Gardopia Gardens Grows Resilient Communities Through School Gardens and Urban Ag
Stephen Lucke, founder of Gardopia Gardens in San Antonio, is using school gardens and drought-smart agriculture to empower the next generation and grow healthier, more resilient communities.
By Jill Dutton
The Packer
June 12, 2025
Excerpt:
As the founder of Gardopia Gardens, an urban agriculture nonprofit, Lucke is transforming homes and businesses into thriving gardens, and classrooms into living laboratories. His team not only grows food for local residents but also educates more than 75,000 students through garden-based learning programs that have improved test scores and sparked curiosity in sustainability.
With support from a USDA grant, Gardopia is expanding its impact beyond San Antonio, showing how the next generation of growers can be nurtured from the ground up. The nonprofit recently received a United Way grant to improve fifth and seventh grade math scores through a curriculum called “math in the garden.”
The goal, Lucke said, is to preserve farmland, educate young farmers and create a sustainable local food system.
Lucke: My sophomore summer, I took an introduction to nutrition course and learned about the health epidemics impacting San Antonio, how it is one of the least healthy cities in the nation, and how childhood diabetes and obesity was leading Generation Z to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
If the health care system was not the solution, because if it was, we’d be healthy already, right? With that, and then coming to graduation and not going to medical school, I had to decide what I was going to do with a degree in biochemistry and understanding that food is medicine.
Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, [is quoted as saying], ‘Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.’ So I thought, if the guy who started Western allopathic medicine is saying that food will heal us, then I need to learn more about nutrition.
Read the complete article here.
Source: https://cityfarmer.info/gardopia-gardens-grows-resilient-communities-through-school-gardens-and-urban-ag/
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