Katie is a partner at the Bridgespan Group, an advisory to nonprofits and philanthropy. She has written many books and articles on sustainable development and has coordinated community development programs in Africa and Latin America for Food for the Hungry International. She is also the co-author with her mother Mary Ann Smith of Cappuccina Goes to Town (Kids Can Press, 2002), as well as the non-fiction book The Human Farm: A Tale of Changing Lives & Changing Lands (Kumarian Press/Stylus Publishing,1994).

Katie lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA.

In your interview with PaperTigers last year, while touching upon the then forthcoming The Good Garden, you said, “In an era of food crisis, any child can play their part in their home or school garden, or in supporting poor farmers through acts of giving.” How have you aimed at getting that message across in the book?

The Good Garden is based on true people and events, and portrays the life of a campesino family in Honduras. They, like so many small farmers around the world eke out barely enough to live on – in a good year – and are highly vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition, when weather or insects create havoc. This family’s life is transformed, however, when a new teacher, Don Pedro, comes to the village school and gets the family’s daughter, María Luz Duarte, to help him plant a school garden – which he not only uses to teach students their basic subjects, but moreover to teach simple, sustainable agriculture methods that they can apply using their innate human resources: their heads, hands and heart. Through the caring labor of composting, terracing the hillside, planting beans among corn to keep soil nutrients in balance, and even dotting the terraces with flowers that smell bad to bugs, students see their school garden thrive on land that they all thought was too poor to keep them going. María Luz and others bring the learning home to their farms, improve their crops and grow in confidence about taking their own produce to market as opposed to selling to unfair middlemen – called “coyotes” in Honduras – who scoop profits. The knowledge they glean in the marketplace triggers another cycle of learning and innovation. Most importantly, the way the family shares what they have learned – passes it forward – ultimately transforms village after village.

So on one hand, kids see many acts of giving within the story – from teacher to student, from student to family and from family to family. At the back of the book, however, we offer practical ways that kids can help local food banks and community gardens, or give to international organizations like World Vision or Heifer International that provide seeds, tools and farm animals to families that need them. On our website www.thegoodgarden.org, kids can learn more and join a national food drive.

What else do you hope children will find inspirational in the book, which is based on the true story of Honduran teacher Don Elías, who had a profound affect not only on his pupils, but also on the whole community, through spreading his practical knowledge of what was needed to create sustainable farmland?

I hope kids will feel empowered to apply their heads, hands and hearts to any problem to help themselves and others. And I especially hope The Good Garden interests them in combating world hunger – ideas for action are listed at the back of the book. I also hope we see even more school, community and family gardens sprouting up – so kids can identify, if only in a small way, with the billions of poor in our world who live off the land, and so they can experience the satisfaction and nutrition of self-grown produce.

As I was completing The Good Garden manuscript in spring 2009, two of my kids got interested in planting a vegetable garden, and so we’ve had a miniature farming experience ourselves. The kids worked their tails off planting, watering and weeding. They harvested corn, Brussels sprouts and cucumbers, but bugs and shade killed most of the peppers and tomatoes. This summer, Brendan (15) and Mary Kate (12) expanded the garden for maximum sunlight and planted marigolds to repel the bugs. We’ve had great peppers, tomatoes and eggplants, but a varmint got through the fencing and decimated the corn patch. All to say, we have learned how good home-grown food can be, but also the tenuousness of growing it. We would starve without groceries!

The Good Garden has only been out for a few months but have you already heard about schools using it as a springboard for their own projects?

Absolutely. Here are a few anecdotes: Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. invited me down from Boston and María Luz up from Honduras (her real name is María Cecilia Vasquez, and there is a documentary about her real story) to speak to their middle school and reinforce their existing program to provide vegetables to a local soup kitchen. Across the street from Sidwell Friends, the Phoebe Hearst Public School, which joined forces for María Cecilia’s visit, read The Good Garden to their entire school during what they called “Good Garden Fridays” throughout the fall, and then they went out and worked in their school garden. Meanwhile, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a school called Edward Everett is planning to use The Good Garden as a springboard for helping a local homeless shelter to build their own vegetable garden. So the connection between the book and school gardening appears strong – and it’s helping schools move beyond their own gardens to collaborating in the community.

Can you tell us about the real María, who was the inspiration for The Good Garden‘s 11-year-old protagonist María? What was her reaction to finding herself in your book?

Last summer, we made a short documentary of one of the campesino families I profiled 18 years ago when writing the biography of Don Elías Sanchez, the Johnny Appleseed of sustainable agriculture in Honduras, and basis for the teacher Don Pedro in The Good Garden. We filmed the Vasquez family, a heartwarming father/daughter story of reviving poor land, as portrayed by the Duarte family in The Good Garden. The real María Luz is named María Cecilia. She has grown up and become an important community development worker in her province, looking after more than 300 campesinos (at the age of 21!) and connecting them to training and fair credit. She is the first in her family to obtain a high school diploma and a profession outside of subsistence farming. And she would tell you that a key difference between my book and her life was that it took about 10 years to transform their family farm, not just a season. During those 10 years she was up before dawn working the farm, then off to school in her one dress, then back to do chores and cook, then homework in the one notebook per year her father could afford her – when she wrote on the last page, she would memorize the lessons, erase and reuse it! It was such a privilege to be able to tell “the rest of the story” in the film – and to underscore the “girl effect”: when you invest in girls in developing countries, you really do invest in a family and community.

You met Don Elías in Honduras in 1992. What was it like to spend some time working alongside him? In what ways has he inspired the way you live your life?

Oh yes! In the summer of 1992, I spent time in Honduras living and working on Don Elías’ training farm alongside campesinos, and visiting former trainees – men and women – on their farms to see the fruits of their learning. Elías was a short, feisty, former-campesino-turned-teacher who had helped about 30,000 farming families — rural and urban — to food security. I’m basically a black thumb, but even I learned how to get a seed to sprout using my God-given abilities – thought, hard work and caring about what I was trying to do. I heard from campesinos, again, and again, that as they learned to nurture their land, and saw the results, they became more interested in nurturing their families and their communities – sending their kids to school, getting them vaccinated, investing in running water and sanitation and so forth. There was a spiritual aspect, too – as farmers got into synch with Creation many grew reconnected to their faith community. Alleviating hunger and thirst is really a first step in alleviating poverty of the body and soul. It’s hard to strive for education, entrepreneurship or enlightenment if your belly is empty. Don Elías, who was not particularly religious, had a credo: “Ideas unshared have no value!” It’s a principle that one can apply to all of work and life.

What was it like going back to Honduras recently and witnessing the differences in the land and the people?

Elías passed away in 2000, but I had the chance to revisit his training farm in Honduras in 2005, and to spend time with his widow, Candida, with his protégé Milton Flores, and several other characters from a biography of Elías that I had written some years before. Incredibly, his farm’s terraces held in the teeth of Hurricane Mitch, which wracked Honduras in 1998, and I walked those original big, earthen steps. It was really wonderful to be back and see both what had changed (buildings and capacity) and what had stayed the same – the approach to empowerment, the simple technologies and those sturdy terraces.

In your guest post for Cynsations recently you said that Don Elías’ starting point was always to “plant a seed in campesinos’ heads: the ideas that they could solve a lot of their problems using their innate resources: their heads, hands and hearts” – this seems particularly meaningful in light of The Good Garden‘s focus on the soil and planting seeds to grow a plentiful supply of food. Do you think it’s possible to have the one without the other?

I think it is hard to succeed in anything without belief in the mission and your ability to accomplish it. Those seeds of ideas that Don Elías planted created hopes, dreams and, most of all, confidence to achieve them. That was his “magic”. I would see campesinos shuffle into the training room on Day 1 of a program and be looking Don Elías in the eye by Day 3, telling him their new ideas. He was a study in empowerment.

Having first heard about Don Elías when you were writing your non-fiction book The Human Farm, did you know straight away that you wanted to create a children’s story out of it?

Just as you say, inadvertently, the book is the fruit of about 18 years of thought and labor! I researched the life of the teacher – Don Elías Sanchez – in 1992 just after the Earth Summit, for a biography-based story of healthy community development: The Human Farm: A Tale of Changing Lives & Changing Lands . Then, in 2005, just as I was finishing up the manuscript for my last kids’ book, One Hen, the protagonists in The Human Farm came out with a Spanish translation and asked me to review it. As I reread paragraphs on Don Elías’ early life – when he was a rural school teacher and taught farm kids through building school gardens – something just clicked! I saw the setting for a great children’s story to communicate lessons of food security and how kids can play a role in addressing global hunger.

The One Hen website has already been a phenomenal success. Can you tell us a bit about the website thegoodgarden.org and how you hope it will work alongside the book?

The website offers resources around each word in our motto “Learn, Play, Make a Difference!” Under the Learn icon, we offer schools free, downloadable lesson plans that relate the topic of food security to social studies, science, community service and other subjects. In addition, it has a Meet Real People tab where we have biographies of many subsistence farmers from around the world, with each one exemplifying a tool or approach they adopted to move from hunger to having enough. Under Play, we currently have an interactive quiz and we’re seeking funding to build out a virtual farm game. We also have forms for schools to fill in if they want to order a free Good Garden Chutes and Ladders, to use in the classroom (the game will release this fall). Finally, under Make a Difference, kids can register as a class, club or family to join our annual food drive where we try, as kids across the nation, to make a big difference for food availability.

How does The Good Garden fit in with/compliment the other books in Kids Can Press’ CitizenKid Series?

Well, it addresses a new topic for the series: food security. But in a sense, it also builds on two earlier books: Tree of Life and If the World Were a Village, which respectively lay out biodiversity and how the resources divide up around the world.

The theme for this year’s World Earth Day is “A Billion Acts of Green“. How do you hope The Good Garden can contribute to that? Do you have any special plans for World Earth Day?

I hope The Good Garden reminds kids how much power they have to trigger big things through small but consistent acts, whether it’s planting a tree a year, or planting an entire community garden with classmates or neighbors, and serving a harvest meal to those in need. As for the Milway family project, we are going to plant our vegetable garden and pick up trash in our neighbourhood park!

And what about for the future, regarding any new book projects?

I do have another book in the works that will introduce kids to primary health care and how they can build healthier communities and help stem disease abroad. It’s now in illustration with my One Hen collaborator Eugenie Fernandes, and due out Fall 2012.

Auction #121: A Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 Book Set of Seven Picture books, some signed. From PaperTigers.org

Description: You are bidding for a set of seven high-quality picture books (all hardcover) which were selected as the Spirit of PaperTigers book set for 2010 to be sent to different schools and libraries around the world.

The Book Set comprises the following titles with some, as indicated, containing book plates signed by the author/illustrator:

First Come the Zebra – SIGNED
Written and illustrated by Lynne Barasch
Lee & Low, 2009. Ages 4-8

Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing – SIGNED BY THE AUTHORS
Written by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann
Barefoot Books, 2008. Ages 9-12

My Little Round House - SIGNED
Written and illustrated by Bolormaa Baasansuren
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2009. Ages 4-8

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference – SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR
Written by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes
Kids Can Press, 2008. Ages 7+

Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai – SIGNED
Written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola
Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Ages 5-8

The Storyteller’s Candle / La velita de los cuentos – SIGNED BY THE ILLUSTRATOR
Written by Lucia Gonzalez, illustrated by Lulu Delacre
Children’s Book Press, 2008. Ages 4-8

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon – SIGNED
Written and illustrated by Grace Lin
Little Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009. Ages 9-12

Estimated Value: $150

Bio: PaperTigers.org is a colorful website devoted to multicultural books from around the world for children and young adults, with a particular focus on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. We seek to promote the celebration and tolerance of diversity, and to nurture literacy and a love of reading. As well as highlighting the world of multicultural children’s and ya literature on our website and blog, we work to reinforce our goal of promoting cross-cultural understanding via our Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach, under the banner Books and Water: Nourishing the Mind and Body.

PaperTigers’ website: www.papertigers.org

By the time I got to this book with my daughter for her bed time read, she’d already been exposed to it at school.  But that did not diminish her enjoyment of the story the second time round.  She loved the colorful illustrations by Eugenie Fernandes and was quick to point out some lovely things I would have never noticed in the pictures like the colorfully clad chicken mothers in the market of one drawing.   The story is set up perfectly for children to understand.  The purchase of one hen leads to the purchase of another and so forth until by the end of the book, Kojo, a grown man, is shown as a producer of one of the largest poultry farms in West Africa.   That’s microfinance in a nutshell, or rather, in a children’s book! And the great thing about this book is that it’s based on the true life story of Ghanaian producer Kwabena Darko.

One Hen is a truly inspirational and informative read.  If you can, I suggest you buy the book as some of the proceeds of the sales will go directly to the One Hen: Microfinance for Kids organization.

Sheila Barry, Kids Can Press’ editor-in-chief, answered our questions about One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, one of the seven books selected for inclusion in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set Donation Project, and about other topics related to the company and to multicultural children’s literature.

Q&A

PT: One Hen by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes is one of the most talked about books of the last few years (and arguably the one most used in classrooms across the United States and Canada). How did this project come about for Kids Can Press?

SB: Katie wrote a picture book for Kids Can some years ago, so we were the first people she approached when she decided she wanted to write an informational picture book that would allow her to share her knowledge of development issues in Africa, where she once worked in a village very like the one in the book. Since we had already published other informational picture books on global subjects, we were excited to work with Katie on developing her concept—and obviously we’ve been thrilled with the end result.

PT: Did Kids Can expect the book to do as well as it did, or have some of the ripple effects of its publication come as a surprise?

SB: We hope all our books will do well, but sometimes it does seem that a book comes into the world at exactly the right time to take off. With One Hen, we knew we had done something pretty original in making the subject of microloans both accessible and inspiring for children. We hoped buyers would appreciate our accomplishment, and we’ve been gratified to see that our title clearly struck a chord for many, many readers.

PT: What about the choice of Eugenie Fernandes to illustrate One Hen? How did CBP go about finding the best match for the story?

SB: Eugenie Fernandes is very well-known in Canada as both a writer and an illustrator of picture books for very young children. But in addition to her classic picture books (her new book Kitten’s Spring just came out), she has also illustrated an older book for us called Earth Magic, a collection of poems by Dionne Brand, a Trinidadian-Canadian writer. This book marked a real departure for Eugenie, and it also showed us that she would be perfect for One Hen. Eugenie’s mixed-media artwork creates the effect almost of magic realism, a hybrid style that is perfect for this book, since it is at once a picture book and a work of non-fiction.

PT: For those readers who may not be familiar with Kids Can Press, how would you describe your catalog? What are some of your bestselling books/or genres?

SB: Kids Can Press is a Canadian publisher dedicated to children’s books. We publish for children from birth to age 16, and we publish in all genres—picture books, non-fiction, fiction, graphic novels, craft and activity books, and so on. Our list is diverse, but we keep children at the centre. We hope that every book we produce will both entertain and enlighten, and we believe that you don’t have to sacrifice one aspect in order to achieve the other.

PT: Can you please tell us a little bit about the CitizenKid Series and how it fits in with Kids Can’s overarching goals?

SB: CitizenKid has been percolating for nearly 10 years now, ever since we published If the World Were a Village. That book touched people around the world, and we realized that there was a real appetite for books that introduced children to a global perspective on important issues. We started working hard at making sure we had a book a year that brought this global perspective to our publishing programme. When we realized in the spring of 2009 that we had a substantial collection of books on a breadth of topics, we decided it was time to brand them officially.

PT: How does Kids Can reconcile taking risks with making projects work from a financial perspective?

SB: In a perfect world, all our projects would be both innovative and financially successful. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there’s formula that anyone can use to reconcile risks versus financials. We make decisions one project at a time, by gathering people from editorial, design, sales and marketing into a room, where we debate (and sometimes argue) until we reach a decision that everyone is happy with. It’s not a very scientific method, but it does let us feel confident that whichever way we go, all viewpoints have been heard and acknowledged. And I think the result is a list that has a good balance between books with greater commercial appeal (and perhaps greater financial viability) and books that are more unusual (and perhaps appeal to a smaller market).

PT: What are some of the biggest challenges Kids Can faces as a children’s book publisher in Canada? What main changes in the industry have you noticed, since 1973, in regards to the publishing of multicultural books?

SB: Canada is a small market, and it can be difficult to generate sufficient revenue from Canadian sales alone. We are therefore eager to sell our books both in the US and into other international markets. The biggest problem we face is that we are a relatively small publisher. Our promotional budgets are correspondingly small, and sometimes it can be hard to get noticed in a world that is full of really wonderful books. We rely a great deal of on word of mouth, especially from librarians and teachers. It has been clear to us for over a decade that educators are increasingly eager to give the children in their care information about the whole world, in all its diversity, and so we have tried hard to produce books that will fill that need. I think we have been successful with One Hen and the other books in the CitizenKid collection.

PT: What are your hopes for the future of Kids Can?

SB: We hope we will continue to produce innovative and original books for children of all ages for many years to come.

…

Thank you, Sheila, for taking the time to answer our questions. We are very grateful to Kids Can Press for donating copies of One Hen in support of the Spirit of PaperTigers project. We wish you and the company continued success!

To find out more about Kids Can Press and for a list of their authors and illustrators, visit their website.

Lucia Gonzalez, author of The Storyteller’s Candle (Children’s Book Press, 2008):

I would like The Storyteller’s Candle to travel to Puerto Rico, to be in classrooms, libraries, and homes from the smallest town to the capital city San Juan. I want children in the island to know and be proud of the work of Pura Belpré, and to re-encounter the stories that belong to them.

and Lulu Delacre, the book’s illustrator:

I would like to send The Storyteller’s Candle to Tibetan schools for monks and nuns in Ladakh, India. Their lovely children have no libraries, and live off the generosity of others. They are taught English and the lesson that Pura Belpré imparts at the end of the book might be one they truly connect to.

Katie Smith Milway, author of One Hen (Kids Can Press, 2008):

If I could send One Hen anywhere in the world right now, it would be to Haiti, in Creole, to inspire children there to play an entrepreneurial role in rebuilding their nation. Happily, a Haitian Creole edition of the book is due out in 2010 through publisher EducaVision.

and Eugenie Fernandes, the book’s illustrator:

One Hen is already at the White House, so… after that I would like to send it… everywhere!, because it’s a book that connects us all.

Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, authors of Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing (Barefoot Books, 2008):

Little Leap Forward is about the lives of children who are growing up in a very poor, overcrowded society, in which food is rationed and there are no toys (beyond what they can make themselves) – a closed society in which freedom, knowledge and creativity are suppressed, and the people they love are about to be taken away from them. It is also a story about the irrepressible power of friendship, love and the imagination, even in the face of hardship and revolution.

So if we could send the book to children in areas of need in the world, it would be to any country where people are not free to express themselves, where families are divided, and children suffer from hunger, fear and poverty. In some small way, we would love to give those children the feeling that they are not just tiny grasses blowing helplessly in the wind (there is an old Chinese saying about this), but that they can find strength through nature and friendship, and hope for a better future by making the most simple gestures of freedom and compassion, whether it is releasing a caged bird (as Little Leap Forward does), finding music in everyday sounds, taking care of a friend, or flying a homemade kite in the wind.

and Helen Cann, the book’s illustrator:

I’d like Little Leap Forward to go anywhere where lives are repressed and people are told what to think and do. Little Leap Forward is about the triumph of hope, love and imagination over oppression.

Once again, those interviewed have provided us with plenty of food for thought – and perhaps you have very particular ideas about where you’d send special books like those that make up the Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set? Do let us know…

When the sun goes down, fears come up. The blessing of a transcendent story for any age is that it helps us to escape, to relate, to connect and to understand the perils and magic of our mortal universe. [...]

In the midst of the swirling clouds of conversations on recession, terrorism threats and environmental anxieties, our great authors, honoring the mysterious yet profound world of childhood, steer us toward peace and community, and the promise of hope in the morning.

Pam’s list is comprised of 8 books and includes Planting the Trees of Kenya and One Hen: two books which we chose for our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set! Here is what Pam has to say about these two books and why they made her list:

Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maatthai by Claire Nivola. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for her efforts to repair the environmental damage done to Kenya. She taught women and children to plant seeds and grow trees. Nivola shows the children restoring the health of a country. How this book will inspire: it’s not just Wangari who rallies us; it’s the tenderness of the children and their mothers, taking political action by planting gardens.

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes.  Kojo lives in a small Ashanti village. His life is changed when he is given a micro-loan by his village and he is able to buy a hen. His success after this impacts everyone in his community and beyond. Why we all should read this: When we try to figure out what to do to help in this year 2010, this book gives us a good model for how teaching a man to fish is more important than the fish itself.

Be sure to click here and read about the other books on Pam’s list.

Today we are thrilled to be announcing our Spirit of PaperTigers Project, an initiative of Pacific Rim Voices, whose aim is to promote literacy while raising awareness of our common humanity. The idea is to donate 100 book sets of 7 carefully selected multicultural books to libraries and schools in areas of need across the globe.

The following titles have been selected for inclusion in the 2010 Book Set:

Planting The Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, by Claire A. Nivola. Frances Foster Books, 2008.

First Come the Zebra, by Lynne Barash. Lee & Low, 2009.
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Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing, by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann. Barefoot Books, 2008.

The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos, by Lucia Gonzalez, illustrated by Lulu Delacre. Children’s Book Press, 2008.

My Little Round House, by Bolormaa Baasansuren, English adaptation by Helen Mixter. Groundwood Books, 2009.

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes. Kids Can Press, 2008.

Where The Mountain Meets The Moon, by Grace Lin. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009.

Our website currently highlights all the authors and illustrators whose books have been selected, as well as other features related to the project. Please note that we will be further exploring the particular reasons for selecting each title, here, on the blog, during the month of February.

One important aspect of the Spirit of PaperTigers project is that we will be receiving feedback from the book set recipients. In the course of the coming months, as feedback comes in, we will be posting it to the blog and the site, so everyone can find out about where the books are going and who they are reaching.

To learn more about the project and enjoy the new features, visit the website. And please help us spread the word on this exciting new venture!…