Veterans have been a vital part of GRuB’s community since its inception. In fact, the seed for GRuB, planted in 1993 as the Kitchen Garden Project (KGP), was inspired by Vietnam Veteran Dan Barker, who built backyard gardens to heal from the wounds of war. Dan Barker, who passed in 2017, was the founder of the Home Gardening Project in Portland, OR. Dan found a renewed sense of purpose, belonging, and community through building backyard vegetable gardens with low-income families. Richard & Maria Doss were inspired by Dan’s work and brought it to southwestern WA as the Kitchen Garden Project, building free gardens for low-income families to support food security in our area. Since then, GRuB has built thousands of backyard gardens, honoring Dan’s legacy by engaging Veterans as gardeners, volunteers, interns, and staff of our garden program over the last 25 years.
In 2014, Army Veteran Mark Oravsky, experiencing a challenging transition back into civilian life, reached out to GRuB wanting to connect. Mark then hosted an open house for Veterans at GRuB, and brought a wave of Veterans and active duty service members volunteering with GRuB to build both backyard gardens and fellowship with one another. In the words of Mark, “GRuB’s ability to engage individuals, foster empowering experiences while connecting community members is a highly successful model for transitioning service members and their families to be immersed in. From this veteran’s perspective, it is a model in stark contrast to the culture we came from and is why it is so wildly popular.”
In late 2015, Mark and a team of Veterans founded GRuB’s first Victory Farm, a veteran-led farm located on a 1⁄2-acre site in Olympia in East Olympia. Modeled after GRuB’s youth program with peer-to-peer support, council practice, community-building, and hands-on farm experiences, the Victory Farm was envisioned as a shared growing space for Veterans where they could work and grow food shoulder-to-shoulder. At this time, GRuB began developing more relationships and partnerships with local, state and nation-wide Veterans organizations, like the Mission Continues, the WA Department of Veterans Affairs, the WA chapter of the Farmer Veteran Coalition, Growing Veterans, and Veterans Rites, to name a few.
Sadly, after over a year of successful farming and a tremendous showing of community support, the Victory Farmers were unable to renew their lease agreement with the private land owners of the Victory Farm site, and had to vacate the premises, leaving 18 months of hard work behind. Shortly after, Mark left his role at GRuB to pursue his passion for creating and leading wilderness-based rites of passage with veterans at Veterans Rites. Despite this challenge, the Victory Farmers were determined to continue this impactful work by establishing a Victory Farm 2.0. We also partnered with the WA Dept. of Veterans Affairs to begin hosting Veteran interns at GRuB through the Veterans Conservation Corps (VCC). We have since hosted 5 VCC interns over the years at GRuB, two of whom went on to become full time staff at GRuB.
In 2018, a new site for a Victory Farm 2.0 was secured on a half-acre site on the grounds of the new Lacey Food Bank Hub. Once again Veterans and their families had a safer space to connect with each other and the land, to learn sustainable growing techniques, and to contribute to the community. The new Victory Farm was designed and led by Army and Marine Veteran, Beau Gromley. Beau went on to manage the GRuB Garden Project and Veterans Program for 6 years.
In Beau’s own words, “I spent nearly 15 years in the service and while I knew that I could get a job following the military, I didn’t think that I would or could find something that I would truly feel proud to be a part of again. With the help of dozens of volunteers and some very important community partnerships, GRuB’s Victory Farm began to take shape and I was lucky enough to be a part of it. In a few short months we changed an abandoned, overgrown urban lot into a thriving urban farm and community educational space.”
In 2019, the Victory Farm also got its first beehives! Local master beekeeper and president of the Washington State Beekeepers Association, and Army Veteran, Alan Woods, reached out to GRuB and offered to introduce hives and mentor Veterans in beekeeping at the Victory Farm. GRuB partnered with Woods, the WA State Beekeepers Association, and the WA Farmer Veteran Coalition (WA-FVC) to launch Healing Through Hives in 2021, funded by a 4-year grant from the USDA. Around the same time, we co-created the Shepherd Project with WA-FVC and Boeing to support Veterans entering agriculture. Through the Healing Through Hives and Shepherd projects, the Veterans Program holistically supported Veteran beekeepers and farmers to get started in agriculture with education, mentorship, hands-on workshops, and community support.
With the Healing Through Hives project, we were able to establish 6 Veteran community apiary sites throughout Western WA, as sites for Veteran beekeepers to get hands-on beekeeping experience, work with mentors and other beginning beekeepers, and build a sense of community. We have hosted apiary sites at GRuB, Roots Farm in Poaulsbo, Growing Veterans in Lynden, the Veterans Ecological Trades Collective in Rochester, the WDVA’s Orting Veterans Farm in Orting, the WA Governor’s Mansion in Olympia, and at the Haki Farmers Collective at the Victory Farm site when they took over the site in 2020.
Today, our Veterans Program’s focus is on supporting military Veterans throughout their lifelong transition back into civilian life by connecting them with community, nature, and a local and nationwide network of resources to help build their own paths to healing. Since 2024, GRuB’s Veterans Program has been steered by two dedicated staff, Alex Cumings and Jennah Kemp. Alex Cumings has been at GRuB since 2024. She is not a Veteran herself, but the child of two, as both her mom and dad were in the Army for most of her life. Jennah Kemp is a Navy Veteran and started at GRuB in 2019 as a VCC intern.
Over the last 4 years, we have been able to connect over 100 Veterans with farming and beekeeping resources and educational support through our Healing Through Hives and Shepherd Projects. We have also built a Veteran mentoring program that supported 50+ beginning beekeepers and farmers in meeting their agricultural enterprise goals.
At our apiary sites we offered workshop series and other events that have brought Veterans together to celebrate and learn from each other.
2026 marks the end of our current Healing Through Hives project as our funding through the USDA comes to a close. We will spend the remainder of this year wrapping up this project and continuing to support Veteran beekeepers as they work towards their beekeeping and business goals.
As we prepare for this transitionGRuB and the Veterans Program team are considering what the future of Veterans programming at GRuB should and could look like. GRuB has long held Veterans and their families at the forefront of our work. Veterans have been key leaders and community members at GRuB since the inception of this organization, especially in our backyard gardens program, our Veterans Victory Farms, and our current Veterans Program. With that in mind, over the next few months, we will seek the feedback and perspective of former and current Veteran participants, our partners, other Veteran-focused organizations, and the broader community to help us shape how we might continue to provide impactful programming for Veterans at GRuB moving forward. No matter what that looks like, Veterans and their families will continue to be valued and important members of our community.
If you would like to learn more about our Veterans Program or would like to share feedback or ideas for the future of our Veterans programming, we would love to hear from you! Please reach out to us at veterans@goodgrub.org.
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