Community Garden Scholar

I'm thrilled to be joining  The Cornucopia Project  staff part-time as a Garden Educator. The Cornucopia Project empowers our community to make healthy food choices. We do this by creating and delivering interactive experiential educational programs and teaching models, adapted to a variety of learning spaces, from gardens to classrooms and kitchens. These programs connect people of all ages to real food and to each other. We increase our impact by partnering with organizations that share our core values of: Good Health Effective Education Strong Community My internship experience with this organization in 2011 essentially solidified my sense of professional calling as an environmental educator in community food systems. I was especially proud that year to have researched and written a Community Impact Grant to build a learning and giving garden which has now been providing fresh produce for the pantry at the Peterborough Community Center for several years. I'm really...

I'm proud to be working with C&S Wholesale Grocers and Antioch University New England on a workshop for local business and nonprofit leaders: "Planting the Seeds for Workplace Gardening." The morning workshop will focus on how employees can enjoy the benefits of workplace gardening and share the bounty of gardens with our communities. It will be facilitated by Garden Educator Madi Walter. Participants will receive a resource packet, chances to network, and learn from the C&S Workplace Organic Gardens model. The workshop is Tuesday, July 24 at 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. at C&S's corporate offices on Optical Ave in Keene, New Hampshire . For questions: csgardens@antioch.edu. More info: https://lnkd.in/gxr7cmh

Through summer 2018, I am continuing the PhD journey by working on a dissertation proposal that incorporates community gardens and community gardeners. While I have a bit of work to do on my research methodology, I know it will be as community-empowering as possible, as my research question remains centered around the phrase "food empowerment" and specifically what that looks, feels, and maybe even tastes like in community contexts. There are tons of really bold, rich, and challenging ideas in the scholarly literature and around food justice, dignity, and sovereignty, local food and agriculture policy, community-based food systems, community gardening, and empowerment. The more I read, the more I am grateful for the community of published authors in this field, like Joshua Sbicca, Nathan McClintock, Claire Nettle, Heather Burns, Laura Lawson, Adam Pine , Charles Levkoe, Julian Agyeman, and others. (Some of their works are listed in my Resource Hub .) I'm also grateful f...

Food Solutions New England  has published a story on the service learning project I am now wrapping up: Monadnock Farm & Community Coalition Introduces New Local Food Resource, "Cultivating Community" The Monadnock Farm & Community Coalition (MFCC) has announced the launch of a new resource for Coalition partners and community members: a visual and narrative portfolio depicting the array of work people in the Monadnock Region are doing around issues of local food and the ways these individuals experience, relate with, and find meaning in the work. The photographic and written depictions, available to the public through MFCC’s  website , can be used by organizations and stakeholders to enhance their own efforts, whether to inform promotional or educational programs, engage new members, apply for funding, or support collaboration. The collection can also provide a tool for farmers, service providers, educators, and others to reflect upon and communicate the val...

Cultivating Community:  Portraying work in local food system issues as experienced by people in the Monadnock Region Jess Gerrior, MS - Antioch University New England Project Description: This project involves people in the Monadnock Region who are engaged in work around local food system issues. Whether farming, gardening, educating, purchasing, or advocating for a more just, vibrant, and sustainable food system, there are many ways people experience this work. "Cultivating Community" is a doctoral service learning project focused on what their work entails, what it takes to do it, why they are involved, and what it means. "Cultivating Community" events are informal gatherings fo r people engaged or interested in work around local food system issues. Participants are invited to share and discuss their perspectives. My role in the project is to facilitate the creation of a realistic portrayal of participants' work, which will be a new, share...

Sharing from the  Cheshire County Conservation District : Supported in part by a New Hampshire Humanities Community Project Grant, the series of events is sponsored by the Cheshire County Conservation District in partnership with Keene State College. It is a collaborative venture that will further an urgent project at the heart of the environmental humanities: the connection of people, ideas, and the land. The Conservation District works with the farming community on improving management practices that enhance soil health and viability and to educate the general public on the foundation for a healthy food system. This project poses a series of challenging questions about human culture and agriculture: What do our current agricultural practices say about us both individually and collectively? How do we understand the social needs and demands of our local agricultural economy, the natural constraints of ecology and the political imperatives of democracy? And how do we reco...

The American Community Gardening Association 2017 Conference: CONNecting our Roots  has been deliciously invigorating. The conference theme seems especially poignant this year, as I continually "dig" deeper into community gardening as both an extension of my professional journey in sustainability education and the means for "growth" as a community-based and critically-oriented researcher. (I am not the only attendee who finds every opportunity to use garden metaphors; they are everywhere!) I still believe strongly in the power of higher education and local efforts to generate synergistic solutions for health and justice in our food systems, and thereby shift our larger social, economic, and ecological spheres toward greater sustainability. I am finding more and more that a balance between theory and practice - academic and "dirt under the nails" approaches - is the path to real progress. Being able to engage with other dedicated, intelligent, and courage...

Today marks the second and final doctoral weekend of the fall semester. Earlier, my cohort and I exchanged presentations on our essays about the intersections of our professional interests with service learning and community-based scholarship. As a way of sharing with the wider academic/professional community, here are the figures from my presentation, with my working bibliography for the essay.  Figure 1: The intersection of two themes I am working with,  i.e.  the bridging of higher education and food systems and the continuum of praxis (theory and practice, thinking and doing). The figure that follows contains an idea that harnesses these seemingly disparate challenges together and provides a crux for my conceptual framework. Figure 2: Education is cultural work. I like to think about what's possible when the worlds of academia and community food converge around the value and practice of sustainability. This work requires new, more responsive models that trans...

In doing some background research for a literature review and photovoice research project I am conducting this fall, I came across the 2015 report, " Improving Access to Food Systems Among Communities of Color: A Food Justice Issue Report to the Oregon Food Bank "  - written by Alma M.O. Trinidad, Helen Camden, and Anne Coleman of Portland State University's Center to Advance Racial Equity Research , in cooperation with the Oregon Food Bank . I am interested in this report for many reasons, and it's an excellent example of the kind of work I want to continue doing in my doctoral program and beyond. A few aspects I'll mention here are the authors' engagement and empowerment of community members in the process of research and advocacy, and the sensitivity with which they considered different cultural compositions of Portland neighborhoods. They did a great job of identifying the aims and methods of their research, and presenting their findings in a way that re...

Today I am reintroducing a story I published on Atavist earlier this year. Food gardening in the workplace benefits employees and workplace culture; addresses community hunger while enhancing local food systems; exemplifies creativity in business-university partnerships; and provides opportunities for research on many fronts - education, ecopsychology, sustainability and social justice, to name a few. Full story: https://jessgerrior.atavist.com/making-it-work  

Later this month, I'll be giving a brief transitional talk about my research on food justice at the Monadnock Farm & Community Coalition's spring summit, “ Improving Local Food Access to Moderate and Low Income Communities ” - hosted by the MFCC's Education Working Group . In June, I'll be co-presenting a concurrent session entitled " Tending Gardens, Raising Resilience: A recipe for community, served three ways " at the UVM Food Systems Summit . Hope to see you at one or both of these events.

I had the wonderful privilege of co-presenting two workshops at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability (AASHE) Conference on " Transforming Sustainability Education " in Minneapolis this past week, and am so pleased to report that not only were both sessions really well attended, our participants were deeply engaged and passionate about both topics: "Re-thinking Options for Curriculum and Faculty Development: How will we take it to the next level?" and "Sustainability Officers: The Dream, the Sometimes Harsh Reality, the Reasons You Want Us on Your Leadership Team" (a video shoot). Many thanks to my colleagues for a great collaborative experience! It's rejuvenating to be in the company of such thoughtful and skilled sustainability educators, and I keep finding new facets of meaning in "sustainability" (even if the term sometimes falls short as a tool to convey an idea). There was a strong voice for change in both workshops - ...

Visit the Monadock Farm & Community Coalition 's event page for details: Produced by the Monadnock Farm and Community Coalition and Monadnock Food Co-op, Healthy Monadnock Champions November 9 – 15, 2015 The  6th Annual Feast on This! Film Festival features movies that educate our community about the diverse issues affecting our national, regional and local food and agricultural systems. We chose films that  will spark conversation and action  around building stronger local, regional and sustainable food systems. FILM SCHEDULE: 5:30pm Monday, November 9, 2015  – Hosted by Prime Roast Coffee, Keene 3 Acres in Detroit A willful urban farmer sets out to transform an abandoned house into a greenhouse 7pm, Tuesday, November 10, 2015  –  Hosted by   The Cornucopia Project, Peterborough Lunch Love Community Passion, creative energy and persistence come together when Berkeley advocates and educators tackle food reform and food justice ...

Part of the PhD process is forming a central research question - fascinating and sometimes exhausting work, especially since it never seems to be "done." But, in preparation for this summer's course in quantitative research methods, I've written this version of my research interests that I'll share here: I'm interested in the synergistic potential of environmental education and community/institutional collaborations to advance social and environmental justice in food systems. I want to know what environmental education practices, approaches, tools, and measures post-secondary institutions are using (or could be using) to both support and model such food systems. To me, socially and environmentally just food systems are community-supported/community-supportive, resilient, healthy, and affordable/accessible to all. I see this research as relevant to environmental studies because of the complex and dynamic relationships between food systems and ecological sys...