 Thanks for having us up here. Again, my name is Craig. I'm from New York. My friend is originally from New York. I moved to South Dakota about six years ago. I've been living down in the Northwest Reservation ever since. I'm working with Redko and the Food Sovereignty Initiative. I'm going to let that introduce himself. I'm Anthony Marcesa. I'm the target manager at Redko Food Sovereignty Initiative. I've been living on the road for like three years, almost now. Originally I'm from Pine Ridge. I'll talk a little bit more. Alright, cool. So you guys got the package in this. So we're going to kind of move through things relatively quickly. For some reason we're having a PowerPoint issue in terms of all our pictures coming up. We'll kind of just go through. So quick background. We're based with Redko Rosebud Economic Development Corporation on the Rosebud Reservation. It's an economic development part of the tribe. They mostly do business enterprise development about five or so years ago. The board as well as tribal council basically said all this business stuff you guys do is awesome and we need that. But we also need all these other things, all this community development work. Out of that kind of very broad directive to go do cool stuff, this is where the Food Sovereignty Initiative came from. We started about four years ago in 2014. What I'm here to talk about today is our CCG agreement with NRCS and the project that we developed through that which is called Growing Food Sovereignty from the Ground Up. This is kind of a little bit of a hot topic hot topic term and it's basically kind of an enhanced version of local foods. It's not just growing food it's also about the systems of food and how you are able to get food to your community. Who kind of controls the resources that gets food to your community which is important. So this is kind of just a brief background of what we do. The Food Sovereignty Initiative kind of has a couple of big areas. We run a one acre incubator farm garden. We are the organizers of the farmers market on Rosebud as well as some other market developments and we do traditional foods work. So kind of a lot of food gathering, buffalo harvest, etc. This project particularly here, we were awarded three years ago I believe for the first round of CCGs that came out. We had a project previously with NRCS. We planted over 800 fruit trees in one of the local communities on Rosebud. Community members basically said we want our grandkids to eat well so we need to plant trees fruit trees specifically, native berries and others that will be here for the next three generations. So we went with NRCS and partnered awesome project really successful. CCG came out, local foods was on the RFP and we were kind of like awesome, this is right up our alley. I've never really seen that kind of language before from NRCS so it was really helpful and we welcomed that a lot. What Jeff was talking about before in terms of CCG having a non-matching requirement was 100% essential for us as an organization to be able to apply so really and we'll get to the impact later on was the catalyst for us to have enough stability to launch all the things that we're doing now. The amount of growth we've seen since we've gotten this one opportunity I think we've tripled our staff and programming output in the last three years. Actually the last two, we're entering our third year now so we can try and have a good return on investment rates as a partner. Basic sort of improvements in the program. We're trying to increase local food production, increase consumption of local foods and sort of build up the components of a system so that people who produce it, they'll market pathway. How do we leverage more dollars within our local economy on rules but turn our dollars over as much as possible. Specifically where we're from and probably in South Dakota as a whole, we have a lot of leakage a lot of money that we used to go elsewhere because there's not resources or markets in our local area. I think rural South Dakota has that in general so this is something we find really important. We're finishing this fall, it's called the state of food sovereignty report for Rosebud which will really lay out just exactly how many close to millions of dollars that we currently weak just in food purchases, not even with all the other amenities people need to buy so we're trying to just capture as much of that locally as possible in terms of key aspects of the product. This is our garden right here for people who can see on the right. We have leverage that geothermal geodesic dome greenhouse so it uses underground soil heating and cooling technologies to mediate temperature and then we have the high tunnel is actually rolling, it sits on a track and can move physicians throughout the year so we can grow multiple crops throughout this season so what we're trying to do in partnering here is to actually increase our actual production numbers since the start of this project we effectively doubled the amount of produce, we went from 3 to 6,000 in the first year, pounds of produce that we've harvested this year we're creeping up closer to 7,500 by the end of the season numbers doesn't say all but we also grow about 40 or 50 varieties of crops so we're not growing 7,000 pounds of produce, tomatoes, lettuce, bok choy, kale, snow peas, nap peas you want it, we can grow it, we have grown it so we're trying to have a diversified small scale farm we also do chickens and egg production, we also have beekeeping that we do out there as well and this year we just incorporated some small scale fruit blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, I think I'm just a little sugar-happy here, it kind of escapes about 6 slides ahead anyway I kind of memorized it, the other one was the kind of next level of what we were looking to do was a lot of community engagement activities so a major part of what we wanted to do was Rosebud is this, if you look at the size of the Rosebud Reservation it's one and a half times the size of the state of Rhode Island and masses and the communities that we're trying to serve about 30,000 people so most of the services are centralized in the towns of Mission which is where we're based for Rosebud which is where the tribal services are we have communities up to 40 miles away from our centers so a big part of our thinking in this project was if we're really about food systems development we need to go talk to all the people who are a part of our food system so each year since the inception of the grant we've visited all 20 of the communities on Rosebud at least once a year bringing in a meal and just sitting out with people saying what are the struggles that you have in accessing food and also what are the opportunities for you and your family if we were able to help you develop some sort of small enterprise based out of your house that was based on what would that look like so we just spent the last two years we'll do that again this year kind of visiting that and all the stuff that we've talked to people about will also be in our state of food center based on your people's experiences here's the dollar numbers but then here's what people's actual experiences are and then the last kind of big the last kind of big piece that we wanted to touch on here was that our original dollar amounts that we were able to leverage through this project we currently have leveraged to date and additional three quarters of a million in grant and other support funding to expand our project so the most recent one which we couldn't talk about last time but we can now we were successfully awarded a community farmer grant through USDA so we'll be working on the next three years out of the space that CCG helped us to develop to train up to five or six tribal members in small scale food production specifically with the focus of entering small scale ag is as an enterprise not just home gardens for fun but to have major impact in our community food systems we also in addition to that have hosted over 40 youth interns we hold the last two summers in the garden 20 hours a week on a sort of regular basis and that's a big part of what I want to you know Edwin talk about this a little bit he's got the best story so it could be quiet for a while but the idea that if something is going to happen on those but that's going to have a positive impact it has to be community led so a big part of our focus has been how we create opportunities for people to plug into work and opportunities that we're treating so I'm turning over to Ed just to talk about his story and his passion and if I put you to sleep I'm Ed Hermione versus a little bit background about me like I said earlier I am from Pine Ridge Pine Ridge my mom is from there I was born there I was raised there I moved over to Rosebud about three years ago with my brother I was kind of dropped out of dropped out high school whether they do nothing just figured out moving with my brother and my grandma and trying to find a job doing something was very unsuccessful for about a year until I got my GED and then I had a cousin that worked with Mike I can't remember what year that was it was 2017 he worked up in the garden as one of our summer interns so he we went through the whole process he took me to their office I applied I got the job and then I started off as a summer intern 2018 in June and then about two weeks I kind of realized this I mean so far like we had a week of rain and then a week of like actually doing stuff and after that I kind of decided that I loved what I was doing I thought the food work after a very passionate presentation from Mike orientation I thought about it a lot and I really loved doing the food work like at that point I was kind of into gardening I kind of like being outside more than I like being inside I'm very introverted I don't like going outside too much and I don't like being too social too much so this job was a very big personal growth for me so after some time I talked to Mike and some other people about a year like any other job opportunities that I could try to get on so there was a position open for the AmeriCorps year long volunteer internship whatever so I did that and anything about office work I just thought I was going to be gardening age of five I was wrong so that started in August 29th was when I started my full-time position at food sovereignty and I think about six months in before I think it was either in January or I can't remember right now it was a couple months in but I decided I told Mike that I wanted to take over the entire garden after learning as much as I could I just decided I'm going to dive into this I don't really like doing office work so I dove in and this summer was the first summer I called myself the garden manager I managed all the interns told everyone what to do did post of the planting you know all of that fun farm stuff and the last day of my VISTA term was August 28th this year so that was a year and then right after I was offered a full-time paying job benefits making real money for anybody that doesn't know if this does it paid about five dollars an hour depending on where you live but I was offered a job as the garden manager to run everything full-time and like during this entire process it was insane to me that I didn't know growing food sovereignty from the ground up sometimes when I reflect on what I do it was like growing food sovereignty from the ground up where I didn't care I went from not caring about anything and just eating processed food to now this past week I was able to buy sourdough, some jams and jellies raised raised local beef and some squash and watermelons from our vendors and like a year ago I was just buying stuff from the grocery store and just eating that so a little bit about our back story talk a little bit about our interns this year like I said this was my first year managing anybody so it was very scary but it was very fun to see some of the people we had most of them were at least so I am 22 years old I'm going to be 23 in December most of them were about my age or younger or most of them were just out of high school most of them were like coming back from a year from the first or second year from college just like we had a lot of people that were in college coming back from college or just around like young adult age and it was very great for me just because I'm helping teach people that are around my age that always feels better for me and it's always better for like when we host kids up in the garden when they see younger people more people more towards their age or people more towards maybe their older brothers age or their sisters, cousins whatever but also since they were my age they also had some very similar attitudes that I had in some of the times they were very mouthy so sometimes I had to put my boss foot down but it was a very good experience for me we had them do a summer project and it was whatever they were passionate about we had them think on a level of so we had different levels in our society of local culture there's Mie which is yourself there's Ti Oshuaide which is your immediate family there's Ti Wahe which is your extended family and then there is Oyake which is the nation in that project we had those four levels and at the end of this internship which was about mid-August we had them do a project of whatever they're passionate about and it had to be on one of those the Oyake level of what could they do what did they want to do that could make the Oyake better and the ideas and stuff that they had the ideas that they shared with us had me so fired up because they were all amazing and like I was ready right then and there to implement them I didn't care I still feel the same way I still want to implement every single one of their ideas or help them whatever way I can there's just so much to talk about here Mike also talked about the beginning of the program that we rewarded we came up to our we have a new director now his name is Matthew Wilson we have another co-worker that is coming on her name is Deanna Eaglefeather she's our market manager so me Deanna and Matthew we sat down and after our end mic and then some other DRA partners we sat down and we decided to come up with our name so the name for our beginning it's going to be a farm beginnings type class but we realized there's a lot of processes to that too much to explain I don't really want to explain it but anyway we came up with a name and it is a name which means they will develop into producers and it was actually one of our interns from Stanford that came up with our name and it fits very it fits like it's a very nice name and I feel very good about that name because not like growing foods out from the ground up we're just not going to train farmers but they will develop into producers so it's whatever enterprises like salsa, tinctures or I can't remember where it's from they will produce something by the time they are done with this with our one year classes so that name carries a lot of weight to it for us and so we are very happy and excited to go through the painful process of learning a lot of new things but it will be very worth it probably it's kind of a wrap so you guys can keep going with the meeting when you look at well first of all I'll just say Edwin makes the best budgets in our whole office even though he hates office work he makes the most detail very simple to understand budgets so that's good I think when I look at Edwin I'm always very proud of him and I think that's something that it makes me happy for our young people to be able to see that we have strong leadership and this is what we hope for them as well this isn't something that's going to be a top down program program driven movement this is going to be community led especially our young people are the ones who are really taking this I always like to say too we're not done and we're not even close to done so in the next five years we look to expand our garden from one to five acres and our goal internally and we'll just say it for anyone is we would like to be a regional leader in small scale food production that's what we're going for we're not looking just to do cool things for ourselves but we want to push the envelope on what small scale food production and local food systems development looks like for the entire region also just this year we launched in conjunction with our farmers market we launched a mobile market component and are doing a feasibility study for a mobile grocery store so basically trying to think about in rural communities we need to start thinking innovatively about how we're getting food to people because traveling 40 miles around a trip grocery store just isn't working for a lot of people break those barriers I guess just finally to kind of thank you for taking the time to listen to us I know like hearing people introduce themselves that angle we're coming at it is probably different than a lot of other people but I see at a base level all is going to eat and we all want to eat good we don't want to feel full we want to be happy with tasty food and that's really what we're doing we want our communities to be healthy we want our children to be healthy and we want our land to be healthy and we think that some of the ways that we're doing that are good so thank you for taking the time to have us and you know we're happy to be here honored to be here walking around if anyone wants to visit if anyone has questions now one thing really quick Mike said that we think we can do some our mentality me and Matt's mentality is shifting so we will do it there's nothing we're either going to do it or we won't would you share with us the amount of grants award that you received so our grant was a $520,000 grant over three years that leveraged three full time positions in one part time position that leveraged all the supplies and growth up at the garden as well as we have a lot of passion usually a little resources so we take up any and turn it into $10 so that's kind of what the impact of that but that was an initial award yeah of course thank you they like to come visit and just see what we got going on where he's been fun to talk to and kind of map some of our progress she just had come to visit and asked she did a feature on this last year and then wanted to follow up and see where we were at so thank you any other questions thank you so much I appreciate it