Butler is my home town. When I was young, it was a thriving community that had a robust and bustling downtown with many small local businesses that everyone supported. I experienced a cohesive community growing up, and that's why I believe that almost everything we need in life can be produced and maintained at the local level, benefitting our community instead of the giant corporations that seek only large profits without regard for our local quality of life. We have to get back to sharing community and end the isolation that we have created in our "bubble" homes.

My personal passion is growing. The importance of growing our own clean food has never been more important. We are slowly destroying our soil in the United States with large chemical agriculture production and our various chronic diseases are being linked to those existing farming practices and food production. (For more information, watch: Farmer’s Footprint, Regeneration: The Beginning.)

As an educator, I believe that learning how to grow food should be part of our school curriculum and available to all community members. Every K-12 school should have gardens for children to learn experientially through growing food. There should be accessible local garden sites in communities for everyone to grow and share nutritious foods. During the World Wars, Victory Gardens were a staple in every community. Everyone understood the importance of nutritious foods. (Victory Garden at the National Museum of American History - Smithsonian Gardens). The process of changing our food production in this country will be a mountain, but we must start somewhere. If we start at the local level, we can begin to make a difference in our own back yards.

By connecting with community through growing and other basics, we will start to restore our health in more ways than one. We will not only be able to grow and share food that provides the necessary microbes for our body, but studies have shown that through connection to community, we can begin to restore better physical and mental health. That’s what the Blue Zones have in common. We’ve become isolated people in our homes and our physical and mental health is being impacted. We don't mingle with our neighbors and community like we used to. Let's begin to restore our health and reclaim our lives.