We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mackenzie Feldman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mackenzie below.
Hi Mackenzie, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Re:wild Your Campus is a non-profit organization with the mission of eliminating toxic, synthetic pesticides from school grounds and helping campuses transition to organic land management. This movement began in 2017, when my teammate Bridget and I, both student athletes at UC Berkeley discovered that herbicides were sprayed around our beach volleyball court right before practice. Astounded, we worked to ban herbicides from the courts and began picking the weeds ourselves with the Athletics Grounds Manager’s permission. This small action turned into a campus-wide movement to transition UC Berkeley’s campus herbicide-free. We worked with Grounds Management to initiate an organic pilot project on the campus’ two largest green spaces. After graduating in 2018 and supporting the campaign to operate independently at UC Berkeley, I did not have the initial intention to expand this organization beyond one campus.
Soon after, I found myself at the Johnson v. Monsanto trial in San Francisco, where a school groundskeeper from California, Lee Johnson, sued Monsanto because the company’s glyphosate-based weedkiller allegedly caused his terminal cancer. Inspired by Johnson’s courage to stand up to Monsanto, I wrote him a letter sharing my admiration and the origin of our campaign. Lee wrote me back a few weeks later and asked how he could help with our efforts. I knew that his story was important and decision makers, especially if they were groundskeepers themselves, would be more likely to listen to him in light of their shared life experiences, groundskeeper to groundskeeper. I worked with a coalition to bring Lee and his family to Hawai’i to speak to stakeholders and advocate for safer school spaces. By the end of the trip, the Hawai’i Department of Education agreed to ban herbicides from every public school in the state. I then used this momentum to organize students and we successfully pressure the UC system to ban glyphosate from all 10 University of California campuses. Lee Johnson’s story humanized this issue and gave people a sense of urgency, compelling them to take action. In 2018, Re:wild Your Campus (formerly known as Herbicide-Free Campus) evolved to become a national organization that supports and trains student activists to eliminate herbicides and transition their campus to organic land management across the country. As we support these students in initiating pesticide-free, re-wilding campaigns on their campuses, there are boundless opportunities for growth and momentum building toward our overarching goal of seeing every school in the U.S. go adopt organic land management by 2030. I have seen how the power of taking action has transformed the people and spaces around me and it fuels my purpose to have the opportunity to support other students as they witness similar changes in their communities.
Mackenzie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Mackenzie Feldman and I am an environmental activist from Honolulu, Hawai’i. Growing up in Hawai’i and having ancestry that is both Native Hawaiian and Native American has undoubtedly shaped how I view the natural world. My upbringing in Hawai’i meant that I was surrounded by nature and had a sense of kuleana (responsibility) to care for and protect our precious natural resources. The development of this lens supported me in understanding the inherent issues with the industrial poisons used by agribusiness corporations to test their genetically modified seeds on our ancient land, usually near Hawaiian Home Lands. I was inspired by the courage and urgency of everyday people standing up to these corporations to protect people and ʻāina (land), given the painfully high rates of cancer and birth defects in our communities. At the same time, I have learned from and worked with activists who are leading the food sovereignty movement and advocating to give more land back to Hawaiians who have the traditional ecological knowledge to uphold some of the most sustainable agricultural practices ever documented. These foundational experiences throughout my upbringing prepared me to lead a nationwide movement to decolonize aesthetics on the lands we hold most prestigious in society today, higher education campuses.
Re:wild Your Campus (RYC) is a women-led and youth-run movement that envisions a toxin-free future. We are challenging the deep-rooted aesthetic values that have been upheld on campuses for decades. Sprawling lawns on college campuses, classically associated with prestige, are not only derived from colonialism, but also often pose an underlying risk: extensive herbicide use that puts students, staff, and especially groundskeepers at risk. As spaces become herbicide-free, we hope to expand the network and, working with more indigenous student groups and those with local knowledge, incorporate more native plants, edible gardens, and foraging zones that can help combat food insecurity, serve as culinary and medicinal resources in our communities, and engage students as growers and producers.
We believe universities are microcosms for the world. If we can help empower students to be changemakers on their campuses and share skill sets to build healthier soil and protect community health, when students graduate and embark on professional journeys after college, they will be unstoppable.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding a non-profit is not easy! But finally, after fundraising for my non-profit for five years, we are finally at a pretty good spot (meaning I am not worried if I will make payroll each month!). What I’ve learned throughout my journey is that you really have to think outside the box. Just like when you apply for a job, you cannot expect to hear back if you merely send in a resume. You need to network, and this applies to fundraising too. You cannot just write a grant and submit it, but rather you need to focus on building relationships with folks at the foundations or corporations you are asking for money.
About a year into expanding my nonprofit nationally, I was still working 2-3 jobs and trying to make it all work, and had not secured any major funds. I was a one person team essentially, and at a fundraiser where I was asked to speak, I met a woman from a foundation. She gave me her card and encouraged me to reach out. I did, and a few weeks later we had coffee. We talked about how women always ask for less than men, and she was giving me some tips about approaching donors for money. By the end of the conversation, she said her ride was here, and she stood up to leave, and I knew before she left that I needed to pitch her.
So I said “wait, so, I feel like I need to ask this…do you think you would be interested in funding my work?”
She replied with a smile, “yes, how much?”.
I had no idea what to say…I had no concept at that point of how much I needed. I had never put a budget together. She threw out a number and I eagerly said “Yes!”. I got an email a few days later that her foundation was awarding us more than double what she originally said, and that ended up being just one donation out of many over the past few years. This coffee chat taught me that I cannot be afraid to ask. In the nonprofit world, there are a lot of negative feelings about money, and because people in the nonprofit space tend to make a lot less than their peers who work in the for-profit space, there is a general belief that because folks who work in the nonprofit world are doing something good for the world, they shouldn’t care about money. But in reality, we NEED money to keep our organizations afloat, and we cannot be afraid to ask for what we need. Since this coffee meeting, my confidence around fundraising has increased and I am proud to say that we are financially doing very well as an organization.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Re:wild Your Campus recently launched the Green Grounds Certification, which certifies schools that meet our standards. The certification has been an amazing way to grow the number of schools we work with. Instead of starting the conversation with a school about how they need to eliminate all pesticides, it is much easier to bring the certification into the conversation and talk about how they can apply and be rewarded for the great work they are already doing. To qualify at the Bronze level, you only need to manage 50% of your campus without synthetic pesticides, and this opportunity opens the door and celebrates schools for the great work they are already doing, as opposed to making schools feel like they have a long way to go to achieve what we are asking of them. And then once a school is certified, we can work with them to improve the level they are at, and eventually get them to a place where they are using 0 harmful chemicals at schools.
https://www.rewildyourcampus.
So, if you are reading this and wanting to get involved, we made a template here so you can email your alma mater and tell them to apply to our Green Grounds Certification!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rewildyourcampus.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rewildyourcampus/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rewildyourcampus/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rewildyourcampus
- Twitter: @rewildcampus
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rewildyourcampus