Morgan M. Hurley | Downtown Editor

Local nonprofit caters to disadvantaged kids

“If you build it they will come” may very well be one of the most overused phrases ever, since first surfacing in the 1989 film “Field of Dreams”; but in the case of SMARTS Farm, a 10,000-square-foot area located on a former junk parking lot on the northeast corner of 15th and F streets Downtown, it couldn’t be more apropos.

Just steps away from the Downtown Police headquarters, this bastion of lush green agriculture and splashes of bright color seems to explode the visual senses of everyone who enters this place. Previously surrounded by broken down motorhomes, cars, rampant homelessness, abandoned buildings and transient housing, this space is now a thriving hands-on community garden and educational center.

Launched in May of 2013, SMARTS Farm is a project of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Humane Smarts, the vision of founder and CEO Susan “Susie” Madden Lankford, an author, photojournalist and activist who has spent decades documenting the lives of the homeless and women “in the system” and their children, many of whom end up in Juvenile Hall.

Lankford has written three books, filmed one documentary and is currently working on another. She refers to her body of work up until now as the “awareness phase,” and SMARTS Farm the “solution phase.”

And while what they provide the community is much too vast to capture in a feature article — one must actually go there to completely grasp all they are doing — in summary, SMART Farm’s solutions come by way of educating the less fortunate, the disadvantaged, and the underserved, while welcoming those who aren’t in need but want to experience the magic that happens behind the big chain link fence.

“Anyone who feels lonely or stressed, this is a place where they can all come together,” Lankford said.

Lankford’s daughter Polly Lankford Smith is executive director of Humane Smarts. Smith — also a photojournalist and a graphic artist — has a degree in psychology from San Diego State. She spent two years interning alongside her mother at Juvenile Hall while completing her degree and the process was life changing for both women and brought them to where they are today.

SMARTS Farm’s mission statement and branding phrase is “A place where hearts can grow and minds thrive.”

With that as a goal, Lankford and her staff primarily seek to reach the children that often get lost in the system or move from place to place as the child of displaced parents. They want to show them that there is a whole other world outside the confines of their transient housing — a place where they can play, learn, lead and grow; like the seeds they plant in SMARTS Farm’s many wooden planter boxes.

“We’re trying to bring the two [hearts and minds] together so that children can really develop that level of feeling,” Lankford said.

Their community garden currently has 40 planter boxes — which come in two sizes, 4 x 4 x 8 and 4 x 4 x 4 and two feet of soil — leased out for the year with a 10-person waiting list. Gardeners are growing flowers, vegetables, amaranth, corn and more. In addition, they have up to 25 more planter boxes that are split between SMARTS Farm’s own production and the transient children that visit.

Oklahoma native Dr. Connie Joy is director of education and she drives program development and execution at SMARTS Farm. Current and past programs range from gardening, self-esteem lessons, photography, arts and crafts, culinary arts and sampling, composting, team building, leadership, and puppetry.

“This is the enrichment piece that so many of these Title One kids miss out on, so we serve it here,” Joy said.

In the gardening and sampling classes, the children get to taste, smell, touch and feel vegetables they’ve never experienced before. A recent class taught the kids about the process of a cucumber — from seed to harvest and even becoming a pickle; many had no idea the two were related. Still another class showed the children the full cycle of a chrysalis into a Monarch butterfly.

“We learn so much from these kids because they are unspoiled and have a thirst for learning,” Lankford said. “You want to see empathy develop with children? It can happen with an insect.”

Their formula is working; SMARTS Farm has already serviced over 300 children in the past year, something Lankford is very proud of, but she wants more.

“Frankly we want more kids to be coming from some of these areas in here,” Lankford said as she gestured to the surrounding neighborhood. “We’re in the most densely populated service provider area and it’s hard for us to be able to get kids to come to us, because the various providers don’t provide an individual to escort the kids.”

“As you look out across through here — you look at all those apartments and all those windows — we’re looking for two, three, four dozen kids and you can’t tell me they’re not out there,” Joy said, also gesturing to the neighboring housing areas. “We are right in the middle of the mecca. We want them to come.”

Accessing transportation for their target audience, which would bring the children to SMARTS Farm, has been Lankford’s greatest challenge. Transient housing centers like Father Joe’s, just two blocks away, don’t have money for children’s programs, stifling the opportunity for transportation or even allowing an adult walk the children to SMARTS Farm.

Unfortunately, Lankford’s liability insurance doesn’t allow her to offer transportation. It’s a challenge that Lankford hopes to overcome with input from the greater community.

“That’s a stop gap that we have that we have to try to figure out,” she said. “And we’re working very very hard at figuring that out. But we don’t have any limits as far as with children. The kids can learn as much as they want to learn, they can be here as much as they want to be here.”

The YWCA has the ability to transport 14 children, and they do, each Tuesday and Thursday.

But SMARTS Farm isn’t just for children or the disadvantaged; plenty of thriving Downtown urban dwellers are now also taking advantage of its personal gardens, which are leased for a year at a time.

Lankford said some of their clients had never ventured far from their burgeoning high-rises, especially into this easternmost area of East Village. Now those same people ride their bikes over, tend to their gardens, bring a lunch or just hang out at one of the picnic tables at what has become a soothing escape from the endless blocks of construction and development in each direction.

“Everyone leaves their baggage at the fence,” Smith said.

On July 19 they had what Lankford hopes to be the first of many annual events, the Butterflies and Camels festival.

The SMARTS Farm team has been buoyed by partnerships with ValleyCrest, a landscaping company that has provided them with irrigation, fencing, property cleanup, and moving the extra heavy gardening boxes around; Home Depot who donated time and materials to help visiting children create the Yellow Brick Road that runs through the property and greets every visitor; as well as Armstrong Feed and Supply and Prime Electric.

They could not have done it without these partnerships, but it is clear they need more community support to sustain them. Interested donors can contribute a specific amount to sponsor a children’s gardening box or some of the many educational programs, and general donations would help expand their production garden and grow their space to service more people.

Organizations with certified transportation options to bring more disadvantaged kids in to this educational space are of great need, because once they arrive, SMARTS Farm makes a difference in them.

“Their curiosity, their imagination is full-flowered and that’s exactly what we are all about,” Lankford said. “If we can full-flower that and we can find the sparkle in each one of these children, we just embellish on that with them.

“Some of these kids who are living four months at a time at the Y, they’re eating food from the Rescue Mission two times per day, this is a breath of fresh air for them,” she said.

SMARTS Farm is located at 15th and F streets Downtown. For more information, stop in for an up close visit or check out their website humanesmarts.org.