Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies

It's been quite the ride. I have enjoyed serving as the Interim Director for the 22-23 school year. There was not a day that went by where I didn't learn something new. In the picture is my favorite day from the year when my kids got to see how amazing it is up here and planted some trees and harvested some plants. We will hopefully have a permanent director soon.

Thanks to Lauren, Pablo, Jay, Karen, Debbie, Jill, Andy, Mary Anne, and Aaron for their help along the way (to name a few..... sorry left off all the Dr.s to just keep it more simple). Thank you to the students and faculty for their love for the Lyle Center. See you in the Fall - look for info on my solar energy course, and more info on our OC Sustainability Decathlon entry - as the Lyle Center is very much part of both.

-Juintow Lin (Professor of Architecture)

Thank you to everyone from Cal Poly Pomona's Division of Academic Affairs who came out for a tour of the Lyle Center! Our Randall Lewis fellow Tracy also made herb bundles for everyone to take home.

Our Randall Lewis fellowship class made this beautiful vertical planting bed out of an old pallet and coconut coir soil! Green onions, strawberries, kale, and cilantro are planted all throughout the bed, which is growing on the rooftop above the amphitheater. Fellows also installed an irrigation timer so it doesn't have to be watered manually all summer.

Many months later, see how our seedlings have grown! These photos display about four months of growth (with plenty of rain!) for leeks, celery, cilantro, and kale from November 2022 to March 2023. All of this produce has now made its way down to the Poly Pantry for students to enjoy. Thank you to all of our student fellows and assistants, as well as Farm-to-Pantry volunteers for making this possible!

Claudia Serrato's edible landscapes class cooked and enjoyed foraged hoja santa quesadillas made with homemade heirloom blue corn tortillas, queso fresco, crickets, and (of course) hoja santa! As a drink, the students also had nopal juice made from the pads of cacti that were set to be soon removed from the center.

Rohan's RS3020 class had their own end-of-semester celebration and also put a new layer of cob on the pizza oven and the papercrete bench. The Lyle Center will miss all of these amazing students!!

We are thankful to the crew at California Conservation Corps (Pomona Center) for helping us out on the grounds the last two days. They have helped build an urbanite wall around the Village Green, remove roots, thin plants, and will help us complete the brick caps for our outdoor classroom later this summer.

We had the honor of hosting Betsey Olenick Dougherty, formerly of Dougherty + Dougherty, the original Architect for the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies. and Principal with merger partner, Perkins Eastman. Betsey provided an oral history of the evolution and development of the project to local studio staff (many from Cal Poly) as well as current students and faculty as a part of an historical retrospective of the history of their firm.

Some of the awards that the Design has won nclude:
One of the first Top Ten Green Buildings awarded at that time by the U.S. Department of Energy
The first project to initiate the SCE Savings by Design program
The winner of the AIA California Nathaniel Owens Award for Sustainable Design
The AIAOC COTE Award recognizing its 25th Anniversary


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Congrats to our graduating MSRS students : Shawn, Audrey, Arthur, Lauren, and Rebecca as well as to all of our minors. We have enjoyed the journey with you thus far and can't wait to see where you go from here.

To send the Spring semester off with a happy farewell, our RS3030 and RS3010 classes taught by Elektra Grant and Doug Kent held an end-of-year social at the bocce court. Students enjoyed tasty treats made with hoja santa, baked up some homemade pizza, and had a blast playing with the giant jenga. One of Elektra's students, Tom, also took polaroids to commemorate the event.

To send everyone off with a final thank-you, we held an appreciation luncheon with our student assistants, staff, College Corps fellows, and current and past Randall Lewis fellows. Thank you to everyone who's helped the Lyle Center grow and thrive this past year!

Our Randall Lewis fellows this semester were Benjamin, Norton, Tracy, and Ethan, who kept the Lyle Center in tip-top shape and helped with food insecurity on campus. We did lots of overhauls this semester and they were there every step of the way. Thanks for all of your hard work.

We also hosted four College Corps fellows for the '22-23 school year: Kenya, Wendy, Lesly, and Camille. They helped not only with grounds work, but also on office projects like designing and making seed packets, researching comparable programs, and even making many of the posts on our Instagram and pages! Thank you to the College Corps and these four for everything they did this year.

Our three student assistants Jacob, Gia, and Blake will continue on to help us next year with their expertise in sustainable grounds design, landscape maintenance, and equipment operation. These three have been the cornerstone of keeping the Lyle Center going, especially with all of the changes that have been going on this semester. Thank you, and see you next year!

Our Randall Lewis fellowship applications with reopen this Fall. Keep an eye on our page and the link in our bio for updates!

The Lyle Center is happy to know that the excess of our mosquito fish population is going to help in areas where the heavy rains have brought bodies of standing water. These fish are natural predators to mosquito larvae, which grow in standing water, making them a natural and sustainable way to keep mosquitos away and keep them from repopulating.

Student assistant Gia Menchaca and College Corps fellow Lesly Ibarra worked together to remove tree suckers as part of an effort to revitalize our walnut woodland. Along with other fellows, they also pruned the larger trees, weedwacked the area, and piled up branches from the trees that were cut down to be removed.

As graduation approaches, we can't help but smile when we see this memory.

We extend a belated thank you to Dr, Pablo La Roche, who served as Interim Director of the Lyle Center from 2017 to 2022. Dr. La Roche brought decades of architecture experience and knowledge about passive cooling systems, low energy carbon neutral architecture, and affordable housing to his work at the Center. He is currently on sabbatical updating his book, Carbon Neutral Architectural Design.

Dr. La Roche increased classes and enrollment at the Center, worked with students to design a community Center in South America, hosted earth day events, brought numerous other visitors and events to the Center, created signage, built a welcome pavilion, hosted a 25 year anniversary event, and developed a relationship with poly pantry, worked on various research projects, including test cells, and led the Center through Covid and the shift to distance learning.

We look forward to seeing him back in the fall teaching classes at the Center.

Rohan Guyot-Sutherland and his class used branches from the recent tree removal project, cactus pads, and recycled cardboard to create the Lyle Center's first Hugelkultur bed in front of the Village Green. Hugelkultur is a style of raised bed that uses logs and plant debris to create a super-fertile growing environment for plants. His class planted squash and watermelon seeds in the pilot bed, and they've already sprouted just a few weeks later.

See the last slide to learn more about Hugelkultur!

Check out these photos from our last Farm to Pantry of the year. A huge thank-you to everyone who came out and volunteered at any of our events this year! We got so much done thanks to all of your help, from planting trees to harvesting produce and more. See you all next semester! We are grateful for our collaboration with and for leading the event.

Today, we had final MSRS thesis defense presentations. It was our first in-person thesis defense in quite some time, and we are so proud of our masters students!

Audrey Snyder presented her thesis, "Tracing Transhumance: An interdisciplinary case study of regenerative grazing in Southern California's fire multiscapes with Cuyama Lamb Inc."

Lauren Hamlett's thesis was about "Understanding users of a wildlife helpline"

Rebecca Velarde's thesis was "Resident responses to changing climate and community: Transit use, housing development, and gentrification in Downtown Santa Ana"

And finally, Arthur Levine gave his thesis: "Measuring and mapping warehouse impacts on carbon storage and sequestration, an ecosystem service, in the Inland Empire"

For all the mothers out there, we hope you are being celebrated!
Photo of our Randall Lewis Fellow Tracy making herb bundles.

Curious how to get all the way up to the Lyle Center? See how some of our student fellows take their commutes!

Lesly, a College Corps fellow, rides her electric scooter up the hill. Student assistant Gia Mencacha rides her bike from Pomona. So does Randall Lewis fellow Benjamin, who lives on-campus.

CC fellows Wendy and Kenya both take the Bronco Express Shuttle up the hill. RL fellow Norton drives his car, as does CC fellow Camille, who also sometimes carpools with some of the on-campus fellows.

If you've been here before, how do you get to the Lyle Center?

Are you interested in pursuing higher education? Want to learn about regeneration and sustainability in a modern context? Apply to our MSRS program! Fall 2023 applications close on Monday, May 15. Visit cpp.edu/env/lyle or go to the linktree in our Instagram bio to learn more about the program and how to apply.

Our student assistant Jacob teaches Randall Lewis fellows Ethan and Tracy how to prune rose bushes. The process of caring for each plant in the right way is important to regeneration -- without pruning, these roses could get sick or die. They may look barren now, but come May these bushes will be in a full, gorgeous bloom. Be sure to come by and check it out!

Even at sunset, these sheep are still hard at work.

Students from Doug Kent's RS3030 class had an enriching extra credit opportunity to try out weaving with natural plant fibers. We're glad to be a part of the learning process for these students!

We at the Lyle Center were glad to be host to so many amazing events this Earth Week. Here's a look back at all of the wonderful ways people practiced sustainability and regeneration on our grounds over the week.

On Tuesday, we had a foraging and edible plants workshop hosted by our very own edible landscapes class. Students learned all about how to cook with the plants around them and even tried out a few recipes!

Wednesday, the CPP Native American Student Center hosted a natural dye workshop using many of the plants we cultivate onsite.

Thursday, our SSRA student club collaborated with Eco Now to hold a vermicompost workshop, demonstrating a system to recycle food waste into fertilizer with worms!

Friday morning, the Cal Poly African American Student Center came for a tour and demo showcasing container gardening.

And finally on Saturday, Earth Day, our Farm-to-Pantry event took place, hosting dozens of students to gather herb bundles, plant oak trees (see our other post for more details!), and plant new crops for the coming seasons. Our Randall Lewis fellows were a huge help in leading the event.

A huge thank you to everyone who hosted or attended any of these events, and we welcome you all back in the future to bring the ideals of the Lyle Center to our campus community.

This April, our Farm to Pantry event featured a special donation from Cal State LA through a National Science Foundation grant fund that allowed us to plant dozens of oak trees. This grant is part of a research project aimed at testing the effects of native and nonnative oaks, which are a foundation species, on urban food webs around LA including surrounding plants, insects, and even birds. We're glad to be a part of this important work, and grateful for everyone's help planting these trees on Earth Day!

This Earth Day, we gave a tour of our Lyle Center grounds to a group from the Jack and Jill Foundation, whose mission is to address issues affecting African American children and families by investing in programs and services that create a strong foundation for children to thrive long-term. Our guests especially enjoyed seeing Pancho and his crew going to town on the long grasses covering the hillside.

Haven't had the chance to make it to one of our Farm-to-Pantry events yet? Join us on May 6 for our last Farm-to-Pantry of the semester, where we'll be planting and harvesting produce for the Poly Pantry to help combat food insecurity and also planting more new oak trees all over the grounds of the Lyle Center. The event, led by Dr. Aaron Fox, will start at 8:30 AM and run till 11 AM. You can sign up at the link in our bio on the ASI website.

We hope to see you there!

Today we say good bye to Jillian Gomez, the Lyle Center Instructional Site Technician (and MSRS grad) for the last 8 years. We will miss her dearly. Luckily, she will not be too far away.

Jeremiah ......

Farm to pantry event on Earth Day... Planting tomato and basil in village Green