Transfer of Knowledge (Or, How the World Connects Through Scarborough, Maine)

I've linked several times to Kitchen Gardeners International (and, in fact, I started a North Atlanta Seedsavers group on the site, if you are interested. There is currently one proud member--me!) I got to wondering about this Roger Doiron, who founded and runs the site, from Maine, of all places (he joins sustainability visionaries Elliot Coleman, and The Good Life Center and Scott and Helen Nearing in representing Maine so well).

So, on a cold day in Atlanta where almost every single front lawn in my neighborhood harbored rarely-seen snowmen, on a day when we celebrated Martin Luther King and I thought about my own dreams to change the world for the better, I spoke with Roger about his dream and journey.

"It took me 40 years to move ten yards," Roger told me, since he now lives in the house next door to his parents in Scarborough, Maine, the fastest-growing suburb in the state, just about ten minutes outside Portland (which, by the way, was on that America's Greenest Cities list in Organic Gardening magazine).

But during the ten years Roger and his family lived in Brussels, Belgium, he ran the European division of Friends of the Earth, the world's largest grassroots environmental organization. And he spent weekends in his mother-in-law's kitchen and garden in the foothills of the Ardennes in the southern part of Belgium. And he learned.

"When I came back home to the town in which I had grown up, " Roger explained, "I saw that the local farm had been plowed over and planted with its final crop--100 new houses."

Roger also noticed which neighbor homes no longer had the vegetable gardens he remembered as a child.

"My big concern was how we were going to be sure there was a transfer of knowledge about how to garden, preserve foods and cook," Roger told me.

And so, like many times in many lives, a nagging voice inside manifested itself in action. Roger started Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, in 2003. Today, KGI has more than 5,000 kitchen gardener members in more than 90 countries. His new "community" section of the site connects these gardeners more robustly through forums and groups.

Expect to hear a lot more from Roger this year. He has been selected as a Fellow with the Food & Society Policy Fellows Program. This program, administered by the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute, aims to catalyze cultural shifts and policy changes through innovative communications about sustainable food and farming systems. In short, it unites and supports select journalists who are trying to get the word out and influence audiences about these issues. In short-short, it puts even more power in the pen (er, keyboard).

You go, Roger.