>> Narrator: This week on "Friends and Neighbors."

>> Paxton: What I love about East Chicago is that it's a very rare combination of demographic opportunities, and that's the kind of community I'm about serving.

That's what I like about East Chicago, the promise, the promise of it.

>> Chris: Ultimate is a sport that I think really anybody can enjoy playing.

The Ultimate's kind of like a cross between football and soccer and a little bit of basketball all kind of mixed together but just with a Frisbee.

And really, if you can throw a Frisbee around and you can run around, you can play ultimate.

>> Ben: When I first started drinking coffee, it tasted bad.

And what got me really into coffee was learning that that's not really how it's supposed to be.

And you can source coffee from small farms that are growing really nice stuff.

And it's exciting for me to share with other people that coffee can taste good.

>> Phillip: We sell anything from retro to brand new video games.

>> John: Collectibles, if we can deem them directly related to video games, literature, plushies, just a little bit of everything.

As long as we can encompass it into the video game world, we will buy, sell, and trade it.

>> Narrator: Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

(exciting music) >> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I'll remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

>> Narrator: Shopping for fruits and vegetables in the Strack & Van Til produce department is a feast for the senses, with produce picked at the peak of freshness.

From apples and avocados to pineapples and peppers, treat yourself to the best quality fruits and vegetables.

Find them at your local Strack & Van Til store.

>> Narrator: A long lasting legacy of family ownership dedicated to generations of clients is what sets Centier apart.

Trust the integrity, experience, and personal service of Centier, Indiana's largest private family owned bank.

>> Narrator: Support for programming in Lakeshore PBS comes in part from a generous bequest of the Estate of Marjorie A.

Mills, whose remarkable contribution will help us keep viewers like you informed, inspired, and entertained for years to come.

(gentle music) >> Narrator: Additional support for Lakeshore PBS is provided by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music) >> This is the East Chicago greenhouse.

We are run by the Parks and Recreation Department, and we are a 15-ish, 20,000 square foot facility.

We've got four bays.

Two of them are dedicated to a tropical room, which is what most people think of when they think of greenhouse.

So you come in, you see hibiscus and cute banana trees, agaves, things like that, so that's really kind of a walk and look kind of scenario.

And then we have two bays that are dedicated to growing and propagating plants.

In the age of "Fortnite," do kids need to know about agriculture?

Especially in the way that we think of agriculture, 'cause I'm here for a reason.

I'm not on a farm, on a tractor with some cows for a reason.

I'm here in the middle of East Chicago, and that's because agriculture doesn't have to be what we're typically told it is.

Does it in every way, shape, and form make their life better, and more enriching, more involved?

Absolutely.

If I had a dollar for every kid who has walked by a plant and been like, "What's that?"

And I'm like, "It's a tomato, dude."

And they're like, "I didn't know that."

And I'm like, "How do you not?

Look, it's just green."

And they're like, "I thought they were always red."

If we want our kids to be eating in a different way, to have a different experience with their food than we were offered, then yes, I would highly encourage it in any scenario.

We work with the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana, and we also work with Catholic Charities, and we typically have at least two what we call mobile market giveaways each month.

If you're at all familiar with Food bank of Northwest Indiana or Catholic Charities, they provide generally goods that are gonna last a while in the pantry.

So you will get fresh produce and frozen meats off of them often.

So what we like to do with that in mind, the idea of fresh food being relatively rare, is we use our aquaponic system, and now our container gardening into like an actual vegetable garden, and we use all of that produce to distribute with the Catholic Charities or the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana Mobile Market.

We try to cover all of the bases with stuff that's gonna last a good long time in your pantry, and also get you some nice freshly grown vegetables that were literally harvested that same day or just the day prior.

(gentle music) I get in there and I do my fair share of cutting and spraying and all that stuff, but the two ladies who really make sure, who are the living breathing heart of the greenhouse here, who make sure that the stuff that needs to get done gets done, are Lisette and Diane.

And they've been here a good while longer than I have.

And they've been here running the aquaponics setup, making sure that the tropical room stays alive and keeps thriving.

They're really what keeps this place going.

And I'm deeply thankful to have two people working with me who are seriously dedicated to keeping this place up to snuff.

It'd be impossible to do by one's self for sure.

(speaking in foreign language) >> What I love about East Chicago is that it's a very rare combination of demographic opportunities.

They're vibing and they're coming together, and that's the kind of community I'm about serving.

Where you can reach a lot of people where everybody gets to know each other, and getting to somewhere where innovative stuff is happening and where the good part of the story comes out.

So that's what I like about East Chicago, the promise, the promise of it.

(gentle music) (exciting music) >> Ultimate is a sport that I think that really anybody can enjoy playing.

So ultimate's kind of like a cross between football and soccer and a little bit of basketball, all kind of mixed together but just with a Frisbee.

And really, if you can throw a Frisbee around and you can run around, you can play ultimate.

It's a great sport just to get people involved, to meet people in the community.

And even the sport of ultimate is unique in that it's actually self-officiated, which is pretty unusual for most sports.

But it's called spirit of the game.

And basically, it's unique in that the players actually officiate themselves as they're playing.

But it really does teach a lot of important character traits and values of integrity and honesty.

Obviously, it's something where each player is entrusted a certain amount of actually kind of knowing the rules, but also kind of doing the right thing.

If they didn't actually catch it on a close play, they should admit, "Hey, I didn't actually catch that," and give it over to the other team.

It's a sport that as people learn the sport and develop.

They end up almost giving back not only to the sport, but to their community as well, learning just these character traits and values and morals that I think is helpful for the community to have.

People show up for the first time not really knowing anybody, not really knowing what to expect.

Sometimes maybe they've played ultimate.

Maybe it's been years.

Maybe they played in college.

Maybe they just played with some friends.

Maybe they've never played.

Sometimes we have people that invite friends to come that maybe somebody they know, but who's never played the sport before.

And so a lot of times, they kind of show up maybe not really knowing what to expect, not really knowing anybody, but we pretty quick kind of get them thrown in.

We always circle up and just introduce ourselves.

It's just a really easy atmosphere for new players to come and just jump in and meet new people.

It's really great just to see people try it for the first time and end up coming back week after week.

(exciting music) >> The reason I love ultimate is actually the people.

We've played on a few different teams before in different areas, and we always joke that no matter where we play or what teams we play with, we always meet great people.

It's a great way to make new friends and be a part of a team.

So it's given us a lot of friendships, and it's given us a fun activity to do besides just going to the gym and lifting weights.

It's fun 'cause it's a game.

You don't really feel like you're working out, but by the end of it, you just feel really good.

So when I first started playing Frisbee in Laport, it was me and a bunch of males.

So I invited one of my girlfriends out to come play with us.

And then she started inviting some of her friends out.

And it was nice to see other women feeling comfortable enough to come and play, and every single one have loved it and have come back.

So it's something that I enjoy with not only my husband, but some of my closest friends.

It's really awesome to have women on the ultimate team.

It kind of makes it even, 'cause it's a little bit difficult having a female guarding a male or vice versa.

So having more women on the team really makes it more cohesive, and I think it's more fun having more women on playing ultimate.

(exciting music) >> It was almost like something that started just a healthy alternative to just running or playing this sport or playing that sport.

And also meet a lot of new people that hadn't before around the surrounding area of Northwest Indiana.

I remember when I started with 209 Ultimate, it was just friends meeting after college, and going and playing pickups on a weekend.

So we started to grow and outreach to each other.

That's how those smaller groups started, 209 Ultimate, Valpo group.

And then we had our Laport group.

And those still have their own separate pickups where they try to integrate those.

But we still try to make sure that everybody can come here, and that's kind of what NWI Ultimate was all about, was bringing those groups and communities together, and then being able to take that large community and then develop it.

And so that way we can spread what we've been doing to more and more people.

Put out flyers, say, "Hey, this is where you can come.

This is where we've got organized sport as well, not just your pickups."

So if you wanna continue to take what you've been doing, maybe on the side, on a weekend day or something like that, searching NWI Ultimate as a Facebook group, follow and like the group, and you'll be constantly reminded for those notifications about when there are pickups, when we're gonna have games, when we might travel for a tournament.

This is somewhere where you can come, join other people who love this sport, and play together for fun.

(exciting music) >> What got me really into coffee was learning that you can source coffee from small farms that are growing really nice stuff and putting a lot of work into growing coffee that tastes fruity or chocolatey or like peanut butter.

It's exciting for me to share with other people that coffee can taste good.

You don't have to suffer through this burnt oily cup of sludge to get your caffeine for the day.

We never really planned on starting a whole roasting business in the beginning.

It was just, there were three of us that lived in the dorms at Valparaiso University.

It was me and my roommate, Walker Johnson, and our next door neighbor, Drew McKenna.

We were just getting really into coffee, figuring out new ways to make it in our room.

And our whole thing was come over, we'll make you coffee that we made in our room right here.

It was like this whole community throughout the dorms of sharing coffee with people.

And then eventually, some people were like, "This is not bad, we'll start buying some."

So we start selling to friends and family on a very small scale, and then started doing some campus events, selling to more and more people.

And then we got bigger roasters and bigger roasters, and then it kind of just grew on its own with people just wanting to buy coffee.

A lot of coffee that you'll buy at the grocery store, at whatever gas station is just like a mix of maybe you've got some Columbian coffee, some Brazilian coffees all thrown in, but we buy coffee that's from a single source and has a certain flavor profile.

Costa Rican coffees taste like a little bit of tropical fruit.

A lot of Latin American coffees taste a little bit nutty.

Kenyan coffees are pretty acidic.

And we like to just bring out the intrinsic flavors of the country that they were grown in.

So that's a lot of it is just when we buy it.

And then when we roast it, we have a, this is like a pretty top of the line specialty roaster.

And we've got a software where we track all the data that's happening during the roast, like gas changes, airflow, like the drum rotation, everything.

And we're able to apply heat in different ways that brings out certain flavors.

So I think the thing that people would notice most if they drink our coffee is that there's just a lot more flavor there, where a lot of coffee, it just tastes like coffee.

We have one that really tastes like chocolate and peanut butter.

You just get, you get a lot more out of it.

(exciting music) Two years into messing around with roasting, we met a coffee farmer named Marian Ella, who has a project in Costa Rica where she's trying to make coffee farming profitable, where a lot of times it's not.

And the cool thing about it is better coffee and better sourcing, more equitable sourcing go together.

So farmers can grow a nicer coffee and they can pay more for it, and then they can actually make money.

And for us to be able to buy more of her coffee, and then we met other farmers who were doing really cool stuff and we can buy their coffee and support what they're doing.

And I think bringing better coffee to the coffee market and also coffee that's sourced in a way that's not harmful to the countries where it's grown is of what keeps us going.

We call it the Yaggy mission.

And it's mostly, right now, it's mostly a commitment to buy from people who are doing those things.

Our biggest thing is just, there are people that are doing really good work in their communities growing coffee.

So how can we support them?

A lot of the farms we work with are doing things like clean water for their towns.

They're providing education for the kids of the parents who are coming in and picking the coffee every year.

We just bought a coffee from Nicaragua, and it's 100% produced by women, in a country where not a lot of opportunities have been presented to them, and somebody invested in them.

And now we can buy their coffee and support women owning land and women producing their own product in a place where that's been hard in the past.

Everywhere we buy coffee from, there's a cool story.

There's a farmer in Costa Rica.

Her name is Kathia Zamora.

We carry her Cloza Farms coffee a good part of the year.

And she told me like a year ago, we were talking and she said, having my family's farm's name on your coffee bags in the US feels like winning an Oscar or a Grammy to me.

And that was like, that just blew me away.

So it's definitely a big part of why we're doing all of this and what keeps us going.

For us, it's so important because we learned about it secondhand, I guess, from people who have seen it, who have grown up on farms.

And I think that's part of what drives us to grow is if we can take a bigger share of the coffee market and give that to people who are doing this responsibly, then that is pretty big for us.

Coffee that's not sourced responsibly, there's deforestation, there's pesticides, there's kids living in poverty, not being able to go to school.

There's endless things that exist in the coffee world.

I think one of the things that's cool about specialty coffee is there's a lot of people that are trying to change that.

And we're jumping on board with that.

(upbeat music) >> We sell anything from retro to brand new video games.

Atari all the way to PS5.

Nintendo products.

We also have pretty much every kind of console you can imagine.

>> We also sell lots of collectibles, if we can deem them directly related to video games.

Literature, pluses, it's a little bit of everything.

As long as we can encompass it into the video game world, we will buy, sell, and trade it.

>> Yeah, growing up, I had a Super Nintendo, a bunch of games.

John had original Nintendo, a bunch of games.

So we both played quite a bit when we were kids, so it definitely stems from that.

>> Some of my earliest memories actually are of playing "Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" with my mom.

Believe it or not.

My mom was a huge video game nut, "Mario Kart," "Zelda," "Turtles in Time."

And then my cousin would always be over, and we were always playing as well.

>> Years ago, I did not have a job, and I needed some money.

So I decided to sell my 80 Super Nintendo childhood game collection.

Still hurts to this day.

I decided to start buying more with the money I made.

It kind of just evolved into a whole career eventually.

>> Yeah, and then from there, I ran into him at one of our friend's Halloween parties.

And he's like, "Man, I'm making all this money out at the flea market.

You gotta come out and check it out."

And I put it off for like a month, and finally one day I had a free weekend and I just pretty much sold out of every video game, every item I brought that day.

And it was like wow.

I was just like, "Dude, do you wanna like go drive around and look for more video games to buy at pawn shops or whatever we can do?"

And he is like, "Yeah, I got nothing else going on."

We're gonna start pooling our money and buying X, Y, Z every weekend after the flea market or during the week.

And then that evolved into, I'm like, "Dude, we should make a Facebook page for this."

Every business is starting to get Facebook pages, and it really just snowballed from there.

We started developing an online following, ended up moving into the online market space with eBay and stuff like that.

And it's just, never looked back.

>> Phillip: We get inventory by any way possible.

>> I'm more into actually going out and hunting for stuff than he is.

I'll go to flea markets, I'll go to garage sales.

If I have a day off and I'm cruising around and I see a garage sale, I always stop and, "Got any video games?"

In this time, we've made a lot of friends.

A lot of relationships with people who are very, very devout about this hobby.

And so while we're doing our thing here, they're out hitting every garage sale that we miss.

And then they come in with giant buckets and they're just like, "Yep, this is the stuff that I don't want, buy it."

Or, "Can I trade it for that one item I do want in there that I don't wanna shell out $500 out of my pocket for?"

'Cause some of this stuff is, it's a finite resource.

And some of it, especially in high condition, good condition is, it's a premium price.

And I wish that everything was cheap in here, but unfortunately, just the market dictates differently.

>> Phillip: Like old antiques will get worth more money over time.

It's the same concept, basically.

>> John: From a collecting standpoint, stuff just looks cool on your shelves when your friends come over.

It actually, in the end, it means nothing, but me and my wife joke about it a lot that it makes our living room a happy place.

We get to go into our little room that is just our blast from the past.

>> I'm really big into like RPGs, so like the stories, it's kind of like reading a book, but being more active into it.

It's something that I like to enjoy, to do on my free time.

There's something I could just sit down and relax and enjoy for the most part, maybe besides some really hard games.

I'm pretty in the modern stuff.

I like new experiences at this point.

I've beaten "Turtles in Time" like 150 times.

I don't know if I could do that game ever again.

>> I could.

I could do it right now.

>> It'd takes us 30 minutes and it'd be fun.

>> We're probably gonna get a lot of flack for that one.

>> John: In a fast-paced world where sometimes it can just feel like life sucks, it's an escape.

It's a different world.

You get to put your head space into something else for a little bit, be somebody else for a little bit.

That's one of the best things I think about it.

(exciting music) >> Narrator: Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short.

And the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea and a book versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

>> Strack and Van Til is your wedding planning partner.

Choose handcrafted designs by the trained floral designers in our floral department.

Plan a memorable meal for your reception from our delicious catering menu.

And let our bakery artisans design the wedding cake of your dreams.

Visit strackandvantil.com for details.

>> Narrator: A long lasting legacy of family ownership dedicated to generations of clients is what sets Centier apart.

Trust the integrity, experience, and personal service of Centier, Indiana's largest private family owned bank.

>> Narrator: Support for programming Lakeshore PBS comes in part from a generous bequest of the estate of Marjorie A.

Mills, whose remarkable contribution will help us keep viewers like you informed, inspired, and entertained for years to come.

(gentle music) >> Narrator: Additional support for Lakeshore PBS is provided by viewers like you.

Thank you.