How Mary got started

Mary Wanjiru joined Green Revolution Farmers not long after its formal registration, drawn in initially by a single sack gardening demonstration held near her home in Babadogo. What started as curiosity about growing her own vegetables turned, within a couple of seasons, into one of the organization's most consistent volunteer trainers.

What she actually does

Mary now leads composting and soil health training sessions for new members, drawing on years of her own trial and error to shortcut the learning curve for people just starting out. She also mentors newer volunteer trainers, several of whom she first met as ordinary training participants themselves.

"The first thing I tell new members is that their soil did not get depleted overnight, and it will not recover overnight either," she says of her approach to composting training. "Patience is the actual skill I'm teaching, not just the technique."

Why she keeps volunteering

Asked what keeps her coming back season after season, Mary points to a specific kind of satisfaction: watching a household go from a struggling patch of soil to a genuinely productive kitchen garden over the course of a year, often accompanied by that household eventually becoming a trainer themselves for someone else.

"It multiplies," she says. "I taught three neighbours. Those three each taught more. That is the actual reason this works better than any single expert trying to reach everyone alone."

What this means for the organization

Mary's path — from participant, to confident grower, to trainer, to mentor of new trainers — is one we see repeated across the organization, and it is central to how Green Revolution Farmers has grown its training capacity without needing paid staff to deliver every session. Volunteers like Mary are, in a real sense, the organization's main asset.

What newer trainers learn by watching Mary teach

Beyond the specific composting and soil health content she covers, several newer volunteer trainers describe learning as much from watching how Mary teaches as from the technical material itself — her habit of asking a new member what has already gone wrong for them before offering advice, rather than starting from a generic script, and her consistent patience with questions that more experienced growers might consider basic. Several newer trainers now describe deliberately mirroring this approach in their own sessions.

This kind of teaching-style mentorship, distinct from technical content mentorship, is something we have only recently started naming explicitly within the organization, having noticed it happening informally for years without anyone quite describing it as a distinct skill worth passing on deliberately.

A typical training session led by Mary

A typical composting session Mary leads runs for roughly two hours, starting with a short explanation of the three-bin method before moving directly into hands-on practice, building a small demonstration pile with materials participants bring or that are available on site. She deliberately keeps the lecture portion brief, favouring hands-on practice, since she has found that members retain far more from actually building a pile themselves than from listening to an explanation alone.

Sessions typically end with participants asked to describe, in their own words, what they will do differently at home based on the session, a simple check Mary uses to gauge whether the material has actually landed before participants leave.

Mary's story is deliberately not unique within our organization — it is representative of a pattern we actively try to encourage, where today's training participant becomes tomorrow's trainer. If you attend one of our sessions and find yourself with a question Mary or another trainer cannot immediately answer, there is a good chance that within a season or two, someone new will have figured it out and be teaching it themselves. We plan to profile other volunteer trainers in future posts, both because their individual stories are worth telling in their own right and because, taken together, these profiles give a clearer picture of how Green Revolution Farmers' peer mentorship structure, covered in more depth in a separate article, actually operates across the organization rather than through any single individual.

Key takeaways

  • Mary joined after a single sack gardening demonstration near her home in Babadogo.
  • She now leads composting and soil health training for new members.
  • Her approach centres on patience: soil recovers gradually, not overnight.
  • Her path from participant to trainer to mentor is common across the organization.

Frequently asked questions

How did Mary get involved with Green Revolution Farmers?
She attended a single sack gardening demonstration near her home, which grew into one of the organization's most consistent volunteer trainer roles over subsequent seasons.

Can any member become a trainer like Mary?
Yes — several of our current trainers, Mary included, started simply as training participants before taking on teaching and mentoring roles themselves.

Does Mary train outside of Babadogo too?
Occasionally, when invited to a partner school or church garden session, but her main focus remains our regular member training calendar.

Where does Mary usually hold her training sessions?
Sessions rotate between a few regular sites in Babadogo depending on the season and group size — check our training calendar or Contact page for current locations.