Jewish Telegraphic Agency

This Jewish teen is bringing sustainable gardening to NYC prisons

August 29, 2024

It’s the final full week of summer before school starts in New York City, and many teens are busy trying to make the most of their down time by going to the beach, hanging with friends and finally beating the video game that’s been vexing them the past three months.

Not Steven Hoffen. On this week’s particularly steamy Monday, the 16-year-old Upper West Sider is hard at work on the third floor of the Queensboro Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison in Queens. There, Hoffen — who took the SAT the previous day — is building an indoor hydroponic system that will one day produce leafy greens like lettuce and cilantro to feed the jail’s inmates.

Hoffen, a junior at Riverdale Country School who previously attended the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, is the founder of Growing Peace, a not-for-profit that uses hydroponics — a technique for growing plants using nutrient-enhanced water instead of soil — as a “medium to educate, empower and help those in need,” according to its website.

Since establishing his first hydroponic farm at a food pantry in Tel Aviv in late 2021 — using approximately $15,000 he received for his bar mitzvah earlier that year — Hoffen has installed five such systems across New York City, including at YM&YWHA of Washington Heights & Inwood, the Bronx’s Mosholu Montefiore Community Center and the Edgecombe Residential Treatment Facility in Harlem.

“I’m totally captivated by hydroponics as technology,” Hoffen told the New York Jewish Week. “I want to promote hydroponics as a means of sustainable agriculture.”

He is also inspired by his interactions with the people who receive the produce and tell him what it meant to them. “That continues to motivate me,” he said.

Hoffen’s “Orthodox-slash-Modern Orthodox” family attends Lincoln Square Synagogue, and he first learned about the socially responsible benefits of hydroponics on a trip to Israel. “My Jewish identity is a big part of why I started [Growing Peace] and why I continue,” Hoffen said. “I guess the values that I was born with, such as tikkun olam, are a big part of why I do what I do, because I want to make the world a better place.”

At Queensboro earlier this week, Hoffen and two employees at Green Food Solutions — a Jersey City-based company that plans and designs hydroponic “vertical” farms — spent some six hours assembling, Lego-style, nine hydroponic towers in an interior room that had served as a barbershop during the COVID-19 pandemic. One day soon, the towers will yield some 70 pounds of produce a month. Unlike most produce in the United States, which travels more than 1,500 miles before being consumed, the greens grown in this room will generate zero emissions, as Green Foods’ Maggie Toszko explained.

As Hoffen and his team constructed the towers, Linda Carrington-Allen, the Superintendent of the Queensboro Correctional Facility, took a reporter on a tour of the facility’s “programming” floor. It includes a computer lab, a library, a room where inmates can study for a commercial driver’s license and, soon, the hydroponic garden. The facility houses approximately 150 people, she explained, and nearly 75% of those are on work-release and temporary release programs, which means that many come and go.

Queensboro teamed up with Growing Peace after Carrington-Allen took a tour of the hydroponic plants at Edgecombe, their “sister” facility. “I loved it,” Carrington-Allen said.

“I saw the program in full bloom,” she said, adding that she was captivated with how the towers provided enough fresh produce not only to feed inmates but yielded enough so the staff could enjoy some, too.

When seeking organizations and institutions to partner with, Hoffen said he looks for places that can either benefit from fresh produce itself or from the “educational aspect” of learning hydroponics. “Most of our systems actually accomplish both,” he said. “That’s what we’re really looking for: How can these communities benefit from having hydroponics systems and having access to hydroponics education.”

Dr. Topeka Sam — the founder of Ladies of Hope Ministries, which aims to help formerly incarcerated women and girls transition back into society — helped bring Growing Peace into New York’s correctional facilities. After Hoffen met Sam at a school assembly, the pair had partnered on a hydroponics garden at Hope House, a residence for single women who have experienced incarceration and are reintegrating into their lives.

“Steven has one of the purest hearts of anyone I have ever known,” said Kari Ostrem, the head of school at Riverdale Country School, who visited Hoffen at work at Queensboro. “And he turns that into wanting to serve humanity in the broadest sense. It’s not just helping people in that moment, but building systems that help you think about how the world can become a better place.”

Hoffen was first turned onto hydroponics on a family trip to Israel in 2019 when he was 12. There, they visited Sindyanna of Galilee, a female-led non-profit that employs Arab and Jewish women. “Their mission, as an organization, is to create peace between Jewish and Arab communities living in Israel,” Hoffen said. “They do that by engaging women from each group in different sorts of activities, hoping that they would collaborate with one another and peacefully coexist to achieve a common goal.”

Hoffen made a documentary film about Sindyanna and their hydroponics project. The film, “Growing Peace in the Middle East,” screened at more than 100 festivals and won a host of awards, including Best Young Filmmaker at the Cannes World Film Festival.

While making the film, Hoffen said he “learned basic, very surface-level stuff” about hydroponics. Soon he realized that Sindyanna’s model could help underserved communities closer to home, though it wasn’t until he installed his first garden in New York that he “finally got that hands-on experience,” he said.

Hoffen has won numerous awards for his work with Growing Peace; most recently he was named a 2024 “10 under 20 Food Hero” by Hormel Foods, and last year he was a recipient of the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award.

In recent years, Hoffen has been busy volunteering each week at one or more of his gardens. This coming school year, he’s planning on volunteering at Edgecombe on Mondays and at Queensborough on Thursdays. Exactly how does a rising high school junior have time for this?

“It’s really just a question of balance,” Hoffen said.

Looking ahead, “I do want to continue installing as many systems as I can, to reach as many people as possible,” Hoffen said, noting that his hydroponic gardens typically cost between $10,000 and $20,000 a pop. He’s also hoping to expand his funding sources — right now, the majority of Growing Peace’s funds come from the prize money he’s won — as well as branch out to other states.

Hoffen said he’s “not really sure” where he wants to go to college or what he wants to be when he grows up. “All I know that I’m interested in filmmaking and sustainability and agriculture, and also just where those fields meet,” he said. “And so I’m not sure where that’ll take me. Maybe something like environmental science or engineering, but I guess we’ll see.”