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GGE vs. Ravenous

Give, Grow, Eat Superstructure
merdaINK

Versus Ravenous.

Stefanie Frazier, Merdina Lazatin, Rebecca Nagatoshi

    My name is Rebecca Nagatoshi, and I’m 34 year old advertising executive at a private firm in San Francisco, California.  I live in El Cerrito with my 2 children (with one on the way) and my husband.  I am currently staying at home on maternity leave.  My husband is an IT consultant for a very prestigious firm in Sacramento, California and travels many days out of the year, which leaves me much time for my vices.  We are well off, and we believe in helping others who aren’t as lucky as us.    I am a graduate from the California State University, East Bay which is in Hayward, California.  During my time at CSUEB I met a person who would become very important in my career life.  Her name is Merdina Lazatin, and she is a nurse.  We share the same goals and are both interested in trying to help others.    I am very passionate about helping educate and provide people who are going hungry during our ravenous outbreak.  I was a part of the GEAS for over a year, but I felt as if I could do more on my own.  With funds from private investors and wealthy friends donations, Merdina and I were able to start and run my own non-profit organization, Give, Grow, Eat (GGE).  The premise of GGE is to teach people in mainly rural and desolate areas, in which people have given up all hope, to grow their own food rather than risking buying food from grocery stores or just not eating at all.  GGE volunteers distribute corn and we show people how to grow and maintain their own personal garden.  We have not gone world wide, we are solely based in North America, but we do have high hopes in expanding in the very near future.    For our very first project, we headed out to Stockton, California.  GGE members, including myself, were very hesitant about our expectations.  We didn’t know how everything would turn out; therefore we didn’t expect everything to run smoothly.  We held a community meeting at City Hall.  Many people showed up and asked questions pertaining to our organization.  Unfortunately, there were people who did not believe that this would work, but we also had people who had very optimistic views on what we were trying to achieve.        The name’s Merdina. I am part of the non-profit organization Give, Grow, Eat (GGE).  I would say it all started in college. I was a nursing major and was already half-way into my graduating year.  I meet Rebecca Nagatoshi, my sophomore year and she and I became close through our similar passions in helping others. Towards the end, I was an intern at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, CA. I had taken interns all across south East Asia and the Czech Republic.  The experiences inspired a drive in me that lead to joining the organization FAO. I spent the next 5 years bouncing through third world countries like Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines providing ways to modernize their agricultural methods and improve their policies on food. However, as most stories go, scandals had surfaced the face of FAO and I later decided it was time to leave.    I then reunited with classmate Rebecca Nagatoshi in California. And she and I help develop the group GGE (Give, Grow, Eat), calling in donations from our old college-millionaire-pals and unused resources from several farms and companies. Acquiring several acres of land, we began to mass produce numbers of different types of farming seeds, which we proceeded to disperse among the masses of families and communities. It was a small beginning and though it took some time, the effort had begun to make a difference.    By this time, GGE had made it’s way through the west coast and back into the bay area, which was where we had placed our headquarters. We were spread throughout California mostly, branching out eight other bases and recruitment was ongoing. I met Stefanie Frazier by then, a teacher in the south bay. She and part of her union joined our efforts and another branch of our organization was created. She had come up with the idea of ‘teaching people how to fish’, sort to speak. They came up with several ways communities would be able to retain enough water and manage community crops. This also led to Stefanie creating our Safe Water team, which she based in our Water Resource Department.    My name is Stefanie and currently living in Lathrop, California with my husband, Ken and two children Laila and Kenny Jr. I am a teacher at my children’s elementary school but also work a second job at the local grocery store. Working at the grocery store has allowed me to see first hand that so much of our everyday food has become contaminated. I couldn’t help but pray for something to help fix this problem.     I first came across Give, Grow, Eat (GGE) when the co-founders came to the area. A meeting was held at City Hall in Stockton, California and it was there that I became well acquainted with its founders, Rebecca Nagatoshi and Merdina Lazatin. They were very passionate about helping people in this problematic situation we have now. I just happened to be one of those people. I took a special interest in GGE and after talking to my husband about it, I decided to help in any way I could.    Because it was such a new organization there were not a lot of members, but we sure had a lot of help. Rebecca had connections with many important people, which is why we become so successful. GGE was broken up into a few different departments and I chose to maintain the water resource department. There were several places in our country where the water became contaminated so now only was there unhealthy drinking water but there was a serious shortage. So I formed a team to help create a way to keep the “safe” water from being contaminated and we also made water conservation a key point when spreading the word about this organization. Because without water, there wouldn’t be GGE!    This world is our home and though we haven’t been treating it the best, it will always remain as all that we have. We must to everything we can, and together, to protect, serve, and save it. Give, Grow, Eat was our way of working towards that goal. It will not be our only way, but it’s a great start.

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Dec 04


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