GrowingChange: Shuttered prison becomes fertile ground for growing new lives

Noran Sanford was at a funeral for a middle school football player eight years ago when an idea came to him: What if he turned a prison into a farm?

It was an idea fueled by guilt. He felt guilt for not saving the kid. He felt guilt for not saving other kids. And he felt that he had found his purpose in life -- to change a pattern he was seeing in Scotland County of at-risk young people ending up in prison. Or dead.

Scotland County in southern North Carolina is home to only about 35,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and its population has been shrinking. The median income is $30,000 compared to $48,256 statewide. More than 27 percent of the county’s residents live in poverty. Statewide, 15 percent do. The county consistently has one of the highest crime and unemployment rates in the state.

Sanford is a mental health therapist. He’s the guy judges or parents send young men to so they can talk through problems and to find “the right path.”

The young football player was a patient of Sanford’s. He died in a gang-related shooting.

“I really had to ask myself had we done, had I done everything that we could to prevent this kind of tragedy?”

He said the answer was no. And that’s when he started thinking about the prison, located in the town of Wagram. The 67-acre property has been rotting since it closed in 2001. Except for the decay, everything still looks almost as it did during its 71 years of housing prisoners. The buildings are still there, though crumbling. There’s a basketball court with a rusted and bent hoop. When Sanford walked the prison for the first time he found a string leading down to a jug in what once was the kitchen. That jug, of course, contained leftovers from homemade alcohol.

Sanford grew up in the area, so he knew about the prison. He knew it was abandoned and wondered if there was a way to turn the old broken property into something positive for the community.

A series of phone calls led to a meeting in Raleigh with officials from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety. Sanford secured a lease for the old prison. At the same time he started a nonprofit called GrowingChange. It’s a group made up of some of his patients and other young men who have seen tough times and could use a chance to be part of something bigger.

"At first there was an equal amount of excitement and sleepless nights of wondering if we are going to get past the next hurdle, the next hurdle, the next hurdle,” he said.

GrowingChange now has control of the prison and is turning it into a park and a sustainable farm. The young men are the leaders of the project.

Somewhere safe

"Our main goal is to basically provide a safe haven for the community to allow them to come in and be somewhere safe,” said Jaheim “JaJa” McRae.

McRae is 15 years old. He met Sanford a few years ago, after he was shot in the leg during a drive-by shooting.

"People be walking around just having wars, like for fun, like they just walk around shooting each other,” McRae said. He decided to try to find a new path with the group rebuilding the prison. He joined GrowingChange last October, when the group opened the prison to the public as a haunted house.

McRae said one of his first memories of the site was being scared by a fellow team member. The prison was already creepy, he said, and the decorations just made it worse.

Derek Cummings was one of the original members of GrowingChange when it was founded in 2011. If you ask him, he will say he was on his way to being locked up. His mother had just passed away. He was finding trouble. A judge assigned him to meet with Sanford.

"I was like, ‘This dude -- he don't know what he's doing. He don't know what he's talking about.’ But well, he proved me wrong."

Sanford remembers the indifferent attitudes he faced when he first explained his big idea to the young men in the group.

"I pitched the idea that we are going to help them transform their future," he said. "We were going to help them reverse their future, or flip their prison. I was so proud of myself and they thought that was so cheesy. Until we walked through this 67-acre property."

It’s the massive responsibility that seems to generate the enthusiasm.

“I’m a technology guy so I never expected to be out here playing with smelly food,” said McRae, who gleefully reached into the compost pile to pull out a handful of earthworms. He threw in some rotten watermelon. “This is what they eat,” he said.

The compost fertilizes the native flowers that have been planted around the prison. The young men also care for the farm's animals. They currently have three sheep and a donkey.

Reaching the whole person

“At that funeral,” Sanford said, “it wasn't clear to me that we were going to be able to transform a prison into a sustainable farm and educational center, but at that funeral it became clear that we were going to have to do many things at once and reach the whole person."

There are plans for each building. The guard tower will be a climbing wall. Not surprisingly, that was the idea of the young people. Sanford said the older folks were stumped by what seemed so obvious to the kids.

There are also plans for a laser tag facility. They want to build a place to cook and areas to have picnics.

"The fun stuff that we have around here, we have to travel an hour, two hours to go skating and laser tag and stuff like that,” McRae said. “If we had that closer, that could be something that brings the youth closer.”

GrowingChange is receiving a lot of help from the community and some high-profile help from a group well outside the community. Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken an interest in the project. They flew down to North Carolina at the expense of MIT last month to do site surveys.

"I think that there is so much potential for what can be done here,” said MIT architecture graduate student Ben Hoyle. “We've been learning about the site from afar, from Boston, and I think it's really great to be here to walk through the different buildings.”

The MIT students walked around exchanging ideas with the young men from GrowingChange. They eventually ended up at a picnic table drawing out plans for what they hope will be the world’s largest porch swing.

"A lot of people can't walk around and say, ‘Oh hey, I'm meeting with some MIT people and like planning some ideas,’” McRae said.

The entire project could take decades to finish, but the site is already beginning to show promise. GrowingChange is planting pumpkins for this year’s Halloween celebration, which will again include a haunted house.

It’s a rebuilding project that will, ideally, rebuild generations and give people like Sanford a way to reach people on a different level.

"This was, what I believe, what was required of me,” he said. “And I am not saying that out of a place of guilt. I am saying that out of a place of hope."