Cindy Dach as influences to his community-building work in the area. (Madeline Pado/DD)
Downtown Phoenix Voices is an ongoing series of profiles on the many diverse and inspirational voices in the downtown Phoenix community. To see all installments in the series, click here.
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Kenny Barrett is a self-described artist, urban farmer and community builder.
For Barrett, co-founder and director of Roosevelt Growhouse and project manager for Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation, it was never a question of if he would make an impact on the downtown Phoenix community. Rather, it was a question of how.
Barrett discovered the world of nonprofits after joining AmeriCorps, a ten-month U.S.-based service program where he worked with four nonprofits and met with hundreds more.
In 2002, he enrolled in ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business to gain the skills for running a nonprofit. While in school, Barrett was exposed to the budding arts district as he attended First Fridays.
He became one of the first employees at MADE Art Boutique, where he developed a friendship with owner Cindy Dach that would be influential to his later return to the city.
“His passion for what we were doing was so evident,” Dach said. “I knew if he was a part of our beginning we have a chance to be successful.”
After graduating in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in business with a focus in marketing, Barrett joined a one-year art program in the Spanish city of Barcelona.
“Barcelona was incredibly inspiring. It’s a very urban city and it has just this immense amount of history,” Barrett said. “That experience juxtaposed against Phoenix is just nuts because Phoenix is such a young city and we don’t have a lot of history.”
From his time in Spain, Barrett realized he wanted to live somewhere “culturally and artistically vibrant.”
Although, compared to other cities, culture in Phoenix hasn’t always been considered a huge draw, Barrett’s connection to the people and community leaders here influenced his decision to return.
“If it wasn’t for (Cindy Dach and Greg Esser) I wouldn’t have come back to Phoenix,” he said.
Barrett returned from Spain in 2007 and began volunteering with Roosevelt Row CDC. In 2009, he was hired part time and later gained a full-time position as project manager.
Barrett didn’t wait for an opportunity with Roosevelt Row CDC to start making a difference in the community.
In August 2008, Barrett and his friend Kelly Placke decided to start a community garden in their yard at Garfield and Sixth streets.
“We just dove in,” Barrett said. “We didn’t have any idea what we were doing.”
With support from the gardening community and a micro-grant from Roosevelt Row CDC, the development of Roosevelt Growhouse began.
Barrett and Placke partnered with HandsOn Greater Phoenix to tap into the local volunteer network and encourage the community to get involved with their urban farming project.
“It never entered our mind that we would just do it by ourselves,” Barrett said.
What started as two raised planting beds has now grown to encompass nearly the entire yard.
Just as the garden has grown, Barrett’s influence within the community has increased as well.
Every Sunday Barrett helps volunteers tend the garden’s shared community beds.
Recently, an environmentally conscious club from Chaparral High School came to a Sunday volunteer day.
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Barrett is patient while explaining to the group of high-school students how to properly plant seeds and harvest lettuce.
His hands fall beside theirs as they pull weeds and prepare the soil for planting.
When the students’ volunteering is done, Barrett gathers them to recap their experience and answer any questions they may have about gardening.
They respond warmly to the experience and ask Kenny if they can return.
When they leave, he comments on how neat it is that people so young are already thinking about the greater world around them, rather than just themselves.
“Just being able to go once a week, dig in the dirt, work hard — I think in a lot of ways it kept me sane,” Barrett said. “That aspect of being able to meet your neighbors and meet other people has been really neat.”
The implementation of Growhouse has allowed Barrett to build downtown community and culture, as well as generate inspiration.
“I kind of see myself as someone who connects the dots for other people so that the right people are meeting each other,” Barrett said.
Nearly two years after starting Growhouse, Barrett and Placke moved out of the house and turned it into GROWop, a collective artist boutique that currently sells items from almost 30 artists.
Filled with vintage clothing, books, soap, buttons and other items, GROWop has a cozy feel where customers are met with mellow music and meaningful interaction.
There he paused at times to wave to or greet passersby.
“This neighborhood is so special in that you can walk down the street and people say hello and all of us know each other,” Barrett said. “I feel like that not only creates a sense of safety and security in our neighborhood, but it literally is creating safety and security.”
The topic of safety in downtown Phoenix is often brought up in conjunction with talk of the vacant lots and how they generate uneasiness for pedestrians.
Barrett noticed the problems surrounding vacant lots and was inspired to beautify one across from Growhouse through community action — creating the Valley of the Sunflowers project.
The project brought community members together to plant a two acre vacant lot with sunflowers, also partnering with the Bioscience High School so students could take oil from the sunflower seeds to make biofuel to eventually power a car.
The Valley of the Sunflowers project generated great interest and spurred the community’s efforts in activating vacant land.
“There’s something about activating public land that makes you really excited here,” Barrett said. “Then there’s this weird thing about sunflowers. People just really love sunflowers.”
Even though the project was steered toward building the community and activating land, Barrett said the most important part was the high-school students.
“We wanted to inspire not only people to activate vacant land and use them as creative spaces,” he said. “We also wanted to inspire those students … because they’re truly our future scientists, engineers.
“Sunflowers isn’t the solution for Phoenix … getting those wheels spinning with the students – that is. That is the sustainable solution.”
Following the sunflower project, Barrett decided to continue fostering the interest of Bioscience High School students by taking on nine “greenterns” to work with Growhouse and Roosevelt Row.
Some of these student interns are taking charge of Growhouse’s latest project: a Farm Truck.
The project utilizes a truck with a garden planted in its bed to educate people about gardening by taking the garden right to them.
“It basically takes what we’re doing (at Growhouse) and puts it on wheels so we can take it places and teach kids,” Barrett said.
Barrett’s greenterns are intended to host Farm Truck demonstrations at schools and libraries.
Barrett said working with the students has been one of his most rewarding experiences.
He is described as a “go-getter” and “dreamer” by Braden Kay, a sustainability Ph.D. student at ASU who worked closely with Barrett in facilitating the sunflower project and served as a project manager at Growhouse for a year and a half.
Kay said Barrett “has such a practical view on what it takes to get stuff done” and “really wants to make sure the actions he takes are the right ones.”
Among Barrett’s next actions are plans to start an all-level drawing class at Growhouse.
Barrett gets lost, pacing around and pondering aloud about different ideas for the drawing class he hopes to launch in December or January.
“I’m thinking of having a live model come every time and do a live drawing thing,” he said. “Maybe we could do something where we’re working with the boutique and having a model wear stuff from in here and then we’re doing drawings and then its advertising the clothing as well.”
“He is an artist at his core and most people don’t see that,” Kay said. “He wants people to feel certain things and uses his work to do this.”
Dach describes Barrett’s motivation as coming from a desire “to make a difference and leave things better than they are found.”
“He’s gone from being a community participant to community leader,” she said.
So what is next for this artist, farmer and community leader?
“I really want to buy a home downtown,” Barrett said. “I’m down here and I love the area and I know that if I wasn’t doing the work I’m doing I probably would have left Phoenix.”
Contact the reporter at madeline.pado@asu.edu
