So that wraps up my experience at the ACGA conference in Columbus, Ohio. I met a lot of incredible people and had a peek inside the national community garden movement. There are so many inspiring things happening in this country and I came home from the conference with 30 pages of notes!
Now that I'm back in Philly the summer is coming to an end and so is my wonderful seasonal education job at Bartram's Garden. I hate to leave Bartram's but the school field trips drop off significantly in the winter and there isn't enough work for all of the educators. So I've been looking for full time jobs and everyone knows how fun job searching is.
But then something amazing happened. Within one week I saw a job opening, applied, and got it! In October I will start my new full time job (with benefits, what?!) as the Community Garden Organizer at the Camden Children's Garden, right across the Delaware River in Camden, NJ. It's a bit surreal, I can't believe I will soon be paid to do what I was doing before for free!
from camdenchildren'sgarden.org
For this job I will be communicating with citizen groups in Camden who want to a start a garden and supplying them with fencing, mulch, compost and plants, plus the manual labor to create the garden. After that the group maintains the garden with some occasional help from us. There are also monthly meetings for all of the community garden leaders which involve grilling and a recipe exchange! The CCG is trying to provide the community with information and access to healthy food through this garden program because there is only one supermarket in Camden, a city of 80,000 people. They have started hosting a low priced farmer's market and there are even potential plans for a CSA in the future. I have my own ideas too, of course, and I'm really excited to see how far we can go!
Check out this great article about the program!
Now that I'm back in Philly the summer is coming to an end and so is my wonderful seasonal education job at Bartram's Garden. I hate to leave Bartram's but the school field trips drop off significantly in the winter and there isn't enough work for all of the educators. So I've been looking for full time jobs and everyone knows how fun job searching is.
But then something amazing happened. Within one week I saw a job opening, applied, and got it! In October I will start my new full time job (with benefits, what?!) as the Community Garden Organizer at the Camden Children's Garden, right across the Delaware River in Camden, NJ. It's a bit surreal, I can't believe I will soon be paid to do what I was doing before for free!
from camdenchildren'sgarden.org
For this job I will be communicating with citizen groups in Camden who want to a start a garden and supplying them with fencing, mulch, compost and plants, plus the manual labor to create the garden. After that the group maintains the garden with some occasional help from us. There are also monthly meetings for all of the community garden leaders which involve grilling and a recipe exchange! The CCG is trying to provide the community with information and access to healthy food through this garden program because there is only one supermarket in Camden, a city of 80,000 people. They have started hosting a low priced farmer's market and there are even potential plans for a CSA in the future. I have my own ideas too, of course, and I'm really excited to see how far we can go!
Check out this great article about the program!
2 comments:
awesome awesome awesome! Can't wait to hear more about the job!
Congratulations! Can't wait to hear all about it! Keep in touch, I can see a partnership soon.
Post a Comment