Tailoring a green build project to address food insecurity, nutrition, and other community needs.

In This Podcast: Diana Cuy-Castellanos and Stephen Mackell share the story of Lincoln Hill Garden, a 5-acre community green space that was built on the site of a demolished public school. This property is serving the community with gardens, an urban farm, and a natural playground.  They share the background of how three organizations came together and listened to the community to build a project to fit the community as well as provide much needed assistance with healthy local produce.

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Diana holds a Ph.D in nutrition and food systems and is a registered dietitian teaching courses in community nutrition and food justice at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include community-based participatory research, food insecurity and food environments.

Stephen started volunteering for Mission of Mary Cooperative as an undergraduate at the University of Dayton and joined the staff full-time as the production and operations manager after completing his bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy. He is also the founder of Compost Dayton, a company working to expand food scrap composting efforts by city of Dayton residents.

Together they have been working on Lincoln Hill Garden, a sustainable, multipurpose urban agriculture and community green space within Dayton’s Twin Towers Neighborhood. This five-acre site, located among the residents it will serve, is being transformed with educational and recreational elements that increase neighborhood access to fresh, healthy foods and offers open green space for community gatherings and nature play.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/daytongardens for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Building and blending the communities of sustainability and social justice in one event.

In This Podcast: Sean-Paul tells us how he found his purpose with the community of sustainability and traveling the world learning and understanding from movements and people all over. He landed at Arcosanti just north of Phoenix and is now working to help merge the communities of sustainability and social justice. He shares Arcosanti with us and then introduces the Convergence event happening over the second weekend in November.  There is so much happening you need to hear him explain it to even get a taste of it all. 

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Sean-Paul is an urbanist and community developer with a degree in planning & sustainability from the University of New Mexico. He is concerned with growing resilient food systems, and advancing ideas of good urban design. As an event producer and community organizer, his work facilitates civic engagement, conflict resolution, and social justice. Contemporary social, environmental, and economic injustice inspire Sean-Paul to join arms with activists and cultural catalysts of all varieties and from all backgrounds. His goal is to bend and blend movements together to embody and expound a new urban/social paradigm.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/arcosanti for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

A chat with a farmer about her transition from the city girl. 

In This Bonus Podcast: Returning guest Scottie Jones is back to talk about her new book and making a transition back to the simple life.  She shares a bit about how the inspiration came to write the story of this adventure to start farming.  She also tells why she opened her farm up to vacationers looking for a taste of the country life, and how that has helped her farm.  And, we get an excerpt reading from her new book!

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Scottie lived in Arizona for a while where she worked at Arizona State University for over a decade.  Then she and her husband gave up the busy urban life by moving to Oregon, starting Leaping Lamb Farm and becoming sheep farmers. She loved this lifestyle very much and has opened her home to visiting families through her other passion of Farm Stays.  This journey and the transition to a farming lifestyle became the basis for her new book Country Grit, A Farmoir of Finding Purpose and Love through Skyhorse Publishing. It describes their first years on the farm: the mistakes, the drama, the community, and what it’s like to adopt the farming lifestyle if that’s not where you’re from.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/countrygrit for more information and links on this bonus podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Digging into the invisible structure behind
The Urban Farm.

In This Podcast:  Running any successful business or project requires some good help behind the scenes.  This is true for The Urban Farm as well, and Janis Norton is one of the people who help Greg Peterson manage his dreams to change the local food system, create 10,000 seed banks in the local area, plant 100,000 fruit trees, and empower others to grow their own food.  She shares about the surprise of finding her place in this non-stem field, the rewarding role of helping her community build its resilience, and opens up about some challenges of starting her own urban farm.

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Janis earned her degree in Sustainability from Arizona State University. Her previous experience in working classrooms, running youth programs, and Boy Scout Council Training and Camp leadership were all community and education focused.  However, she did not realize how much she could do with the local food system until her Sustainable Food and Farms class. A class she took as a lark, since she had no interest in growing food. Soon after that class she became motivated to learn all she could about gardening and urban farming while using her organization and project management skills to help facilitate a couple of the Urban Farm’s larger events.

From that point on, she has been an active part of the Urban Farm core team as the Program Manager as well as the Podcast Producer.  She is bringing her enthusiasm and cheerful attitude to her projects at the Farm especially the Urban Farm Nursery’s Fruit Tree Program and the Urban Farm Podcast, as well as partner projects like the Great American Seed-Up and the Permaculture Design Course in Phoenix.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/jarvis for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Identifying the nutrients that your body needs.

In This Podcast: A pre-med organic chemistry class showed Joy Stephenson-Laws that she was not on the right path. She did not waste that pre-med education as she now fights for patients’ rights as a health care attorney. She also tells us why she started the non-profit health information company Proactive Health Labs to help people understand what is happening in their bodies with their nutrition.  An often-overlooked aspect of nutrition is the minerals in the foods and she explains why this is an important part of getting and staying healthy.

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In both her personal and professional life, Joy is dedicated to enhancing consumer health and positively impacting the health care industry in the United States.  She is the founding and managing partner of Stephenson, Acquisto & Colman, the health care industry’s premier litigation law firm.  She is also the founder of Proactive Health Labs (www.phlabs.org), a national non-profit health information company that provides education and tools needed to achieve optimal health. 

Joy just published her first book Minerals - The Forgotten Nutrient: Your Secret Weapon for Getting and Staying Healthy.  Her passion for motivating people to proactively protect their health comes from her personal experience of losing loved ones, colleagues and friends to diseases which, had they been diagnosed early enough and treated more effectively, could either have been controlled or cured. 

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/phlabs for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great

Keeping backyard chickens healthy through simple steps.

In This Podcast: Sometimes helping a neighbor out can truly change your life in ways you never expected. Kathy Shea-Mormino changed her path from attorney to now running a successful business sharing advice through her Facebook page and blog about raising chickens. She says keeping backyard chickens should not be over-complicated and shares her simple steps to keeping the hens happy and healthy.

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Known as The Chicken Chick, Kathy brings an informative style and fresh perspective on raising backyard chickens to millions of fans around the world. An attorney by profession, Kathy is the founder and one-woman creative force behind her wildly popular and award-winning Facebook page and blog, The-Chicken-Chick.com.

Her practical approach and sense of humor allows her to connect, educate and share an appreciation for keeping chickens as family pets as well as for their eggs. With a following of over 700,000 Facebook fans, she has become the person folks interested in keeping chickens, go to for information, advice and fun!  She is also the author of the bestselling book The Chicken Chicks Guide to Backyard Chickens, Simple steps for healthy Happy Hens by Voyager Press.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/thechickenchick for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Enriching the community, becoming the next generation of hope.

In This Podcast: We meet the well-spoken farm manager Casey Holland who explains why she cares so much about her community and providing healthy food to her customers.  She also introduces us to the National Young Farmers Coalition and tells us what they have been doing in her area.  She has gained a lot of wisdom in a short amount of time as a farmer, and her vision and drive gives us a lot of hope for the future.

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Casey is a native New Mexican and young farmer committed to affecting positive social change around small-scale sustainable agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley. She graduated in 2012 from the University of New Mexico with dual degrees in Psychology / Peace Studies, and Sociology. As a requirement for her minor she did an internship with the SouthWest Organizing Project's: Project Feed the Hood. There, she found her calling when she realized the importance of the way in which our food is produced in addressing many of the issues we face locally, nationally, and globally.

In 2015, she started organizing with the local chapter of the National Young Farmers Coalition, which provided her numerous opportunities to speak with government officials and learn about policies that impact her community. Since then she strives to make access to nutritious, enriching food more affordable for underprivileged families and helping her community reconnect to its agricultural roots & culture.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/casey for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Growing quality grapes and wines in the Grand Canyon State.

In This Podcast: At a point in their lives where they were ready for something new, Peggy Fiandaca and her husband decided to take their interest in wines to the next level.  They decided to become vintners to make high quality wine and got serious about it.  Now they have a 40 acres winery and a wine tasting gallery.  She explains some of the wine growing history for the state and even some of the processes that vintners use to make wines. Like everything they do, they do it with style!

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After a slight detour through urban planning, Peggy found her true calling in growing and producing wines.  With her Italian family heritage and a grandfather that produced alcohols during prohibition, this path was in her ‘vines’ so-to-speak.

She and her husband Curt Dunham own a vineyard in south eastern Arizona and the LDV Wine Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Here she enjoys watching someone taste wine and identify the flavor characteristics for the first time, or examine a vine closely with a new appreciation for its role in producing that wine.  Peggy has served two terms as the President of the Arizona Wine Growers Association, which represents wineries and vineyards statewide, and she cares deeply about all the vineyards in the state.

Go to www.urbanfarm.org/ldvwines for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.

Bringing healthy food and education to urban tables through community engagement.

In This Podcast: Creating a successful community health hub is no small feat, and Emily Mickley-Doyle has been part of doing just that in her part of New Orleans using an empty grocery store building, a desire to teach others how to grow food, and some fabulous ideas. The space now has several programs including a community garden, a teaching kitchen for doctors, a farmers market, and programs for the community youth to learn gardening and cooking skills. SPROUT NOLA is amazing, inspiring, and basically EPIC!

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Go to www.urbanfarm.org/sproutnola for more information and links on this podcast, and to find our other great guests.