City Sprouts Farm Intern

The original internship plan was to spend my 90 hours at City Sprouts Farm, on site doing agriculture work or conducting community outreach. However, City Sprouts Farm resides on land owned by Kulshan Community Land Trust. In January, Ellie was notified that City Sprouts Farm would be losing around ¼ of its property to low-income housing; because of this there would be limited hours that a group of interns could spend on the farm, so we had to find alternative methods to work in food justice and community resilience. There were extremely frustrating days where we had to build new fences and reshape the farm in compliance with what Kulshan land trust asked. It was hard to allow areas that obviously had hours of time poured into clearing them to get overgrown with weeds knowing it would soon become a parking lot. Overall, this is a complex issue because the goal of the farm is to combat social and environmental injustices. Building necessary low-income housing is crucial, so we all learned how to balance our feelings of frustration with losing parts of the farm alongside understanding the need for affordable housing.