Anthropology alum takes on hunge How do you tackle climate change, ease food insecurity, promote biodiversity, and foster a sense of local community, all at the same time? Daniel Oladokun-Dybowski says to plant a garden. Oladokun-Dybowski is the founder of Isa’s Garden Charities, an online seedexchange and non-profit gardening forum that aims to tackle food insecurity in Pinal County, Arizona, and beyond. The group is working to establish a physical garden in Casa Grande, Arizona, where Oladokun-Dybowski lives with his family. It might seem like a strange endeavor for someone who holds a Master’s in anthropology, but Oladokun-Dybowski, who earned his degree from UWM in 2011, says that he finds ways to use his anthropological skills every day. He sat down to talk about the community garden, community service, and applying his education. Tell me about Isa’s Garden Charities. How did it begin? I realized that one in four children go to school hungry in Pinal County, where I am. I thought that that was a travesty. At Arizona State University Dean Michael Crow at our graduation told all of us graduates that we should go back to our community and be a very positive impact on our communities, that really hit home. (Oladokun-Dybowski earned a Master’s in social work from ASU in 2017.) I built a Facebook group and started to solicit the strengths of all of the local gardeners in our community to build a collaborative where we could 10 • IN FOCUS • July, 2021
meet up and do seed exchanges. We essentially make an effort to turn black thumbs into green thumbs. How does teaching people to garden tackle food insecurity? Learning seed saving, seed harvesting, seed storage, all of that, can help out with people becoming more sustainable outside of the monetary system constraints. We don’t necessarily have to be limited to going to the grocery store. Healthy food stores don’t have to be so expensive. We can undermine that and subvert it by creating these share groups where people are sharing seeds with each other, learning how to grow food. If you teach somebody how to grow their own food, they’re far better off than if we provided handouts. Now you’re working with officials in your city to establish a physical garden for the whole community to use. How did – pun intended – Isa’s Garden Charities grow from a seed exchange to this project? It’s just phenomenal. There are over 600 folks in my group. I think you can gain a tight-knit following to practice methods of getting yourself into a better position and increasing your quality life. Gardening is one method. If we can teach people how to grow their own food in the harshest of climates like the Sonoran Desert, we can do it anywhere. I think it’s important to document it so you can create a model that others can follow throughout the world and reduce climate change and world hunger. That record is in our Isa’s Garden Charities online Facebook group. I focus on trying to reduce food insecurity in my small town, but if you look at it as a microcosm, you might find that this has worldwide potential. But, how do you grow anything in your town? Arizona doesn’t have the most hospitable climate. Luckily, we have sun here, but we don’t have a whole lot of rain. You can grow anything that you want. We can actually grow anything from bananas, mangoes, various palms, to a lot of other subtropical types of edible fruit trees. Apples, mulberries - a lot of things that will take the full brunt and heat of the sun. That’s what you want to start growing in order to build a microclimate. You have to think soil and shade first. We have to dump a lot of woodchips down on the hard soil to condition it. You have to grow your shade and build your soil top-down. This mulch-over-compost idea builds that organic horizon over a period of a year or two. You can start to grow your trees out. If they’re deciduous, they’ll start to naturally drop their leaves after a while and you can build this natural system forest effect, where it becomes sustainable and regenerative.
