“When I was in the second or third grade, we went to the outdoor education center, which was like an old farm,” Gibson recalls. “They had farm animals they shipped in only when kids came in.” But they gave the children, including Gibson, some seeds to take home. “I grew tomatoes on a little strip of grass at our apartment complex, but I didn’t like them. So I gave them away,” he says.

What drew Gibson to growing was the same thing that brought him to community service—violence. On Memorial Day 2010, he was looking out his window and saw a fight over some marijuana. “One guy threw a punch and hit the other person who fell and hit his head.” Even though Gibson called 911, and police and ambulances arrived at the scene, the victim died from his injuries. “One of my neighbors who was at the scene came to me and said, ‘get out of this town, because there is nothing here for you.’”

Gibson didn’t leave Battle Creek. Instead, he wanted to do something to make a mark for himself and his community. But little did he know at the time he’d become a part of a major food access revolution in Michigan.

A year later Gibson met Jeremy Andrews, the founder of Sprout—a small collective of community gardens at the time—and Anderson offered him the opportunity to volunteer at Sprout. “I started coming in a couple of days a week, then it was every day, working on the organization, systems, and excel spreadsheets.” When Sprout was awarded an AmeriCorp grant, Gibson became the organization’s first paid staffer and he never left.

In the years since, the organization has undergone a growth spurt; it added a commercial-scale greenhouse and began selling produce to restaurants and institutional clients, such as hospitals.

“A lot of the growth has come from building and nurturing relationships with the local chefs,” Gibson says. In 2014, Sprout received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to hire a staff person, who helped manage relationships with restaurants. In just one year, Sprout went from selling produce worth $14,000 to $50,000. “That additional revenue helped us with the funds to provide more food access to low income areas of the city,” Gibson says.

In addition to selling its produce via a community-supported agriculture (CSA) scheme, Sprout runs a farmers’ market in Washington Heights, a low income are of Battle Creek. “People say it is a dangerous area, but our customers come there to shop and bring their children and grandkids,” Gibson says.

The Sprout team also participates in several mobile farmers in residential parts of the city. “In order to be able to pay for the mobile market, we go to the downtown businesses, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, where we quickly sell out,” he adds.