William Sizwe Herring is a teacher, environmentalist, ecologist, urban gardener and educator. In 2002 he was named Middle Tennessee Teacher of the Year by the Tennessee Environmental Educators Association. He is the Director of EarthMatters, Tennessee (EMT) and since 1992 has been one of the primary creators and managers of Plenty’s Kids To The Country program.

For 18 years KTC has been bringing kids from inner city Nashville to the Farm in the summer for a healing “immersion in the natural world” experience. But Sizwe has always stressed the importance of the “circle” whereby these same young people and others in the city keep in contact with each other and with the “urban natural world” through imaginative events such as the “Leaf Lift” and “Smashing Pumpkins” where kids and parents come together to build compost and play and plant vegetables and fowers at Sizwe’s “eARTh Food Park,” a 3 acre greenway adjacent to Interstate 440 in south Nashville. Plenty is working with Sizwe to expand what we’re calling Kids To The Country-Urban to create more opportunities for inner city young people to interact with dirt, compost, growing things and each other, all year round and in their own neighborhoods.

At “Smashing Pumpkins Day” at eARTh Food Park, seeds were collected from pumpkins that had been grown on a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, and the pumpkins were added to the compost pile.

(Sizwe and friend with seeds above.)

People from all over Nashville bring their leaves to the Park for compost that is freely distributed in neighborhoods around the city.