Our Story

As a budding backyard farmer, watching his first flock of backyard chickens scratch through the food scraps, dead leaves, and grass clippings in the compost pile, Jon often reflected on the parallels between what we often do with those items in the compost pile and what often happened with students in his classes.

If you wrap up food scraps/leaves/grass clippings/horse manure in plastic garbage bags, it still breaks down. But the nutrient rich juices become a sludge that can harm rather than help the planet. The more the stuff is closed up, the more it stinks, the less nutrients we are able to get back out of those often tossed items, and the higher grow the landfill piles.

Similarly, and sadly, statistically, the students in Jon’s classes were removed from their social groups and peers, closed into cinderblock-walled, windowless spaces. And as Bill Strickland famously points out, “If you build prisons, you create prisoners.” So, despite the great progress Jon would see within his classroom environment, the rich personalities and experiences closed up within his classroom walls, the moment his students stepped foot back into their worlds, their lack of opportunities to practice social skills in authentic social contexts showed. A few of his students have found paths forward, but far more have found themselves locked into cinderblock cells, not sharing their “nutrients” with society, either, but getting thrown away in a sense, into our human landfill system of prisons.

Motivated to create rich opportunities for students who may struggle with behavioral and emotional disorders to work alongside caring adults and peers from their own community, Jon started daydreaming of a “farm school.”

In 2018, the opportunity came to purchase a home that sat on 5 acres and then, miraculously, in 2019, the 7 acres of raw land adjacent to our home was put on the market. Through a generous loan from a beloved family member, we were able to put down a down payment and purchase the land, believing whole-heartedly in our desire to serve kids and families in our community.

In April of 2019, the week our contract would finally be accepted by the sellers of the land, we were invited to a free retreat for “people who hope to start non-profit farm ministries.” WHAT? Jessica went, she got connected to a farm which had a beautiful mission to nurture healing and growth through the interaction of people with horses in a Christ-centered environment.”  While the horsemanship was very new to Jessica, the mission resonated and the experience of the retreat’s leadership team was ready and willing to help guide us in taking our first steps toward creating a non-profit organization.

In 2019, we felt led to invite a child out with his family after his mom has shared difficulties she’d noticed him having at home and school. Jon just offered to have the boy out for a few hours each week or as needed to work alongside him. The experience was electrifying! The mother of the son shared that she knew deeply that others she knew would benefit from time out on this farm and connected us to Jubilee Academy’s administrative team.  

In early 2020, after a meeting in which we shared our vision, the leaders at Jubilee Academy with huge, tear-filled smiles agreed that their students would benefit from something like our vision and invited us to lead a special elective class, which we later named “Dirt to Dinner.” Through teaching these weekly classes, we got the opportunity to create lessons that wove social and emotional skills instruction into fun garden and cooking activities. 

In February of 2020, our founding board met for the first time. We had lively discussion around personal experiences and experiences with children that had led us to do this work together. 

On June 25, 2020, in the midst of a global shut down and pandemic, and also, incidentally Jon’s mother’s birthday, Renuma Lu Inc. was officially approved as at 501c(3) non-profit organization!  That August we formulated a more substantial 12-week curriculum for school groups based on permaculture principles, again weaving in social and emotional skills prompts and activities.  We also offered the small group of students in the class the regular opportunity to travel to our farm, meet our animals and make fun foods using seasonally available produce. 

During this Spring and Summer of 2021, as our nation seemed to be coming out of the lock downs of a global pandemic, and vaccinations were more readily available, we opened our farm up on a regular basis to one-on-one adult/child visitors, including therapists from a behavioral health provider in our community who would be able to bring their clients out to do farm chores, enjoy a park-like environment or to just visit the animals as a part of their programming.

In the year ahead, we hope to add sheltered spaces for outdoor activities and conversation between adult/child pairs, improve accessibility on our physical grounds by creating level paths around the farm space, and improve our garden to create more of a market garden to be able to see both eggs and produce to support our farm’s activities!