Our Story
How We Started Out
A number of years ago Carol Manetta, founder of Reap Goodness, worked inside the Arizona prison system. She developed a curriculum for people who were about to leave prison so that they would have successes and not go back. Upon completing the curriculum under a US Department of Education grant, she formed a nonprofit organization called REAP, which stood for Reentry and Preparedness. As it turned out, after a few years of helping people from all stressed populations reenter society’s work space, the State of Arizona asked her to work with Native Americans because they were the least served
Second Phase
This led to the second phase of the nonprofit. You see, she was asked by the Native Americans to focus on agriculture. This came from a common voice expressed by those at the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona Inc. They wished for healthy agriculture to heal all their peoples. So Carol complied by offering a new design for greenhouses, that of telescoping greenhouses, which could be manufactured on tribal land, packed into a shipping container along with equipment and solar panels to any tribe, in fact anywhere in the world. The idea was to support agriculture in all weather, using far less water than land agriculture. She worked with Engineers Without Borders USA for design concept, where they determined the greenhouses would be too heavy for humans to stretch out by hand. So the concept had to be abandoned.
Work with the Navajo
In her travels with the Native Americans, she was introduced to Tolani Lake Enterprises, a Navajo Nation business incubator. This was the third phase of the nonprofit. Since they already had solar panels on site and they already had rain capture from a roof to use for agricultural drip irrigation, the concept of having a commercially made greenhouse with rain capture to support hydroponics was born. It was here she began to work with student engineers at Arizona State University through their EPICS program, Engineering Projects in Community Service. Over the course of four years, they worked as a team to develop hydroponics food towers made from reused restaurant containers made from food grade plastic. This teamwork garnered a total of 4 awards from Arizona State University.
While working with the Navajo tribe, she learned about worker owned cooperatives. It was with diligence she pursued creating a law in the State of Arizona to support profit-making work owned cooperatives a legal entity for anyone to form. It became law in 2016 through her efforts with the state legislature. After joining The New Economy Coalition, a conjoining of nonprofits in North America, she found there was reason to write training books on worker owned cooperatives in areas not covered by existing cooperatives organizations. These two ebooks are now available for low-cost sale and in community libraries that partner with certain suppliers of digital resources. The contents of the two books have been donated to Native Americans for their translations across Indian country.
Current Work
Upon completion of this worthwhile set of projects, the founder turned her attention to the state of the planet and food and water security for all living beings. This is where the organization’s name changed to Reap Goodness in 2019. It was at this point the founder chose to focus her time on development of training to save the planet with a new work and business model, a trio of worker cooperatives, given to her by a variety of advisors who choose to remain anonymous. This garnered the 2019 Community Service Project award from the International Society for Performance Improvement whose members hail from over 30 countries.
From this point, all efforts are focused on testing this trio of cooperatives work model in a project called the Heartland Trials and then creating helpful training products for schoolchildren. This involves local volunteers in to work in three equal cooperative groups once a week on two sites loaned for this project in Arizona, USA. These two Heartland Trials will be audio and video recorded as preparation for creating educational training for students to be able to do the same thing outside their schools - anywhere in the world.
This will allow for desertified land anywhere on the planet to be quickly restored by working in harmony to secure and store water, cleanse waters, grow a food forest and support local wildlife with plants as an example of permanent agriculture that can feed the community surrounding such work while restoring its ecosystem.
Read the details in our ebook, Saving Earth: Regenerated Land, Clean Water, Food for All.