MT. HEALTHY, Ohio – Mt. Healthy School District recently celebrated its third annual Pigs, Pizza, and Poetry event at Tikkun Farm. The outdoor event aims to bring the community together for an evening of promoting literacy and community engagement complete with chickens, turkeys, alpacas, and, of course, pigs.

Enjoying the pigs, poetry, and pizza that evening were 141 students, family, and staff members. The kids rotated through activities that involved reciting, reading, and writing poetry, eating pizza, and visiting the animals. They ate 40 pizzas and an unknown number of s’mores.

“Mt. Healthy City Schools is lucky to have Tikkun Farm, a hidden treasure, in the middle of our district,” said Jen Danner, the comprehensive literacy state development grant manager and planner of the event. “We are more urban than suburban and many of our students not only have no exposure to farm life but also lack the opportunities to visit rural communities.”

Tikkun Farm not only provides these experiences but encourages positive learning interactions and offers ways to help on the farm, Danner said. This event invites the school families to engage in literacy activities that support classroom learning while also incorporating nature walks, learning about baby chicks, gardening, composting, and even petting an alpaca.

Rev. Dr. Mary Laymon and her husband, Greg York, bought the abandoned dairy farm in 2010.

“My husband found this property,” Laymon said. “He said ‘Do you think we should own a farm?’ I said I think I should pray about that. I prayed and we bought the farm. Everything was broken down. Both of the barns on the property were taking in water from leaky roofs; we had an old concrete building that was intact, but no water or electric had worked and 20 generations of raccoons had made a home in there.”

Laymon and York didn’t know what they were going to do with the farm but they knew that they would use it for ministry in some way. When thinking of a name for the farm, Laymon remembered “Tikkun Olam,” a phrase she had learned from Jewish friends which meant repairing the world.

“So, we are repairing the old buildings and also the people here whose lives need to be repaired,” Laymon said. “We became a nonprofit in 2015 and that’s what we have been doing. We do that a lot of different ways.”

Tikkun is in an underserved community. They are now healing people with their free food market supplied with donations from 20 partners. They support 300 families a week. They offer cooking classes, free packets of Crockpot meals and much more. While most Mt. Healthy students graduate high school, few go to college. Tikkun provides vocational training in landscape design, horticulture, culinary, and more.

“We are also building what we call a food forest in our orchard,” Laymon said. “We have not just one thing growing, which is a monoculture, instead, nature grows 100 things in one acre. Our food forest is trying to mimic what nature does naturally; we have fruit trees, berry bushes, and flowers that bring in the bees early to pollinate the fruit trees and other plants.”

Laymon wants the kids who live in the low-income neighborhood to be able to come to the farm to spend time in nature. That’s exactly what they did at the Pigs, Poetry, and Pizza event.

Kids wandered through the farmyard petting the critters, enjoying the poetry and the pizza (being careful to use hand sanitizer between the pigs and pizza). Also, each student got a free poetry book and lots of craft things to encourage activities at home.