From food policy to food gardens

In 2008, Roger Doiron launched the “Eat the View” campaign with a simple goal: persuade the next president of the United States to plant a vegetable garden at the White House.

More than 110,000 people joined the effort. The following spring, Michelle Obama broke ground on the first food garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden.

For Roger, the garden was never really about vegetables. He had spent years inside the food system at the international level — directing the Brussels office of Friends of the Earth during Europe’s mad-cow crisis, serving on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations World Food Summit in Rome — and then moved the opposite way most careers run: from the policy table toward the soil. He’d become convinced that some of the most practical answers to big problems, from food insecurity to public health, begin close to home. A garden can teach a child where food comes from, stock a food pantry with fresh produce, and turn an empty lot into a place neighbors actually meet.

The White House campaign proved how powerfully that idea resonates. But it also exposed the gap. When Roger surveyed the movement he’d helped build about what to do next, the answer came back clear: inspiration wasn’t the problem — funding was. Gardens didn’t need more convincing. They needed resources.

What began as Kitchen Gardeners International in 2003 evolved into SeedMoney’s crowdgranting model — a way to help community food gardens fund themselves by pairing local support with challenge grants. Today, that model has helped 3,687 garden projects take root across 52 U.S. states and territories and 65 countries, reaching over 1.1 million people — built and run lean enough that most of every dollar reaches the soil.

Roger still leads SeedMoney from Maine. His TEDx talk, “My Subversive (Garden) Plot,” has been translated into 14 languages and viewed half a million times, but these days his own plot is a modest one — he and his wife downsized the home garden as their sons grew up, and he spends his free time outdoors with his family, including a grandson now learning where food comes from too. The conviction that started it all still holds: that small acts, multiplied across many communities, add up to extraordinary change — and that it usually begins with a single seed.