA covered this program in the Fall 2021 issue, highlighting MI’s collaboration, success, and growth within the New Bedford Public School District. While it started as an after-school program in 2013, the program got a revamp in 2019, becoming the Grow Education Farm-to-School (Grow FTS), a permanent program within the Massachusetts Farm to School Institute. This increased the reach and equity across school districts, ensuring each school got the same programming.

Growing Strong

Now, Grow FTS brings a standardized curriculum to 27 schools in seven districts across the South Coast. At its core, MI Executive Director,  Liz Wiley, says the program “connects communities to the cafeteria, the gardens, and the classrooms.” Grow FTS focuses on “health-building habits” as well as “plant life cycles… science, nutrition, the environment, and regional food systems.” It uses hands-on experience in cultivating permanent food gardens at elementary schools.

How do you feed a whole school… and teach them how to sustain such a project?

First: Build the gardens, with the number of raised beds determined by the size of the student body.

Next: Provide the staff and faculty with the professional development and training needed to make their students successful.

Finally: Implement the program’s lesson plan with educators throughout the year.

Success Story: The New Bedford School District now includes all 18 elementary schools—a feat almost a decade in the making. They hired a former-MI/Food Corps volunteer as the district-wide garden manager who helps maintain the raised garden beds. The city has invested in, and the school system has officially opened, a centralized culinary and nutrition center that includes the sourcing and use of local foods in schools. If you’re looking for an example of enthusiastic buy-in, the growth of New Bedford’s program is a good place to start.

Fall River has Come on Board

In Fall River, the ball is rolling, with program funding raised through grants. In a grassroots twist, building garden beds for each of the 11 elementary schools in the district hasn’t been contracted out to an outside company. Instead, MI has crowned Step One as the capstone project for the next three years of senior students in the Career Technical Education (CTE) for Construction Craft at B.M.C. Durfee High School.

“It’s cool,” says Grow FTS program manager Nate Sander. “You’re learning and you’re helping out your community; other schools are benefiting from your work [by receiving the garden boxes].” Sander, a veteran sustainability education advocate and a builder himself, notes that “Through years of relationship building and successful program implementation, the communities served continue to generate buy-in and recognize the importance of the Grow Education Program.”

Sander acknowledges that the choice of a new school district was spurred by the “need to expand especially to high-level-need students, like in Fall River.” A 2024 USDA Economic Research Service study showed that over seven million children (~20%) of US households with children experienced some level of food insecurity. In Massachusetts, that equated to 37% of total households. A recent report by the Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) and Mass General Brigham found that in 2025 the number jumped to around 40%, or 1.12 million people. Each study reported that people of color and immigrant communities face higher and more frequent rates of food insecurity. In Fall River, where almost one of every five residents was born outside of the United States, and where at least one in three residents rely on supplemental food assistance like the SNAP and HIP programs, hunger is a household word.

Where Does Food Come From

“Where your food comes from is basic on a fundamental level,” Sander says, “And these are the most foundational human skills that are rapidly changing today.” For many, the question isn’t only where their food comes from, but how much food, and even if that food is coming at all.

In Fall River, Sander is working hands-on with 21 seniors from Durfee to complete the raised beds needed for the first three elementary schools (Westall, Watson, and Tansey) implementing the program. The senior capstone project was brought up during the initial meeting at the end of 2025. Sander says everyone from the superintendent to the students was enthusiastic about the project.

Now, “the kids will be doing the construction, installation, and site-work,” Sander says, with the hopes that the capstone project will be completed before graduation. This way, seniors can include the project on their résumés and elementary students can start working with the raised beds in the fall.

“If it goes well—and I don’t see why it wouldn’t—this will be a legacy project,” Sander says, with each new group of CTE Construction Craft seniors for the next two years building raised beds for the remaining primary schools in the district as their capstone projects.

Older student involvement isn’t only to creatively stretch available funding as much as possible. Sander says Fall River illustrates a “really valuable story because the students are so involved,” gaining exposure to Grow Education program operations and values through project participation. With their involvement, students are gaining real life work experience to carry forward and are supporting increased food security in their city.

For these kinds of movements, Sander says the support “has to be from the community level,” that “it’s people who are living in these communities and investing in them” that create sustainable, positive change that lasts. From the outside looking in, community support and engagement in bringing the program to life look a lot like an act of love.

What’s Growing Next?

While talks are in the air for expanding further into Plymouth and Bristol Counties, most important to both Wiley and Sander is the continued strengthening of the program where it already operates.

“Sustainability is something we’re always working on, because we don’t want to walk away,” Wiley says. “We want to provide enough technical assistance, guidance, and support to ensure that the same level of integrity exists in every district we’re in.”

Sander echoes the sentiment, saying continued, sustained support of the program is needed “to have integrity for the model” itself. This is a team that cares about the work they’re doing—and it shows.

However, Wiley says MI has recently secured funding for an adjacent project that will strengthen Grow FTS.

This will be a community of Practice where professionals in food service will meet to share best practices and support. The hub, set to launch this fall, will be facilitated by a food systems consultant. MI aims to share information between different roles in the food sector—even between schools!—to support one another to “buy local food, cook with local food” and to overall “set schools up with more local food purchasing,” says Wiley. 

Collaboration between MI and the respective school districts are bringing innovative solutions in sustainability and food security to the South Coast. And it surely is growing!

Maxx Fidalgo is a freelance journalist who previously worked in the South Coast agricultural-sustainability nonprofit world. Born and raised in New Bedford’s Portuguese-immigrant community, his culture and lived experience inform his relationship with agriculture and food.