Ep. 47 Big Green DAO 2024 Annual - Power Plant Podcast: Rustic Roots Sanctuary

SSG Lacy “Mc” McDonald is joined by Janett Lewis with Rustic Roots Sanctuary. Her involvement in Spanish Lake began as a business investment but became a calling. She quickly fell in love with the land and the people, choosing to stay and pour her passion into the community. Janett developed programs to touch on all of her impact-driven passions — from sustainability to community development and youth engagement.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Yo, we are in the summit of Denver, Colorado, okay? The annual. We come together uh uh once a year uh for you know some I want to say RR relaxation learning and developing our our orgs. This is the big green down, you know, we're uh unstoppable growth going on, but this is the Power Plant podcast. My co-host is uh Stephen Lucky. He's not here with us today because he's uh in the groove. Um, but I do have a special guest that's sitting down with us this morning. Uh could you please introduce yourself? Like, who are you? What's your organization?

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Hi, my name is Janet Lewis, and my organization is called Rustic Root Sanctuary. It's down in uh St. Louis, Missouri.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Ooh, okay. I'm sorry, is that the show me state?

SPEAKER_00 0:51

It is the show me state.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

I always wondered, like, what does that mean? What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Uh I think it means like you gotta really prove yourself. So I did move uh to St. Louis from San Diego, California. Okay. And um I can remember when I started uh my farm, people were kind of like, hmm, you know, basically it was just a big pile of dirt and mud in the beginning. So when I told people what I wanted to do, uh I feel like a lot of them were like, hmm, you know, you gotta show me first. So I think that's that's why they call it the show me state.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

I'll see how it is. You know, I had a short stint in Missouri and that was down in Fort Leonardwood, Missouri. Uh so yeah, that was my army time uh a while ago. But uh yeah, I do definitely remember Missouri.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

That's awesome. My dad was stationed there when I was like knee high to a grasshopper. Okay. So yeah, I spent some time in Fort Leonardwood too.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

All right. That's you know, the school of engineering is done there. That's the home of drill sergeants too. So uh as a young private walking around, you know, the towns down there, I kept on running into all the drill sergeants, which really sucks. If uh, you know, you if you have some background in in the army times and whatnot. But yo, what is on the docker for you? You know, like first of all, I I want to know like what are you trying to do in your neighborhood? What are you trying to to do out there? What's what's what's your mission for the next few, I don't know, let's say the next over this next year? Like, what are your goals? What are some of the things you want to try to do?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Well, um, one of the things that we're working on currently is uh working with our government, like our local government, to kind of um free up zoning restrictions so that more people can grow food. And there's just a lot of different things going on. Um, I'm actually going to have a public hearing in a week where I get to go and try to get a CUP, which is a conditional use permit. And it seems silly that you would need something like a conditional use permit to grow food for your community, especially when you're in a community that's suffering from food apartheid, but that's where I'm at right now.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

So would you say you so you live in a food desert?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

And and is that uh uh is that East Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri? Is that east side or is that the west side of it? So Because you got the Mississippi that splits uh St. Louis, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

And actually, yeah, so we're in Spanish Lake, which is um literally where the confluence is. It's the largest confluence in North America, and we're probably five minutes from there. So it is a food desert, or what the USDA would consider a food desert. We like to call it food apartheid because that acknowledges all the uh systems that have been broken for so long that led us to living in a food desert, so they call it. Um, but yeah, so we're just growing food. We're up there by where the uh rivers meet, and uh we have one grocery store to feed over 18,000 residents, many of which don't have cars or are sharing a car, so it's really hard to get food, and those are the kind of systems we are working to obliterate.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

So I gotta ask Janet, like you were in Cali, San Diego, near the beach, right near the beach, man. Oh man, I love it. Right near the beach. And you went from that to a place of apartheid like food desert. What convinced you to do that?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Well, so uh when I when I lived in San Diego, I had this big vision. This was probably like 20, 30 years ago, and uh I wanted to do like um uh a woman's retreat. So I was coming off of my second divorce, which was terrible, and uh I was like running from my trauma and my history, and I thought like how cool it would be if people could get grounded in nature and centered and eat farm to table, do massage and uh meditate, those types of things instead of running into the next horrible relationship or drugs or alcohol abuse. So I had this dream of doing that, and in order to make my dream come true, I was like, how am I gonna afford this? So I ended up getting into real estate. And uh at first I was a real estate agent, and then I became a real estate broker, and I was trying to make this money so that I could start the retreat, and I basically forgot about my retreat idea and uh ended up just being a full-time real estate uh broker. So my tagline was uh call me because everything I touch turns to sold. And so I got I got busy with the real estate, and then I realized, you know what? I could barely even afford a house in San Diego, California. I mean, you could get maybe an eighth of an acre for five to seven hundred thousand dollars.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah, so it would have been a ton of commissions, and um, I really started thinking about becoming a real estate investor because that's where you can cash flow and kind of sit back, and that was my retirement plan. So, where can you get super cheap property and fix them up for almost no cost and then run them out in cash flow right away?

SPEAKER_01 6:19

The state of Missouri, Missouri.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

So that's what took me to uh St. Louis, and the funny thing about Spanish Lake, it's an unincorporated St. Louis County, is it is so naturally diverse and beautiful that you would never see. Like, if you're not from there and you just drove through there, you'd be like, wow, this is so beautiful. So, like, I really had no clue what I was getting myself into. You know, I just I started buying up these properties sight unseen, and they were like anywhere from, well, like the cheapest one I got was on a tax sale. It was $7,500. And then a lot of them were like $22,000, but they were just super cheap. So I bought up a bunch of real estate, seven houses to start, and uh started getting to work on rehabbing them. And while I was there uh renting out properties, I started realizing um I was becoming part of the problem there. So uh St. Louis, especially, specifically uh Spanish Lake has this rental market where out-of-town landlords will go and buy up the property, and they'll kind of do the bare minimum, they call it lipstick on the pig, you know. I'm like, oh, don't insult the little pigs now that I'm a farmer. But uh, yeah, so they would go and do that and then not really care for the properties. And so they get run down and slumlords. Slumlords, so cause more issues. So I was determined to not be that way because my father raised me on leave every place you go a little better than you find it, right? Okay, so I was fixing them up like above and beyond. But what started happening was um my tenants would go into the holidays and they would stop paying rent from December to January-ish, February, like March, April. Okay, yeah. So like after you go for months, yeah. And there's no way of like coming back from that once it starts to stack up. So uh I just ended up, you know, having to go through the eviction process and putting people out and them being very resentful and busting up my house that I had done above what you know the typical house was looking like. So I realized kind of quickly that um that was not gonna work. But while that was happening, I had my own property in the area that was on three and a half acres. It's pretty big. It's a good little size uh piece of land there. And then um, sorry. So uh next door I had a house that became like a nuisance property. It was suffering from vandalism, uh illegal dumping, and then two uh fires that the first one was like burn the house down 10%, and the second one burned the house down 75%. Okay. So after that, I kind of was like, I'm gonna buy this house out of probate. It was on three and a half acres, too. And so I called the probate attorney. Luckily, my background in real estate, you know, kind of helped me wheel in deal with him. And he was like, Well, you know, I'll give it to you for 75% of the appraised value. And I was like, Well, what's the appraised value? And I think it was like 14,900. Don't check my math because but, anyways, I went ahead and got it for like what I considered a great deal $12,000 for three and a half acres.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah, that's not bad.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Right. So um, with that, I actually uh after we bulldozed the house, I went to the community and had my first meeting and engaged the community around, you know, we live in a food desert now, an area that's devoid of fresh nutrients and food. And uh, would you like to help me grow? And so I started a community garden called Grow Spanish Lake. 30 members of a community of our community signed up that day. And so that was the first thing. We installed the garden, and then from there it just kept growing and growing and growing. So last year we were able to grow 18,640 pounds of food. Yes, uh, we had about over 250 um pounds of honey.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

And yeah, we make value-added products like elderberry medicine, ginger tinctures, like all different kinds of things that we um that we get from the land.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Well, uh, it sounds like you're showing you you showing up and showing out over there in the showy state.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

I'm showing them. That's fresh.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Yo, I'm well, what first off, I'm I'm really inspired about your story and how you came into that community and and realized, recognize what you know you were contributing to, you know, and then and now here you are like being a champion of change when it comes to like local government. And I think a lot of people like lose sight of that. Like you can create these opportunities of change, uh whether it be you know a change of your own life, uh coming out of Cali and and moving over to Missouri. But uh man, like how did you recognize, like, how did you really recognize that you were creating this, you were doing the same thing that a lot of other real estate folks were doing, like the folks that were doing the slumlord stuff. So you recognized it and you're like, yo, I'm gonna the the what I produce here is gonna be well above and beyond reproach. But like, when did you really like when did it hit you though? Like what happened? Was it that was it that you know, three months, no, nobody's paying rent?

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Well, that was part of it. I mean, uh, it's a flawed uh retirement plan if you actually don't collect the money. So um, but one of the uh one of the evictions that I was going through, this lady was very upset. Like she was highly volatile. So um I ended up calling the police. And what happened was when the police got to the house, they were basically like, you need to take your investing dollars somewhere else. This is a horrible neighborhood. Then they started telling me all this these stories about shootings, murdered yeah, like babies and stuff, and I was just like, holy Toledo! So I went and I found this uh Netflix documentary called Spanish Lake. And I don't advise watching it because it's like super uh heavily racially biased. It was um a guy who went from living on Maple Avenue, which is right around the corner from where I live, to LA. And he went back after White Flight and all of that, and he came back and just talked about how horrible the neighborhood had become and how it no longer resembled the great little you know, 1950s. Yeah. So um, so with all of that information, I got uh pissed, honestly. So um at the end of that Netflix documentary, I um they were referring to a couple organizations. One of them is called the Spanish Lake Community Association, and then the other one was the Spanish Lake uh Community Development Corporation. And so I reached out to those organizations, and before I had even started the farm and the garden, uh I signed up for the Claremont CDC, or not the Claremont, sorry, that was California, the Spanish Lake CDC, which I also did uh similar um volunteer work like that in San Diego, but it was way different. Uh so I did two years of being a board member of the Spanish Lake Community Development Corporation, and then uh as the chair was stepping down, she asked me if I would take over, and so I chaired the Spanish Lake Community Development Corporation for two years, and they were basically tasked with trying to uh redevelop and help um like the housing, the housing situation there. So in that time we actually rehabbed one property, and on the side, I had already rehabbed like six properties in Spanish Lake. So I realized once you get into the place where you're asking the government to fund things, yeah, yes, then all of a sudden it had to be ADA compliant, and all of the uh government bureaucracy just slowed everything down to a crawl. So uh yeah, that that's kind of where I was. And then, but during the time I was with the Spanish Lake CDC, I fell deeply in love with farming. And um, I can remember like the first time I ever dug worms, it was like a spiritual experience for me. I got goosebumps everywhere, and I was just like, oh my god, worms, like the the the soil, yeah. It was so alive, and um that was where it was at for me. So as soon as I got connected to the earth in that way, it was all she wrote.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

That's so fresh. Yeah, it's so fresh. Uh man, like uh now that you know we we went through the dystopian, you know, uh uh part of your story, then you transform this area, you're producing thousands of pounds of food, you've got honey, you know, coming out the yin yang. Like and how has the community received that that change? What did what did you see like from the community as you were growing food? You got you got you know bees buzzing, you got worms doing their thing. Like, what did change did you see in the community after that?

SPEAKER_00 15:50

The community is like so incredibly uh grateful and gracious, like everything we've ever needed, like there's more people than I can count coming out for us. Like we had trees fall on the garden, and uh the next day, like all these guys came out with chainsaws and they were like ready to clear all the split off of the garden. I mean, it's just been like so beautiful. And one of the things that we do is we have a produce sale every uh weekend on the farm. Yeah. And then another program we do is a senior program. Uh when COVID exploded in 2020 and people couldn't get out, we immediately decided to start um taking our produce to the uh the elders in our community. So that's right. If they don't, if they uh have mobility issues, then we'll deliver it to them. And if they can get out, they come out to the farm. And it's amazing when they come out to the farm because a lot of them have seen farms growing up, you know, like they this like what takes them back to when they were six years old.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

So, you know, I I see you talking so proudly about like the work there in the community. In fact, I saw some tears come forming in your eyeballs there.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Wait, I didn't go all the way. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

But that's it, it I just want the listeners to know this because like there's a lot of uh a lot of work, a lot of a lot of pain that comes into that, and then like the reward is like overwhelming. Like I'm I'm getting goosebumps listening to you talk about how that plot of land that you transformed into this life-giving, you know, peace, and now like you're trying to amplify that even more by working with your with government entities to spread that love. So, like, what is the end result that you want to see from what you're about to do with uh that local government there in uh Spanish Lake?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

I think that one of the most important things, um, like I've seen a lot of people basically going for their dreams and then get shut down by the government because it's just not conducive to like allowing people to think outside the box. Like status quo, the rules and regulations, um, systems that have been in place, you know, like the comprehensive plan that's happening right now in St. Louis uh County, they haven't done one of these since um 1983. Oh god. So there are all these systems that are holding the problems in place that need to be obliterated. And what I found is people are watching, like there are a lot of people that don't haven't even talked to me. They're like, you know, or they'll come out to the uh produce sale and say, I've been watching you on Facebook for years, you know. So they're like following, they're watching, and they want to see what happens. It's the show me state, right? Okay, so they're like, is she gonna get beat down, run out of town, or what's gonna happen? So we have those people, and then we have the other people that's like, anything you need, I'm here. Like when I told them we were gonna do this CUP hearing, we've already gotten a flood of email letters uh of support as to why we need this. And so what I'm hoping is I just keep leaning into this space of believing infinite possibilities. And so what I'm wanting to do is bridge and create this new uh camaraderie with the the county government. Like if we can and and my councilwoman is the chair of the county council, Shalanda Webb. Love her to pieces. Like she gave me my first award this past year for the Juneteenth celebration. And so, as far as having someone who supports you, she completely supports me and and the farm. But there's all of these other little systems that are getting in the way of us doing our work now.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

So that brings up a question for for me for you. What advice can you give to folks out there that want to create that change that you did? You're like the change is there. Like, as far as I can tell, like y'all like mission is is being accomplished, and now you're you're trying to amplify what you've done. What would your advice be to uh young organizations out there? Maybe they don't have all the assets yet, you know, maybe they're starting at zero, but they have the idea of transforming their community like you did with growing food. What advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

I think like I'm somewhere in between. Uh my my first initial response would be it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. So build your stuff, boo. But then, okay, that's the unreasonable answer that's got me into a public hearing in a week, you know, because I just built whatever the heck I wanted to build, and now they're like, pump the brakes.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

So the other thing I would say is um sometimes you have to believe in your dreams when nobody else does. Even when the naysayers are going, that's not gonna work, this is the reason why I won't, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just keep listening to your insides. Like I've always felt like this is the work that's on my heart, so I'm gonna do it. And even if you told me it was wrong, I'm not gonna listen to you. Thanks for sharing, but I'm gonna build what I want to build anyway. So keep building. And also, if you can connect with someone who has weight in your county government, I would say go ahead and build that coalition, friendship, um, camaraderie, whatever you can, so that when stuff does hit the fan, you have someone on the inside that can help you navigate if you ever get to that point where you're like, uh-oh, I could have got myself into trouble, but luckily I have a friend on the other side who's gonna help walk me through all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

So that's good that we're we're talking about this because it leads us into our next question for you. Uh, your garden sign. You walk into your garden, what what is your garden sign gonna say?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

What is my garden sign gonna say? My garden sign uh literally says belief in infinite possibilities at the bottom.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

There you go. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Yeah. So I'm just you know, I I See a lot of um in St. Louis, I see a lot of limiting beliefs systems, and those belief systems are put in place, I feel like, by the limiting government. So if we can start believing in infinite possibilities, like what is possible? Like if you could dream the biggest dream, you know, what would it look like? And that's what you go for because if you can believe it, dream it, see it, then you can achieve it. There's some cliches.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

There is actually there is, and we're gonna have to pull that one up. Well, that's though. How can people get a hold of you? How can we contact you? How can we follow you? How do we how do we help out? How do we ask for advice?

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Awesome. Yeah. Uh so um my organization is Rustic Roots Sanctuary, and so the website is rusticrootsanctuary.org. Um, you can Google search rustic roots sanctuary. Make sure you put the sanctuary in there because it's a sanctuary for the people and the animals on the farm. Um, but yeah, so if you Google search us, you can follow us on Instagram, which I'm horrible at social media and right now. I'm the executive director, the social media person, the website developer. You know how that's it.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Sounds like there's a job opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

There is a job opportunity. If you want to write grants for us or um do social media marketing for us, uh create TikTok videos or whatever all the cool things youngsters are doing now, please reach out. But yes, so my phone number is actually on all of that stuff. So I'm very accessible. Uh my email is info at rusticrootsanctuary.org. My name is Janet Lewis, and I'm super excited and happy to share like everything I've learned up until this point with everyone.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Well, don't be surprised if you have a bazillion people calling you up to try to help you out, which is which is what I want.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

I'll take two.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Well, this is Staff Sergeant Mac. I'm here uh at uh Unstoppable Growth because that I mean, literally, what's going on? You got that definition, you fit that definition to a T. Uh, loved having you here. Love learning more about what you're doing. Like your energy is great. I think uh just hearing off of what you've done, it already gave me goosebumps on the work that you're doing. And uh I I I'm gonna be praying for your continued success. Thank you and uh keep on transforming this, yo community, man. Like uh you just got an extra hero, an extra fan. I'm gonna be cheering you on from the Mile High City.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Yay! And it's a beautiful city, too.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

And this is Staff Sergeant Mac?

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Uh Janet Lewis.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

And Janet Lewis, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Thanks.