Farming fuels a holistic approach to end homelessness at Lotus House

Growing fresh food helps Lotus House residents find their fresh start.

At Freight Farms we believe that everyone should be able to participate in the joy of eating fresh, healthy foods regardless of location, climate, or socioeconomic background. Our global Freight Farmer network makes this mission a reality–and none more so than the non-profit organizations that use hydroponic container farms to create meaningful and long-lasting change in their communities.

Today we’re highlighting just one organization: Lotus House in Miami, Florida. Lotus House is what many of us would call a “homeless shelter”, but the term fails to capture the sheer extent of their services. Lotus House refers to itself as a “holistic residential facility and resource center for women and children experiencing homelessness”. The difference is significant. Instead of focusing on providing bare minimum resources–a hot meal, a bed, a shower–Lotus House tries to address the initial cause of homelessness, with the intent of getting women and their families back on their feet. Their services provide up to 500 women and children residents with daycare, employment education, and arts programs, beauty salon, yoga and meditation, and much more.

Meet Farmer Jackie

To learn more about the incredible things happening at Lotus House, we connected with Jackie Roth. Jackie is the ideal person to talk to about the role of farming within the center’s greater holistic model:

“As Project Coordinator, I manage all aspects of the Farm in addition to other specialty health/research projects at the shelter. I lead sessions inside the Farm every day, as well as the cooking demonstrations and outdoor garden work, and oversee all Farm maintenance and volunteers. So I’m basically the resident farmer, and guests know me as such.”

Hear from Jackie and Constance (Lotus House Founder and Director) when you download webinar, recorded on April 30th 2020. Download here.

Good nutrition as a pathway to wellness

For Jackie, Lotus House’s farm is part of a much larger conversation about the essential role health and wellness play in building resiliency and ending the cycle of poverty:

“Our mission is to transform the trauma of homelessness into a window of opportunity, where guests can heal old wounds and build resilience for a brighter future. Rather than provide the temporary support of a bed and hot meal, we work to holistically end the cycle of poverty and abuse that too often leads women and families to our shelter. Health and wellness are essential to this healing, and food and nutrition are essential to that health and wellness. It truly takes a village and lots of moving parts to achieve this multidisciplinary vision, and the food and nutrition education component is no exception.”

Lotus House | Farm Spotlight | Freight Farms Blog — “Health and wellness are essential to this healing, and food and nutrition are essential to that health and wellness.”

- Jackie Roth

The Lotus House farm works in tandem with the Culinary Center, where over 500 residents and staff members are served three free meals a day. The farm is mostly used to grow a variety of lettuces that go into the Center’s salad bar, along with other specialty greens, root vegetables, and edible flowers. For Lotus House, the Greenery is the perfect intersection of food, nutrition, and education, and it has been deployed accordingly.

“We aim to serve largely plant-based foods and healthful meals that nourish the healing and developing minds and bodies of those who live here. The Culinary Center is home to one of our paid internship programs for guests where they earn their Food Handler’s certification, participate in the inner workings of a commercial kitchen, and hopefully create new career opportunities for themselves in a city with such a prominent hospitality and entertainment industry.”

Furthermore, the farm and the center have a symbiotic relationship. Jackie explains the benefit of the farm for Lotus House, and the greater community:

“Our Farm saves us thousands of dollars a year on produce costs; in addition, we work closely with local nonprofits and businesses who donate reclaimed food that would otherwise be thrown away. And when we have more food than we need for ourselves, we give it back as groceries for people in the neighborhood - because the community’s health is so tightly linked to our own. So there’s lots of internal and external coordination involved in sustaining our own food source, reducing food waste, and bringing real nutrition to the people who need it most.”

Achieving good nutrition through education

Beyond the dining program, the farm serves an important role in educating and engaging many of the organization’s youngest residents (ages 3-12) on weekdays after school. Jackie, who oversees all the in-farm programming overviews the day-to-day:

“The Farm is the home for an innovative after-school program where children witness the seed-to-harvest life cycle and farm-to-table growing. We also do cooking demonstrations where kids can see different hands-on ways to use their vegetables and learn basic kitchen skills like chopping, mixing, blending, etc.”

Lotus House’s education farming program doubles as a mini-workforce. During their afternoon sessions, younger kids help Jackie plant seeds and harvest mature plants for delivery to the Culinary Center, where they will be served the very next day. Beyond that, older kids interested in the farm help Jackie with the more detail-oriented tasks, like transplanting and maintenance.

But the farming program doesn’t end there! As with everything Lotus House does, the farming program has a holistic and multidisciplinary approach. In addition to the Greenery, the center has built out a general nutrition and gardening presence at the shelter. The building features an outdoor rooftop garden where the children grow basil, cilantro, beets, mint, broccoli and strawberry sprouts–started in the Greenery–in the soil and learn how to compost waste from the Greenery operations (grow plus, leaves, etc.).

The center runs also smaller events and initiatives about nutrition, such as the ‘Farm Stand’ where the Lotus House staff highlight a Farmer of the Week, share what’s growing, provide samples, and give out nutrition-themed activity sheets.

Changing habits to change lives

Ultimately, the goal of the Lotus House Farm program is to encourage residents to eat more fruits and vegetables by connecting them to their food source.

“With the Farm, we have a really unique opportunity to give guests a transparent lens into how food grows, from seed to plate, and get them excited about eating something cultivated in this high-tech environment. The approach is not to lecture people on what’s good for you or what’s bad for you, but to show them how cool plants are and all the different ways you can enjoy them.”

The opportunity to work with kids from a young age is particularly important in this goal. “It’s best to intervene young so they can build healthy habits early on, and hopefully share what they learned with mom to influence her attitudes and habits...If we can play even a small part in ...getting children excited about eating fruits and vegetables, exposing them to something they’ve never eaten before, or bringing moms and kids together to watch their plants grow and prepare a healthy snack, then it’s a worthy battle.”

Inspiring future farmers

With robust educational programs established and successful, Jackie turned her focus for 2020 on two new initiatives: creating a wider volunteer program and rolling out a hydroponic farming job training program for teens and adults.

The volunteer program sought to engage people all over Miami with the center and the farm, based on their availability: “The volunteers are integral to maintaining a beneficial student-teacher ratio, implementing therapeutic teaching techniques, and ensuring all necessary maintenance work is completed and our Farm stays hyper-clean.”

The job training program would teach residents basic farming skills before they started paid jobs with local container farming community partners, like fellow Freight Farmers at Hammock Greens: “We want every abled person in our shelter to come out with a good paying job, and even with the kids and volunteers there was often lingering Farm work, and we had lots of adults who expressed interest in learning more about gardening.”

Unfortunately, COVID-19 brought both programs to a screeching halt just as they were gaining momentum: volunteers stopped coming in and partnering businesses closed their doors. Jackie remains hopeful, however, making sure that post-COVID, the programs are still viable.

These new programs are not the only ones that had to be re-thought in today’s coronavirus reality. As Lotus House works to protect its residents, Jackie is aware of how the farm is at the center of two competing forces:

“On the one hand, we want to exercise the utmost caution in every regard due to the compact interior of the Farm and the nature of growing fresh, uncooked food for hundreds of people when there are still so many unknowns about this virus and its transmission. But on the other hand, supply chains are so uncertain right now and we are acutely reminded of the value of being able to produce our own food. And, all the kids are off school with extra time on their hands and a deep desire for some semblance of fun and normalcy.”

Luckily, Jackie and her helpers were well-prepared to address public health and safety in the farm. Well before the coronavirus reared its ugly head, Jackie implemented rigorous cleanliness practices to avoid contamination like wearing gloves, sanitizing multiple times daily, “dabbing” when sneezing or coughing, and routine deep cleaning of the farm. Since the pandemic reached Miami, they’ve expanded the precautions:

“Most drastically we’re restricting our attendance to no more than two kids at a time in accordance with social distancing. And because of limited attendance, we have fewer hands to help and are therefore at a reduced capacity. Despite all of this, we’re still going. There’s still interest and definitely still a need. Even if we get to a complete quarantine, our guests still have to eat and we will still strive to serve them nutritious options.”

In spite of the increased work and stress of running a farm in the center’s close quarters, Jackie feels that the pandemic situation has reinforced the importance of her work: “The good fight to end homelessness never stops–shelters keep running through even the most unprecedented emergencies, and we are charged with protecting some of society’s most vulnerable people. It’s actually been quite a blessing to grow closer as a team, adapt together, and try to preserve this homey space of healing and sanctuary despite all the madness outside.”

Supporting Lotus House during COVID-19 and beyond

In light of the unprecedented circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked Jackie how the greater Freight Farms community can help Lotus House.

“Because of the pandemic, we truly need help now more than ever. If you head to our website, you’ll see a donation link on the homepage. Anything helps. Your support is critical and immensely appreciated! We are taking so many extra measures and expenditures to supply PPE to our staff and guests, to hire additional persons for added sanitation, to ensure our supply stocks are sufficient, to do whatever we can to protect everyone living and working with us. And to prepare for the inevitable spike in homelessness that will result from this economic collapse.”

Looking beyond COVID-19, Jackie also outlined how community support will help support the Lotus House farm in the future: “Our Farm was purchased and funded the first year through some local community grants, but those grant periods ended last month. We are now exploring new funding streams to advance the program. We accept donations, specifically made out to “The Farm” if possible. We also designed our own educational curriculum for the program, and are happy to share this along with technical training if you would like to replicate what we’re doing. And anyone interested in volunteering can reach out to me at jackie1@lotushouse.org!”