This Former WNBA Athlete Is Giving Urban Farming Her Best Shot
According to the most recent USDA statistics, Arizona’s farming sector is made up of 49 percent women, the highest percentage in all the US and well above the national average of 36 percent.
By Lindsay Campbell
Modern Farmer
Apr 3, 2022
Excerpt:
For more than two decades, Bridget Pettis found purpose amid the towering mesh, musty air and creaky wooden floorboards of a basketball court. But now, the former WNBA guard and coach spends her days tending to bountiful gardens in the Arizona sunshine. It’s where she’s better positioned to make an impact on the world, she says.
Although Pettis was raised by a mother and grandmother who were regular gardeners, she didn’t fully embrace her own gardening roots until a few years ago. “All my life, I only knew one thing: playing and coaching this sport. During COVID, that really shook me,” Pettis says. “Having the earth, the land to stand on, it grounded me and allowed me to see myself beyond that. Now I’m focused on helping others build that connection.”
Pettis is putting roots down in her community through Project Roots, the Phoenix-based nonprofit she founded with her former partner Dionne Washington in late 2019. The idea came to the pair as they were hauling their harvest from a community garden, where it dawned on them that their extra produce could help feed food-insecure populations in their state, where one in three households have experienced food insecurity since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In Maricopa County, where they live, more than 20 percent of children are food-insecure.
“We didn’t realize that tomatoes bear several pieces of fruit per plant and we had so many tomatoes,” Washington says. “When we made soup and fed it to the homeless we thought, ‘How can we make this legit and do this legally?’”
