How Molalla High School’s Culture Club Transformed 1,000 Students Through Oregon’s 500th School Garden

This article is pulled from episode 1-3 of The Farm to School Podcast hosted by Michelle Markesteyn and Rick Sherman. For the full episode and transcript, click here.

School gardens can transform entire communities, but what happens when a thriving program loses its champion? Kelly Douglas, former school garden coordinator at Molalla High School, shares the remarkable story of how she built Oregon’s 500th school garden with zero budget, engaged 75% of her student body, and reduced bullying by 66%—along with hard lessons about sustainability when the program ended after she left.

Finding Purpose in Rural Oregon

Molalla is a small, rural town where student homes can be “20 minutes one way” apart on crisscrossing roads. As the textbook coordinator and librarian at Molalla High School for 17 years, Douglas noticed something important: “I noticed a void. I noticed that our students needed to have a little bit more structure in their free time, and the idea of the garden and the open space that was in the middle of our school really looked really inviting.”

With approximately 1,000 students and limited activities in town, Douglas saw an opportunity to give young people a place to belong.

Building Oregon’s 500th School Garden with Zero Funds

The project started with an audacious goal and no money. “We had absolutely zero funds, zero funds,” Douglas explains. Their first grant came from Figaro’s Pizza—just $100 for paint, poster paper, and brushes.

From there, Douglas knocked on doors throughout the community, securing in-kind donations that would eventually total $30,000. Local hardware stores donated shovels and wheelbarrows in exchange for free advertising through student photos. Contractors provided labor. The community contributed “at least 15 loads of gravel” for walking paths, “5 truckloads of dirt,” seeds, paint, stain, and even giant boulders dubbed “reading rocks” where students could sit and read poetry outdoors.

Working with I and E Construction from Wilsonville, the entire garden—featuring 16 raised beds plus accessible standing beds shaped like a “4” and “H” for their 4-H partnership—was constructed in just 12 hours.

Douglas’s fundraising approach was direct and effective. At the garden’s groundbreaking ceremony with state legislators Brian Clem and Vic Gilliam, she looked them in the eye and asked: “How much are you going to give me today?” Both pledged $500 on the spot.

Culture Club: More Than Just Gardening

What started as lunchtime meetings to discuss tomatoes and cucumbers grew into something extraordinary. Students named their club “Culture Club” and developed their own hand signals, T-shirts worn every Thursday, and a powerful mission statement: “Molalla High School is our lake of Knowledge. Culture Club is the Pebble dropped in the middle and the ripples created are Culture Club students spreading kindness, tolerance, understanding and positive energy throughout campus.”

The club grew from a dozen students to over 150 active members, with 75-80% of the entire school participating in garden activities. “We scooped up all those kids that didn’t have a place to belong, and we gave them a home,” Douglas explains.

Measurable Impact on School Culture

The results were dramatic and quantifiable. “Our incidents of bullying and harassment went down 66% with the inclusion of the Culture Club,” Douglas reports. Teachers noticed the difference too. As one teacher shared: “When I see a student in my class with the Culture Club shirt on, I expect more because I know that that student is involved in Culture Club…instilling kindness throughout the entire school.”

The garden became an integral part of school life. Wrestling team members would “snack and graze through the garden” while waiting for practice. Classes used the reading rocks for outdoor learning. Students operated a micro-enterprise business, making fresh hummus from garden vegetables and Bob’s Red Mill donated beans, selling veggie carts for $1.50 after school when “there’s no live food” available on campus.

Douglas challenged students daily: “If you are in a group and somebody’s talking something, maybe a little negative or maybe it’s something that just doesn’t feel right, challenge you to change the subject and if you can’t say oh, excuse me and step away because you’re taking your energy away from that.”

Changing How Students Eat

Through a research partnership with Oregon State University, the program tracked student eating habits. The university “weighed and measured the students, and then they gave them surveys on what type of vegetables and foods they were already eating” before and during the growing season.

Garden participants learned about nutrition and childhood obesity while growing and tasting diverse foods, guided by the motto “fighting childhood obesity, one tomato at a time.”

Students from different cultural backgrounds shared their food traditions. “All of our Russian students baked bread in the cafeteria…maybe 20-25 loaves of bread, and then we made giant pots of soup…just vegetables…from the garden,” Douglas recalls. They watched Finding Nemo together with soup, bread, blankets and pillows in the library.

Ground cherries became a favorite discovery. “So many people did not know what a ground cherry was and they were the most popular,” Douglas notes. The small fruits taste like pineapples and became “nature’s candy” that students would share with other schools during field trips.

The garden donated over 100 pounds of produce to Meals on Wheels in Molalla and more than 100 pounds to state fire evacuees, connecting students to community service through their growing efforts.

Community Impact Beyond the Garden

Douglas shares a powerful story about one homeless student staying with another family: “This young man called me. It was late on a Saturday night…he wanted to know how far apart to plant the tomatoes because…he wanted to thank the family that had been feeding him. He didn’t have any money to thank them, but he had hard work. He had energy, and so he was out there in the dark after his homework was done planting tomatoes for this family.”

The garden operated with a strict rule: “No technology was ever allowed in the garden. If you were in the garden, there was no phone…you were with Mother Nature and one another.”

National Recognition

Douglas’s work earned her the Billy Odegard Emerging Genius Leader Award from the Oregon Public Health Institute in 2016, recognizing her efforts fighting childhood obesity. The eleven Culture Club officers accompanied her to accept the award, each speaking at the event to “standing room only clapping and whistling…people in tears.”

These students, many from economically disadvantaged backgrounds—some covering shoe scuff marks with black Sharpie markers, one with “one black shoestring and one white shoe string” who “covered his shoe string with a black marker because he wanted to look good”—also testified at the Oregon State Capitol and on Capitol Hill about the importance of farm to school grants and having “live food on campus between practices instead of just chips out of the locker.”

The Hard Lesson: When the Garden Ended

Despite its success, when Douglas left for another career opportunity, the program couldn’t sustain itself. “The garden of Molalla is no longer. The sprinkler system that was donated was gone. All of the tools that were donated were gone. It just disappeared,” she shares.

A teacher attempted to continue the program, but without a dedicated coordinator, participation faded. The students who had called the garden their home graduated, and younger students found only “empty, hardened beds.” Douglas believes “one of the special education classes wanted to use one of the beds,” but “the entire program and the entire garden is no longer in existence.”

Critical Lessons for Sustainability

Douglas learned valuable lessons about garden sustainability: “Time is your most priceless commodity and you can’t buy time and people if they’re not passionate about it. Their time is not going to be devoted there…You have to have that adult.”

Looking back, she reflects: “If I would have known that the garden would go by the wayside, I would have invested more time in securing the other clubs, more participation from the other clubs and being able to hand it over to them.”

The solution lies in paid positions. Oregon’s 2019 school garden survey showed progress: 50% of gardens had at least some paid staffing, up from just 10% in 2012. About 10-15% of those were full-time positions.

The Lasting Impact

Even though the physical garden no longer exists, the experience transformed participating students forever. “Even though the program isn’t still alive, they have that reflection that they can do anything. They can do whatever they set their mind to,” Douglas emphasizes.

Students learned to “work the room” at fundraising events, ask for donations, and barter for supplies. They gained confidence speaking to adults and testifying before legislators. They discovered they could feed themselves and their community. “It’s invaluable the time that they had together and the skills that they learned.”

Douglas remains passionate about school gardens from her current role as executive assistant to the superintendent at West Linn-Wilsonville School District. She continues speaking at Oregon School Board Association conventions and advocating for farm to school programs statewide.

Her advice to educators considering school gardens: “It truly is our responsibility to lean in and create the venue, create the space, create the experience for our students to get their fingernails dirty to really have no technology between each other and get out there in the school garden.”

The story of Molalla’s Culture Club demonstrates both the transformative power of school gardens and the critical importance of sustainable staffing models to ensure these programs continue benefiting students for years to come.

Listen to the full podcast episode to hear more details about ground cherries, reading rocks, student testimonies, and Kelly’s inspiring journey building community through student gardens.