224 - Empowering the Next Generation Through Gardening and Hydroponics with Green Our Planet's Ciara Byrne

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Chioburni, welcome to Listen— Listening with Leaders. You are the co-founder and co-CEO of a nonprofit called GreenOurPlanet.org, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. And what an interesting story that we're going to learn about today. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Doug. Delighted to be here.

What you're doing right now, or what you've been doing actually since— it's been a long time—

2013.

Yeah, I was going to say, interesting parallel. I'll come back to that in a second because I started my nonprofit in 2010, Prison of Peace. But essentially, as I understand it, what you, what you and your colleagues do is teach school kids how to garden. And you provide all kinds of instructional videos and materials for both doing outside gardens and inside hydroponic gardens and teaching kids about the food they eat.

That's right, 100%. Yeah, so we started in 2013 accidentally, myself and my partner Kim McCorry. We are filmmakers, documentary filmmakers by background, and we'd spent about 20 years making films all over the world, from Peru, Papua New Guinea. Kim's been to Siberia, made a lot of films in the Amazon. Basically, we filmed all over the world, and we're so lucky to get to see so much of the world. And of course, we're passionate conservationists. And so around 2011, 2012, we were actually working in Africa with a famous paleoanthropologist and, uh, conservationist called Dr. Richard Leakey. And we were talking to him, and he was promoting a book that he had written in the '90s called The Sixth Extinction, and his big concern was the biodiversity loss that we're creating on the planet, right? And so we were helping him make a film about this so he could use it as he gave talks around the world. And in our conversations, what kept coming up again and again was the fact that Richard and we felt very strongly, everybody needs to be a conservationist. Everybody needs to care about the planet, right? You can't leave it to the Sierra Club or World Wildlife Federation or Conservation International, where they're all great nonprofits that do great work. We are at a point in the history of the planet that needs all of us to take action, right? And so that's the story we left Africa with, thinking about that Richard Leakey had given us that thought. And what happened afterwards was we came up with this idea to create a Green Kickstarter, right? Where Kim and I were so intrigued and amazed that Kickstarter was unleashing all this potential from artists that previously had not been able to be tapped, right? Because people wanted to make books and videos and CDs and, you know, build restaurants and all the things they wanted to do, but they hadn't had a way to raise money for it. And suddenly Kickstarter's, hey, you can do it online, get your friends and family to donate, and sometimes they went viral and raised millions, right? And so we're like, why don't we do this for green projects and communities? That's a great idea, and we'll make it a nonprofit so people don't have to pay fees. People will be able to raise $500 and change out the lights in their kids' school so they can be LED lights, or they can build a community compost or a community garden, whatever it is. Anyway, so our friend Jeff built the website, and what happened was he was based here in Vegas because he worked with Zappos, and he said, okay, let's do some projects in Vegas to start out with. And our first project was we worked with a principal who wanted to build a school garden and she had no money. And so Kim and I made a little video of her kids explaining to the parents, this is why we want to garden at our school. I went in 3 weeks she'd raised $8,000. And then another principal came to us and another, and we stepped back and we were like, huh, this is interesting. Maybe this idea of a crowdfunder is not the way, but what's happening at these schools is these teachers are bringing the kids out into the gardens and they want to teach them STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, and conservation, of course, and nutrition. But they have a lot of challenges and maybe we should set up a nonprofit to solve those challenges. And that's what we did. So we ended up really around 2015. We had about 50 schools on board at that point in Vegas. We really started focusing on what do the teachers need? They need a curriculum. They said they wanted a chef program so kids could learn how to cook from the garden. They wanted to meet and have basically conferences. So all of these things, and we were like, okay, we Green Our Planet, instead of being a crowdfunding platform, this is what we should do because that way When we connect kids to the planet, we're helping them fall in love with the planet so that when they grow up, they will want to protect it. So it came full circle around to our goal of how do we create the next generation of conservationists.

What happened to the filmmaking business?

So we stopped, I suppose, that's a really interesting question. We stopped initially making films, although we always had a filmmaker or two at Green Our Planet because of our background in films, and we were always filming what we were doing, like making garden, like building the gardens, training teachers how to use the gardens to teach them farmers markets. So we started farmers markets at schools. So we filmed a bunch of those and then we started the largest student-run farmers market in the United States. We just had one a couple of weeks ago on April 19th. We had over 600 kids selling fruits and veggies from their school gardens and hydroponics laboratories here in Vegas. And we film all of that stuff, right? But during COVID when we ended up having to leave the schools and teachers were once again reaching out to us and were like, we still need content, we want kids to connect to the planet, how do we do it in a virtual world? That's when we started making a lot of videos again and we created Greener Planet Studios. Wow.

Yeah, that's a lot.

It's a lot. Yeah.

So what's it like transitioning from being a filmmaker to being a social entrepreneur. Very different world.

Yes, it is very different world. And in— I think that's where Kim and my heart, like, our hearts were in conservation. And while we were making a lot of films, like, we were working in films in the '90s, I actually ran a development team at a company called Lion Television, and I would like come up with the film ideas and then sell them to Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC, and so on. And as I was doing that, I was constantly trying I tried to sell films about what was happening on the planet, like biodiversity collapse, overpopulation, climate change, all of the things, and I couldn't sell them. There wasn't really an appetite for them. And Kim was the same, only Kim ended up making films about the Amazon rainforest and Kamchatka in Siberia. He made films about grizzly bears. So he did actually get to make these beautiful films about the planet that I think helped people fall in love with the planet, but I had a harder time trying to cover these challenging topics. And so I think we were always heading that direction into conservation, but I think we weren't sure how we were going to get there. And then Greener Planet provided a way. So yeah, it's been challenging. I think running a nonprofit is very challenging. Fundraising is challenging, but it's very rewarding.

So how many— I look, I went on your website and I was astounded at how you scaled this.

Yeah, so we're in 44 states now. We work with over 1,000 schools. Our goal is by 2033 to be in 10,000 schools in the United States. That's 10% of American schools, and I hope that the other 90% also have gardens from some other organization. Not saying that we wouldn't provide them, but obviously there's only so much we can do. But that's our goal, is to be in 10,000 schools by 2033. Right now, in 1,000 schools, we're impacting About 350,000 students. How many? 350,000.

Holy moly. So are you support— you, you, let me, maybe I'll just ask the question. What are you supporting the schools with? You've got curriculum, video instruction.

Yeah. So we have two programs. One is Garden Connect. That's the outdoor gardens. Mm-hmm. And so we provide all the curriculum to, uh, Next Gen Science Standards, Common Core. They're cross-curricular. So teachers teach math, science, literacy, whatever at, at at one time. So we're trying to help teachers cover, yeah, cover as many lessons as possible. So the curriculum, the videos, every lesson has a video, and that's our secret sauce, I might say, because when you look at why are students in the United States not scoring better in STEM, and the key is that teachers are not being trained in STEM, especially in elementary schools. We're asking teachers to cover biodiversity collapse. We're asking teachers to explain what's happening with climate change, and they don't know. These teachers, they did a degree in English and then they did their teacher certificate. But I think we place an unfair onus on teachers to expect them to know all of these new things that are constantly happening in the world of science. So we're able to provide experts on video to the teachers that go with every lesson. So that's very helpful for teachers. And then of course we provide coaching. So we do one-on-one coaching with teachers and with schools. And we also do about one webinar a day, at least during the school year. And we do the farmers market. So we train schools how to run farmers markets at their schools. But right now we're also expanding in clusters in like Chicago, in Salt Lake City, in other places in clusters so that we can do the giant student farmers market.

That's where the students bring all their produce in from their individual schools into one location and do a big sale.

Yeah, it's awesome. It's so fun. It's so fun. It's so fun. Yeah.

Yeah, the kids gotta really like that.

Yeah.

You've also got a hydroponic side. I guess that's to cover the winter.

Oh yeah.

In other places where the growing season is pretty short.

Exactly. And you know what was funny about that, Doug, was we, so we were in the outdoor garden space way before we got into hydroponics. And because of the way we ended up setting up Green Our Planet, Kim and I didn't have a background in education. We didn't have a background in gardening. We were just trying to help teachers get where they felt their students needed to be, which was outside learning in gardens, connecting to the planet. And then when the teachers came to us and said, oh, we need hydroponics. Hydroponics, we were like, we don't do hydroponics. We do outdoor gardens. But we remembered, because when we had this happen 4 or 5 times, we were like, we said that we'd always listen to the teachers and maybe we should. And we said, okay, let's look at creating a hydroponics program. So we started looking into hydroponics a little over 3 years ago. And then of course, what we realized was when we had schools in Northern Nevada reach out to us and say, we want to do a garden, we realized, oh my gosh, even in our own state. They're only able to grow food outdoors from the middle of May till the middle of September. They would— super—

Winnemucca could get pretty cold in the winter, right?

Yeah. And anywhere and everywhere up around Lake Tahoe, it's all freezing. And so we're like, oh my gosh, these schools, even in Nevada, they need hydroponics. So that kind of really pushed us into hydroponics. And then of course, we had a principal in 2020, just before COVID like maybe February 2020, reach out to us. And he was from John Fredersen Elementary, and they're 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And he said, we have 58 kids in our entire K through 12 school. It's $8 for a head of lettuce. I've read about your hydroponics program that you've just started. We'd love to get hydroponic systems here. Can you get them here? And we were like, I don't know, but we'll definitely try. And then we got them a whole bunch of hydroponic systems and they, we trained them online how to grow the food and they got going. And now Their students grow all the food for the 200 community members in Viniitai, Alaska. And yeah, and that's a Native community. And we're in all of the communities north of the Arctic Circle, all the schools. It's called the Fort Yukon School District. So we're up in all of those schools because they didn't have fresh food before that. And now the kids are able to grow it, which is amazing. Yeah. So for the hydroponics program, to your point, we provide, in addition to the lessons and the videos, we provide 20 hydroponic systems per school.

Wow. So how's all this funded?

Great question. I'm glad you asked. So yeah, I know the nonprofit world. Yes. So our focus, honestly, Doug, has always been serving kids in underserved communities, kids who don't have maybe the same opportunities as kids in middle-class or upper-class communities. And so we've always raised all the money and had schools just pay a small nominal amount. And we have them pay nominal amounts. Because we feel they have to buy in, right? But we know that they can't afford whatever the cost is, whatever program they're going to go for. So we have predominantly, you know, provided most of them through grants. We apply for grants, we get the funding, and then we expand by 200 or 300 schools every year. We also do have the possibility for schools just to buy the program, right? And that has been happening more and more because we've got private schools approaching us, charter schools, and they have funding and they're like, yep, we just want to buy the program. And we're like, okay, great. And then we set aside a percentage of that profit for schools that are in Title I schools or schools in underserved communities so that we can serve more schools.

This might be a stupid question because I can already tell, but what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

I get excited about serving the teachers, the rockstar teachers, the teachers who care so much about their students that— this is no lie— I look at the emails that come in, it's comes into our info@ email. So, it's teachers looking for more information. I tell you, Doug, they're writing to us at midnight, at 2:00 AM, on the weekends. These are teachers that are so dedicated to their kids, and they know that this kind of program, which is fun and engaging and hands-on, the kids love it, and they're doing it after school hours. The teachers are, right? They're doing the research, they're trying to make it happen. I love those teachers because I believe those are the teachers that change the world. Those are the teachers that get kids excited about school, about the planet, about project-based learning, about changing the world. I want to help them. And so that bounces me out of bed in the morning.

There you go. And how do you vet a school to make sure that there's a good fit?

So there we have a— so schools, first of all, they go to our website and they fill out an interest form and they say, I'm interested in HydroConnect, or I'm interested in GardenConnect, or I'm interested in both. And then we have them fill out a form, which is a lot of usual information from whether they're Title I or not, what kind of community they're in, what kind of population they serve. Because obviously we're serving— we put our funding towards the most underserved schools first, and then we kind of work backwards from there.

And so you'll take a look at the applications. I presume there'll be a contact person. You'll have it, have an interview or a conversation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Is this person really dedicated? To doing this, or are they just blowing smoke?

And they, they have to give us a vision. Like, part of the grant is just, you know, how many— are you just engaging your kids in your classroom or the whole school? Obviously, we prefer the whole school to be engaged. How are you going to do that? What do you care about? What do— how do you want to move the needle? Is it increasing STEM test scores? Is it increasing parent engagement? Is it getting more kids to come to school more often? Schools have such a different array of why they want our program.

It's interesting, if you took a middle school say 5, 6, 7, maybe 8, depending on the district, how do they, how do you take, say, a 6th grade teacher who wants to run it through the whole school, how do you, how do they do that through all the grade levels?

That's a great question. So essentially, we like to get as many teachers as possible in the school using the program. So that's why we send 20 hydroponic systems. We don't send 1 or 2. We originally sent 7 hydroponic systems, and guess how many teachers we engaged? 7. And we had instructions for how teachers could hand-build manually more systems, but they don't have time. That's what you realize. So we thought, we asked teachers, we're like, if we sent you more systems, would more teachers at the schools be engaged? And they were like, yeah. So we were like, oh, okay. So that's when we shifted our money around a little bit and we're like, okay, we need more systems to engage more teachers. So that's why we sent 20 systems. In some cases, if the schools— we work with a lot of small schools in rural communities. Sometimes they, because we'll send them too many systems, they will then basically train kids and then kids sometimes take them home. So that's an option that they have. But yeah, teachers get online, they go through our training, right? We have different cohorts. So we have a cohort that starts in September and a cohort that starts in January. Teachers go online, they get the training. All the trainings are anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes. So they're not like super intensive. And there's a basic kind of 4 trainings you need to do. So you know how to germinate your seeds, how to plant your seeds, how to harvest your seeds, and how to use your curriculum. They're the kind of the key things. But then we have a gazillion other webinars from how to run a really great composting at your school, how to do a great nutrition class. Like we have a ton of other— how do I create herbal teas with the herbs from my hydroponic system or whatever. So we have many webinars, but there's a core 4 or 5 trainings that we want teachers to do so that they're able to run the systems and use the curriculum. And then after that, they can engage as much or as little as they want. So we have— let me get this right, I just saw these recently— we went originally from when we were sending out the 7 systems, we went from about 15 to 20% of teachers at schools using the program. Now we're at more than half of our schools up to 20, like 15 to 20 teachers at the schools are using it, which is great. And so our goal next year is to increase that to 70%.

Wow. And so with the hydroponic system, they put it, they just put them in the classroom. Yeah. Classroom. And so it's there and they, they'll have a period of time dedicated to doing the work on the science and everything else. How cool is that? And the kids right there see it all happening.

Yeah. 100%. Yep. And it's what we heard from teachers over the years is they don't have time. And so we have made it like, this is how easy we've made it. Not only do they get the lessons and the videos, but we actually have built out PowerPoints for teachers. So let's say you're the 6th grade teacher you mentioned, you go into our Magic Garden portal and you click on 6th grade HydroConnect. So you're doing the hydroponics and you have all the lessons there and you have all the PowerPoints. And the first part will be, these are the standards that you're going to cover in this lesson, right? And then it goes into the section on the background for teachers, and then it goes into the student section, right? Which teachers just click onto their SMART Board and they pull up the PowerPoint and we're good to go. They actually have the PowerPoints built out with the lesson laid out with the video in the right place. There's also assessments built out. Take a pause here so students can talk to each other and talk about the benefits of hydroponics for the planet. For example. And then at the end, they have an assessment to see how well did the lesson go, how many students really understood or didn't or whatever. Yeah.

Wow. How do you develop the curriculum?

We hire teachers. So we, we work with thousands of teachers and many of the teachers we work with are rock stars and they want to make extra money in the summer and we hire them and we work with them and we map out the the vision for the curriculum and then work with the teachers to create it.

Hmm. So it's a teacher— it's a teacher-created and teacher-led curriculum.

Yeah, 100%. The only, I guess, special thing or unusual thing about it is they work directly with filmmakers because the way the lessons are written have to be able to be turned into a film. So not every lesson can be turned into a film. So whatever the concept is, whether it's capillary action or or whatever it is, that teachers write it in such a way so they have to work with our film team. So they're like, oh, I have this idea how to teach capillary action, and the whoever from the film team is working with them might be, that's going to be too hard to make a film out of that. So that's this kind of unusual—

so you still have a pretty strong film orientation, you've got filmmakers within the company.

So we actually created, ended up creating a separate social impact company called Greener Pond Studios, is for-profit company, and we work there, our sister company, and they're run by their CEO is Kim. So Kim is my partner, and together we created Greener Planet, and now he runs Greener Planet Studios.

And what's the, what's the Greener Planet Studios do?

They just make, they make educational content for K-12.

Okay.

Yeah. And their superpower is because they're filmmakers that come from sort of an LA background, we're making Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC films, they're character-driven stories. So it's, they're not like talking heads telling kids, this is how capillary action works. Instead, We, they have created a series of characters, whether it's a penguin with a problem that he lost the spelling bee and he's really upset because he got stressed. And so they get into the science of stress, adrenaline, blah, blah, blah. And they actually create the story and the information comes to the kids through the story because so many studies show that kids learn so much better through stories than through just firing information at them.

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So as you look back, it's quite a career you've developed for yourself. What, what do you think is unique about yourself that you bring to the table that's made all this possible?

I think my determination and perseverance despite enormous obstacles. And I say this for better or worse, because maybe at certain times I should give up. Maybe this business should not really work. Work. Um, but I just keep going. Yeah. And Kim is similar. So between the pair of us, we keep going despite the obstacles, despite all the odds, to be honest with you. I think that's it. Yeah, I think—

yeah, stubborn, right? Irish stubbornness.

Irish stubbornness. Yep. Not willing to give up.

Wow. So where do you see the future of the organization?

I believe we just did our first program this year in Dubai with an awesome school that really did great. They ended up, the kids ended up creating a robotics app and robotic system to take care of their hydroponic systems, and they won this big hydroponics competition. Al Yasat was the name of the school in Dubai. I realized that the way we're doing our programming, because it's all online through a portal and we can ship the hydroponic systems anywhere in the world, but really You know, the world is our oyster. We can expand this around the planet. And I think our goal of 10,000 schools in 2033 is very doable. And I think the special thing about our program that I, that really again gets me out of bed in the morning is the community aspect. So when students grow food and when they have the opportunity to write a business plan for their farmers market and then to go out into the community and to sell the food, there's They're so proud of themselves and they're so empowered. And the community— so at our farmers markets, we have the corporate sponsors, we have the parents, we have community members going. And it's just this beautiful moment where you realize this is how education should be every day. The kids are so engaged and so excited and learning so much. That's what makes our program special. And I think if I would die a happy person if I knew that in 10 years' time there were thousands of farmers markets happening from Salt Lake City to Alaska to Florida and everywhere in between. And even to Dubai and Ireland and all the other places.

Wow.

Because, because it's very possible. It's very doable. We've done it. And it's not as heavy a lift as you might think.

It's just scaling and finding the money to scale. Yeah. Yeah. It's all, money is always the problem.

Yeah.

Money is always the limitation. I know. That's really cool. You're doing great work.

Work.

And I know that, I know from my own personal experience that when you start doing work that is work from the heart, like what you're doing, and like what I've, my colleagues at Prison to Peace done in maximum security prisons, teaching murderers to be peacemakers, that's work that compensates you in ways that most people can't even imagine, right?

Oh yeah. Yeah. When you find a purpose and when the purpose also happens to pay you, it's Oh yeah.

It, it's amazing. And that's, that's the advice that I give to young people is say, find a purpose. And it may change over the course of your life, but if you can find something that you're really passionate about, then the money will follow.

Yeah.

And you don't have to worry about it. Well, that's really cool. All right. One more thing. One more question, then I'll let you go. 'Cause I know you're really busy. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

Hmm, like a story or a trait?

Anything. Could be something quirky.

I spent part of my childhood growing up in Tehran.

Now there's a story. Yeah, Irish Ireland to Tehran.

Yeah, working-class Dublin neighborhood to Tehran in the '70s, and we ended up having to We were kicked out in '78 when the revolution happened. Yeah. When the Shah fell. Yep.

Wow.

Yeah.

Been all over the place, haven't you?

Yeah. Yep. A world traveler. I am a global citizen and I think because of that, I'm very passionate about protecting the planet. I, I always say to our team, to kids we work with, to the teachers, when you, when we looked through the Hubble Space Telescope, and now we're looking through the Webb Telescope, right? That's the new telescope. When we look back in time and we look back however many billion years, astronomers and scientists have not found any glimmers of life that is even a smidgen comparable to what we have here on our planet. And we spend billions and billions of dollars trying to get to Mars. I'm not saying we shouldn't go there, But I'm saying when you look at how bleak Mars is, and when you look how extraordinarily beautiful our planet is, when I look outside my window and I see hummingbirds and bees, and we live on an extraordinary planet, and we may be alone in the universe, that should make all of us sit up and want to protect our planet.

We need to slowly raise the consciousness of the people. So they can come to that place. There are too many people who see the planet as a resource to be exploited at no charge.

Yeah, exploited and extracted. We have lived a very human-centric focus where we're at the center of the story, when the truth is we can't survive without oxygen, water, plants, right? So we don't exist without the planet. And so we need to come to a place where humans and the planet and all the other living beings on the planet can coexist in a way where we all thrive, the planet, us, all the other living beings. We have to stop the sixth extinction.

Absolutely agree. Thank you so much for your time today, Chara.

Thank you. Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.