A story by Anne Dagenbach on Jodine Grundy. This article is also featured in the December 6, 2024, issue of The Ripple.

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Sometimes we are faced with a call we cannot ignore. Even as a teenager, Jodine heard a call to action. It presented itself in the form of a vivid dream. In it, she was an educator dedicated to connecting rural and urban areas for sustainable food production and consumption. Jodine Grundy’s life of community organizing and activism is captured in a quote from Antonio Machado’s Proverbs and Songs #29: “Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.” Throughout her life, her dream helped create her path. Follow her path to see the steps she took to heed the call to action.

Step 1: Discover a Need That Aligns with Your Values

Jodine Grundy was raised in Southern California with a family history of farming. She grew up in the garden with her mother, planting seeds and caring for a variety of flowers and vegetables. Her connection to theEarth grew deeper through education with renowned horticulturalist AlanChadwick at University of California, Santa Cruz CA and hands-on involvement with The Grail in San Jose. With social justice as the core principle of TheGrail, Jodine was called to witness and work to improve the lives of impoverished migrant farmers and abysmal labor camps in the early 1960s. She found herself wondering “How do we live simply? How do we live rightly in the world?”

These questions led her (along with her husband and several others) to join the “back to the land“ movement, and they moved to WestVirginia to farm the land themselves. During this time, Jodine and her group learned from their neighbors how to manage a farm, but they also saw extreme poverty that their neighbors were powerless to overcome. Jodine saw the similarities between farmers in California and West Virginia. She and her group pondered questions such as: “How do we know what the need is?” She figured the best way to answer that question was to “stand where you are and look around.” Jodine began to deepen her skills in organic farming and community organizing in this context.

Step 2: Listen for the collective need and apply your strengths to the problem

After their homesteading experience in West Va she and her community made their way in the mid-1970s to Grailville ,national center of the international Grail, in Loveland. Soon after they arrived, they learned about plans to develop of a large sewage plant that would undermine many small farms in the area. Together with local residents, Jodine used her community organizing skills and experience with agriculture and social justice to form a non-profit organization, “Citizens fora Better Goshen.” The goal was to stop development of this over- sized sewage plant designed for inappropriate development detrimental to rural residents and the environment. After a “massive amount of work, community organizing and fighting against political interests all the way up to the state level,” these wage plant plan was defeated.

Step 3: Don’t expect to know where the path will lead – just get started

By this time, Jodine was becoming well known as a grassroots community organizer and a friend to sustainable farmers. She soon helped form another group called“Rural Resources” to promote education and advocacy. She said, “I didn’t know where things would go with Rural Resources, but we had to start.” Her guiding question was: “How can people organize to bring about what they need?” In this case the goal was to help save small scale family farms, protect rural people to sustain their communities and help provide regional food security for urban and rural sector.

Her group spoke to local farmers, analyzed data, and organized conferences to learn more, ultimately finding markets for the farmers’ products. Rural Resources became a local, regional and state-wide powerhouse. According to Rural Resources historical documents, the group“recognized the interrelatedness of rural and urban areas, of producers and consumers, local and global food, production, as essentially interconnected systems, as an ecology, upon which food, security, and the economic and cultural lives of the populace and the health of the land and inhabitants depends.” The rich and impactful history of Rural Resources has been preserved through the University of Wisconsin’s Historical Archive of U.S. Organic andSustainable Agriculture from 1970 to present. Click here to access this resource.

In 1979 Rural Resources convened an Ohio convention and“birthed” the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA). With 28chapters state-wide, this 45 year old organization continues to thrive today. The group focuses on the engagement of farmers and consumers for sustainable food choices and food security. OEFFA is recognized as the primary certifier of organic food products in Ohio and other states have modeled their certification programs on OEFFA. Staff and members work together to influence policies and legislation that support sustainable agriculture, produce educational conferences, and provide support to one another.

Step 4: Help others apply their strengths and give them resources

Fast forward 30 years through life, family, careers and continued passion for the Earth. Jodine and her husband Terry were approached in the late 2,000’s by their neighbor who was very concerned about climate change but inspired by Louisville’s efforts to address it. Could Cincinnati do something similar? He called on the Grundys to approach community leaders for the purpose of addressing the effects of climate change. Jodine took this seed of an idea and gave it resources to be successful. She and her husband tapped into their networks and engaged the City of Cincinnati, Hamilton County, DukeEnergy, University of Cincinnati ,Cincinnati State, Cincinnati Public Schools to form The Green Partnership for Greater Cincinnati. This collaboration was formed to have a large scale effect on climate change.

At a Green Partnership meeting Cincinnati Park Board’sNatural Resource Manager explained how southwest Ohio was destined to lose 1/3of its tree canopy due to the emerald ash borer, Asian long horned beetle, development and other external factors. “He really woke us up,” Jodine said. It created a new seed of an idea in Jodine’s mind.

At this time the Cincinnati Nature Center hosted an important meeting of Ohio organizations and individuals who were also awake to the threat to the region’s tree canopy. “The seed of an idea …. you never know where it’s going to go.” Jodine said. “If it’s a really good seed… timely and relevant… It has a lot of power.” The result was a new initiative formed in 2013 called Taking Root. The goal was and is to address tree canopy loss.

Step 5: Plan to help the effort grow beyond its initiator and become sustainable.

The vision of Taking Root is a “vibrant tree canopy in theGreater Cincinnati Tri-State region now and for generations to come.” Jodine and the members set an inspirational goal of planting two million trees and are still working toward that.

Taking Root has many educational and outreach programs throughout the year. The programs focus on key stakeholders - community residents, planning commissions, tree care professionals, garden centers and more. Taking Root seeks volunteers in a variety of roles not only in planting trees and education but also with social media and promotion.

According to its website, “Taking Root is striving to educate the public on the need for trees, to value and care for them and to promote and facilitate efforts to plant them—by the millions.”