Originally published 2020-08-12.
Growing Change is a small nonprofit in Wagram, North Carolina, that has spent more than a decade turning a closed state prison into a working farm run with and for local teenagers. Founded in 2011 by social worker Noran Sanford, it gives young people who are in trouble, or close to it, paid work, mentoring and mental health support on the same land where the state once locked people up.
The idea is simple to describe and hard to pull off: take a building that stands for punishment and let the young people most at risk of ending up inside one rebuild it into a place of growth. Here is how the project started, what the teenagers actually do there, what its results show and why its founder thinks the model could spread.
What Growing Change is and where it works
The farm sits on roughly 67 acres a couple of miles outside Wagram's small downtown, in Scotland County near the South Carolina border. The site was the Scotland Correctional Center, decommissioned in 2001 and then left to decay for about a decade. Growing Change leases it from the state's Department of Public Safety at no cost.
This corner of the state is poor. Neighbouring Robeson County had a median household income of about $33,700 when Civil Eats reported on the farm in 2020, and the two counties shared the worst health rankings in North Carolina in 2019. Roughly a quarter of Scotland County residents faced food insecurity. Jobs are scarce, small family farms have been disappearing, and too many teenagers drift towards the juvenile courts.
Why a social worker decided to flip a prison
Sanford grew up in nearby Laurinburg and worked for years as a therapist for young people and families caught up in the juvenile justice system. In 2009 a middle-schooler he had counselled was killed in gang-related violence. That funeral, he later told North Carolina Public Radio, convinced him that therapy sessions alone were not enough.
He also learned how deeply prisons were woven into local history. Until the 1970s, North Carolina used chain-gang prisoners, including men held at Wagram, to build its highways, and in 1979 the state had the highest incarceration rate in the country. Speaking about the teenagers he works with, Sanford put it bluntly: "These are the young men on which we build our adult prisons."
His answer was to give those young men a stake in reshaping one of those buildings. His work has since earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship (2015) and an Ashoka Fellowship (2016).
Who takes part and what they do on the farm
The first group of 12 participants came mostly from intensive juvenile probation. From 2016 the programme widened to include teenagers who had not been charged with anything but were struggling with chaos at home, failure at school, mental health problems or substance use. Groups are deliberately small; in 2020 there were nine participants. Many are young men of colour, the group most likely to be pulled into the adult system.
Participants are paid by the hour and spend at least one full day a week on site. The work is varied and hands-on:
- Beekeeping, composting, organic vegetable growing and a worm farm housed in an old freezer.
- Raising laying hens in a mobile "chicken tractor" built from salvaged materials, and grazing sheep on rotation for wool and meat.
- Breeding soldier fly larvae as animal feed.
- Sorting around 600 pounds of discarded produce a week from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke: what is still edible goes to food banks, the rest feeds the animals and the compost.
Alongside the farm work, participants receive mental health treatment off site and coaching in workplace skills. Local mentors include Davon Goodwin, an Army veteran injured in Afghanistan in 2010, who credits farming with helping him recover. Bringing veterans and teenagers together was part of Sanford's plan from the start.
How the old cells and towers are being reused
What makes the project memorable is the plan for the buildings themselves. The proposals Sanford has described include growing mushrooms in former cells, a certified community kitchen in the prison galley, a museum of prison history in the barracks, a recording studio in the old "hot box" isolation building and a climbing wall inside a guard tower. Some of these were finished pieces and others still plans when the farm was profiled in 2020, so they are best read as a direction of travel rather than a list of completed facilities.
The farm also earns money. Eggs and salad greens are sold to a nearby university, and meat, wool and a locally made chowchow relish were planned as further products. That income helps pay the teenagers' wages, and it shows them that what they grow has real value.
What the results show, and what they do not
Growing Change reports that an internal study of 24 participants between 2011 and 2016 found the programme 92% effective at keeping them out of reoffending and adult prison. Former participants have gone on to college, the military and steady jobs. Terrence Smith, who joined the first group at 14 after being placed on probation in seventh grade, went on to become the farm manager.
Those numbers are encouraging, but they come from the organisation itself and from a small group. They are not an independent evaluation with a comparison group, so they cannot prove how much of the change is due to the farm rather than to the young people, their families or other support. Readers should treat them as a promising signal, not a final verdict.
Sanford describes the deeper goal in one word. "At the core level, we are instilling hope," he has said, arguing that when hope disappears in poor rural communities, something much darker tends to fill the gap.
How North Carolina's juvenile law has changed
When the project began, North Carolina treated every 16- and 17-year-old charged with a crime as an adult, which meant a teenager could leave court with a permanent adult record that followed him into every job application. Sanford often pointed to this as one of the reasons early intervention mattered so much.
That has since changed. Under the state's Raise the Age law, which took effect on 1 December 2019, most 16- and 17-year-olds are now handled by the juvenile system. A later amendment, in force from 1 December 2024, means those charged with the most serious felonies (Classes A to E) start their cases in adult court, with the option of being sent back to juvenile court. For most young people in programmes like Growing Change, the old automatic adult record no longer applies.
Could other closed prisons follow?
More than 300 prisons have been decommissioned across the United States, 62 of them in North Carolina, according to figures cited by Civil Eats. Many sit empty in rural towns that need both jobs and fresh food. Sanford has been building an open-source "prison flipping" guide with step-by-step instructions, with the aim of sharing it through the national cooperative extension network.
The practical lessons travel well even without a prison. Programmes that work with at-risk teenagers tend to do better when they pay young people for real work, keep groups small, connect them with steady adult mentors and pair practical tasks with access to mental health care. Growing Change combines all four, and adds a powerful symbol: young people who were expected to end up behind bars are the ones taking the bars down.
Sources: Civil Eats, 15 June 2020: Youth are flipping an abandoned North Carolina prison into a sustainable farm; WUNC, 24 September 2018: He's flipping a prison into a farm. Meet Noran Sanford; North Carolina Department of Public Safety: Raise the Age. Photos and video: Growing Change.
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