Colby Gould, by all appearances, is one of the happiest men on the planet.
Kids and young adults absolutely adore him. They swarm him, tug at his sleeves and ask him questions. Every now and again, the 26-year- old man eagerly drops to one knee, smiles sweetly and answers each of them.
More important, at this moment, he is sitting on a nice stack of cash, all of it from the coffee brand Maxwell House and its Drops of Good contest.
Basically it was looking to recognize five community centers in the country doing work to improve the lives of residents in struggling areas. Those receiving the most votes got a $50,000 grant.
More than 200,000 people sent in a vote for GrowHaus, the community farm, market and education center Gould runs at 47th Avenue and York Street in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, one of the poorest in Denver.
“Everywhere — and I mean everywhere — I went for months, people would walk up and say, ‘I voted for you!’ It kind of blew me away,” Gould said the other day while giving me a tour of GrowHaus.
The idea is a simple one.
He had envisioned a place where residents of Elyria-Swansea, with no supermarket within 3 miles, would have easy, year-round access to affordable, fresh and healthy food. He would invite neighborhood folks in, especially kids, and teach them about healthy eating and how to grow their own food sustainably.
It grew out of a belief, he said, that he should always do for those who were less fortunate than he. Maybe, he said, it was put there during the years he worked for his mother, who ran a catering business serving mostly homeless people.
“What I did learn,” he said, “is that food is the one common denominator in the world. It brings us all together.”
I arrived shortly after the weekly neighborhood tour of the farm was over. Several young kids from his Seed to Seed program, an eight-week summer seminar on healthy eating and farming, still lingered.
They are in charge of the long, long array of trays in which micro-greens are sprouting. The handful of young adults also still working inside the building are tending to various plots of lettuce, kale, broccoli, peppers and watercress.
Cole English, 19, is in her second summer working at GrowHaus, having graduated from the Seed to Seed program last year. She is in the farmer-in-training program.
She heard Colby Gould speak two years ago in one of her classes at East High School.
“I got so excited by what he was saying,” she remembered. “It made me want to learn how to grow my own food. I had never before heard how to make food happen, and how delicious it could be.”
Now enrolled at the Community College of Denver, English said her goal is to one day own a farm.
“Being here, it has changed my life,” she said.
GrowHaus remains a little rough around the edges, no doubt little-changed since it was built decades ago as the primary warehouse for the Leh rer’s Flowers chain.
The grant money, Gould says, will be used to renovate much of the building into a multiple-use market area where produce and other items can be sold year-round.
In the far back section is the 20,000-square-foot greenhouse, which already has been completely restored and outfitted with an elaborate geothermal heating and cooling system.
By the end of August, with the grant money firmly in place, rows and rows of hydroponic growing beds — a mile long, Gould estimates — will begin churning out nearly 2,000 heads of lettuce and Asian greens a week.
In this space, with its sea of crisp and clean new windows and expanse of unspoiled, freshly poured concrete, Colby Gould smiles the widest smile.
He should.
Elyria-Swansea is a place the rest of the city seems to have forgotten. He has given it hope.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
