There's a growing movement to bring more outdoor learning to public schools. This month, we profile Land to Learn, a non-profit organization that provides hands-on, garden-based learning to elementary students and teens throughout the Hudson Valley.

Executive Director Nicole Porto previously worked as a farmer and has dedicated her career to building sustainable and just food systems. In our interview, Nicole describes how Land to Learn's gardener-teachers work with kids of varying ages to instill knowledge of where their food comes from and advance values of caring for the Earth. There's also the unexpected thrill of watching the seeds they planted — strawberries, tomatoes, arugula — grow before their eyes.

"One of my favorite things to watch people get excited about is when a little yellow flower starts to grow a tiny, baby, spiky cucumber," Nicole says.

This episode focuses on Land to Learn's SproutEd program for elementary schools in Beacon, Newburgh and Kingston. Through SproutEd, gardener-teachers build school food gardens and teach monthly lessons that combine knowledge of plants, nutrition, cooking, and environmental stewardship. Separately, Land to Learn also offers employment and internship opportunities for teens and college-aged kids.

Find more information on Land to Learn at Landtolearn.org.

Lastar Gorton, Beacon's new Ward 1 city council rep, is tired of watching families be forced out of the city because their paychecks can't cover the rent or a mortgage down payment.

Lastar grew up in Beacon, and she has watched waves of lifelong Beaconites leave as the cost of housing rises, while developers have erected dozens of mostly luxury condo buildings. That includes her uncle, who was forced to leave his longtime apartment and move away from Beacon after his wife passed, despite expressing interest in buying the building he lived in. His offer, which would have easily bought the place just a few years ago, was slightly under the highest bid.

In this interview, she makes the case that Beacon hasn't done enough to resist real estate market forces that have already forced many longtime community members to move to Poughkeepsie, Newburgh and other nearby cities and towns. And she outlines what she believes it will take to create a wave of truly affordable construction in Beacon — as opposed to the "below market rate" units that are sometimes passed off as affordable.

There's plenty of other great stuff in this episode too, including on traffic, a community center, the TOD development and more.

If you like what you hear, please share it with a friend, and subscribe to our newsletter at Beaconites.com

How do you end up going into business with your life partner? For Paula and Justin King, the couple behind Rexhill Studio, the decision came many years after they first met, as their separate interests and skillsets gradually converged in their adopted home city.

Paula grew up in NJ, attended NYU and lived in the East Village in the 90s. Justin grew up in Ohio, took an early interest in art and dreamed of escaping the Midwest. They both ran away to the West Coast, each for their own reasons, and met in Portland where they lived for years before moving back East and putting roots down in Beacon.

Over time they realized they had complementary skills - Justin a woodworker of steadily improving ability, Paula a gifted interior designer with the operational knowledge to maintain books and oversee a shop. Thus was born Rexhill, a mom-and-pop cabinetry and interior design studio that has found a niche by resisting the prevailing forces of our economy.

In an age when most manufacturing is modular and mass produced, Justin and Paula have embraced a way of working that is custom and small-scale and local. And they've done it together while raising kids, something common in bygone times but very rare these days.

Not sure what to do with your one precious existence? Good news from the true-life adventures of Vibeke Saugestad: You don't have to pick one thing.

Best known as a power-pop singer-songwriter, Vibeke is also an accomplished literary translator, multi-instrumentalist, puppet-maker and ventriloquist.

"I don't stand still for long," she says in our interview.

Vibeke's music career started in the early 90s when she was the teenage frontwoman for Weld and other bands. She kept making music for the next 35 years in various groups ranging from the mellow, loungy Thinkerbell to her most recent combo, the hard-driving Vibeke Saugestad Band, featuring an all-star group of Beacon-based musicians. Another local project, The Wynotte Sisters, pairs Vibeke with Sara Milonovich and Daria Grace (both former Beaconites guests).

Outside of her music, Vibeke has built a career as a translator, creating Norwegian versions of English language books, including "Johnny Cash: The Life" by Robert Hillburn and Booker prize-winner "The Sellout" by Paul Beatty.

It doesn't stop there. During the pandemic, Vibeke took up ventriloquism and created Punguin, a conceited but adorable animal who spreads joy on Instagram at @the-punguin. (Penguin appears in this interview.)

For more episodes and community updates, visit Beaconites.com or contact Zach at [email protected].

Photo credit: Ken Fox

Beth Poague's life changed when she and her then-husband Jim learned that their youngest son Finn had a rare genetic disorder. Their pace of living shifted, they sought community with other families going through the same thing, and as Finn got older, Beth channeled her energy into advocating for changes to Beacon's schools on her son's behalf.

First at JV Forrestal and later at Rombout Middle School, Beth pushed for — and got — more integrated classrooms and school activities that allowed kids with disabilities to learn alongside typical kids. She believes the work she and other parents did improved outcomes not only for their special needs kids but also for the "normal" kids.

"All of us get accommodated all the time, right?" she says in our interview. "I am wearing eyeglasses right now. That's an accommodation for my disability of my sight. But eyeglasses are seen as something normal, so we don't ever think of it as an accommodation. But accommodations for disability are all over the place. Every single one of us needs help. This idea that we're supposed to muscle through everything and pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and be independent and not need anything from anybody is harming all of us."

Also in this episode, Beth talks about the Wheel of Consent, a system for identifying and communicating needs for the purpose of clear communication, healthy boundaries and personal empowerment. Beth teaches classes and facilitates workshops about the Wheel of Consent. More on her website at BethPoague.com.

Repost: Some listeners experienced a truncated version of this interview, so we are deleting and reposting. -ZR

The tables have turned! After six years and more than 133 interviews, Beaconites creator and host Zach Rodgers (i.e. me) moves into the guest's chair for a discussion of his life and the evolution of this community project. A few listeners have asked for this episode over the years, and Beacon AV Lab's own Jonny Taylor — my creative and production partner during the full run of this project — was kind enough to be my interlocutor.

We talk about my upbringing in Northern Michigan, journey to Beacon, the origin of Beaconites, favorite episodes and the future direction of this project.

The tables have turned! After six years and more than 133 interviews, Beaconites creator and host Zach Rodgers (i.e. me) moves into the guest's chair for a discussion of his life and the evolution of this community project. A few listeners have asked for this episode over the years, and Beacon AV Lab's own Jonny Taylor — my creative and production partner during the full run of this project — was kind enough to be my interlocutor.

We talk about my upbringing in Northern Michigan, journey to Beacon, the origin of Beaconites, favorite episodes and the future direction of this project.

Julie Winterbottom has written a wide range of books aimed at children, including books on farts, pranks and horror — all designed for maximum humor, spine chills and fun. Her most recent work is a little different: "Magic in a Drop of Water" tells the story of ecologist Ruth Patrick, who did pioneering research connecting biodiversity to river pollution and helped to write the 1972 clean water act. It's a beautiful book in terms of both the story it tells and the gorgeous illustrations of marsh snails, hugsuckers and, above all, diatoms, the family of phytoplankton that appear in all bodies of water and that were the focus of Patrick's work.

In addition to book projects, Julie also plays cajun accordion and volunteers with multiple local causes, including Beacon Prison Rides and Beacon Climate Action Now. At 68, she offers a wonderful example of someone in endless pursuit of ways to create, connect with others, and give back to this community and those in need.

Mike Diago loves eating, and writing about, food, but his interest is only partly about the cuisine itself. In articles for Eater, Saveur, Chronogram, The Bittman Project and other publications, Mike has created a niche covering the critical role food and eateries play in stabilizing communities. He has written about the surprising Dominican expat tradition of holding spaghetti feasts on the beach; about a BBQ restaurant in the Bronx that has operated continuously since 1954; about a burger place in Jersey City that has anchored its community and overcome sharp racial divides.

This food-focused journalism is a side hustle, basically. In his day job, Mike is a social worker for the Peekskill school district, and over time he has successfully blended his interest in cooking with his outreach to teens. In our interview, he describes how he has invited students - many of them disengaged young men - to prepare meals together. In the process, many have found friendship and discovered that they actually do love to learn in a group setting.

Also in this interview: Eating in Beacon, Mike's backyard cookouts, growing up with a globetrotting father and more.

Heather Christian is a singer, playwright, composer and recent winner of a MacArthur "genius grant."

Her compositions use spiritual music forms to explore themes as varied as ghosts, grief, the Odyssey and the Big Bang. She describes them as " choral-based complex music theater works." They are often presented in the round, in part to obliterate the hierarchy between audience and performers.

"I'm interested in existence. I'm interested in unanswerable questions," she says in our interview. "Our lives have become so much about the in and out business of our civilization. The email, the phone alerts, the economy. When you zoom way way out, all of those things seem so arbitrary and small. I wanted [to] imagine what it would be like if we had the time, space and bandwidth to ask the big questions - like why and how we are here."

Heather's two best known works are Animal Wisdom, which was staged in 2017, and Oratorio for Living things, which has been staged three times, including a string of extremely sold-out performances in 2022.

Originally from Natchez, Mississippi, Heather has lived in Beacon for 13 years, largely under the radar.

"I've tried to keep a separation of church and state. Beacon is church," she says. "Beacon reminded me a lot of my hometown. There's something about river people. There's a reverence to the landscape you're inhabiting. We use it, it grounds us."