Student-Farmers Grow As Leaders Through “Green Jobs” Summer Work

by Maya McFadden

Common Ground rising senior Ty’Ion Knight at work feeding chickens for the Green Jobs Corps.

Gonzalez learns through garden weeds that it’s important to care about what’s around you.

In between feeding chickens, weeding, harvesting cucumbers, and mucking garden beds, Common Ground High School rising seniors Cye Gonzalez and Ty’Ion Knight discovered that caring for the land around them also meant learning how to care for their community.

Those on-the-ground lessons came through the students’ work at Common Ground’s Green Jobs Corps (GJC) this summer.

The school’s youth-employment program has combined paid work with environmental education and leadership development since 2010. Knight and Gonzalez are two of 22 GJC summer employees this year.

The program has persisted even after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) abruptly canceled its $500,000 federal grant last year. While the program couldn’t sustain its previous numbers, it was able to run this summer with the help of local partners’ support. The program consists of five different crews this summer, with its farm crew of eight being the biggest group.

This summer GJC ran for four weeks rather than its usual five-to-six weeks due to the funding shift.

The program continued this summer on a smaller scale thanks to private donors and grants from CT DEEP, the Greater New Haven Green Fund, the city’s Youth@Work program, and the Werth Family Foundation. Students worked with New Haven’s Urban Resources Initiative (URI) and Audubon Connecticut as well as theCity of West Haven for work opportunities this summer in addition to maintaining the 358 Springside Ave. campus’s farm and summer camp.

During the program’s final week, Gonzalez and Ty’Ion Knight gave this reporter a tour of the campus farm. This summer was Knight’s first with GJC and Gonzalez’s second summer but fifth season overall, as he’s also worked different seasons during the school year.

The students worked in different areas of the farm harvesting fresh flowers for flower bouquets as well as produce sold through Common Ground’s farm share.

When GJC students arrived for their day of work, they typically signed up for a day’s task listed on a “needs” board kept at the campus’s harvest pavilion or they checked in with the day’s farm manager.  

Each week Gonzalez said the team worked through more than 50 weekly tasks, which were typically done in order of medium and high priorities.

Gonzalez said the work, depending on the task, Gonzalez could be independent or group work. For example, the group spent Tuesdays usually harvesting the farm’s beans as a team.

Gonzalez said that the farm always offered something new to learn for him and his peers. He learned things like paying attention to detail while also balancing being efficient.

He added that depending on the crop, he and his peers learned when heavy, tedious weeding is needed versus more simple weeding that can be done with a single tool.

“We are constantly learning what type of work style to use for each crop and task,” Gonzalez said.

For tasks like mucking, Knight and Gonzalez said they learned the proper ways to lift and move heavy things like shovels full of compost and soil. Knight said mucking is the biggest challenge for him because of the intense labor it requires. “I’m a lot better now than when I first started,” he recalled.

Another major lesson for Gonzalez learned was to stay properly hydrated while working on the farm. He said he often filled his water bottle at least three times a day. “I’m more in tune with my body because it’s also learning when I need to take breaks,” Gonzalez said.

From learning the different ways to harvest cherry and heirloom tomatoes to the impacts of having two of the three sisters plants, corn and squash, the GJC workers worked daily during the week to keep Common Ground’s food supply thriving.

Common Ground’s farm has grown and shared more than 12,000 pounds of food this year, and turned more than 100,000 pounds of waste into compost.

The crew also worked this summer through unpredictable challenges like bad air quality and heavy rain. When those occasions arose the team would move work indoors.

“There’s always something you can do sitting or standing,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez added that climate change-induced weather changes helped the crew learn more about farming, like that weeding in wet conditions should be avoided. Gonzalez also said that he’s learned about pest-control methods as well during very wet seasons.

The crew planted native trees like Red Bud trees while learning through weekly workshops about native plants and trees.

While Gonzalez learned from GJC that weeds are something to remove from gardens, he also learned that a weed — known as “white man’s footsteps” — also has anti-inflammation properties. When bitten by a bug while working, Gonzalez used that same weed to sooth his bite.

“It’s like a bigger lesson that when we remove things it does not inherently mean they’re bad, it just means it’s in the wrong home,” he said.

Gonzalez noted that attending Common Ground has taught him how to be an advocate and active in his community. “It wasn’t until coming here that I realized how much I care about being able to know the people around me,” he said.

Thanks to GJC, Gonzalez said he no longer looks at insects and invasive weeds as “gross or useless” but instead as “a living being that has purpose.”

During Gonzalez’s sophomore and junior year, he considered being a farmer. Then he took an AP (advanced placement) government and politics course that sparked his interest instead in helping the community with this newfound voice and advocacy.

During the course Gonzalez looked at business monopolies compared to the business of Common Ground, which he explained as “not fighting our competitors to be the best” but rather “fighting to make the farm better to help more and more people.”

Gonzalez now hopes to be a labor lawyer or work with a nonprofit to help build environmentally sustainable structures.

Rising junior Jeremiah Ellervee-Dennie worked with GJC again this summer, but his role was as a camp counselor with 4-6 year olds in the Common Ground Summer Ecology Camp.

Through this work, he’s rediscovered his interest in teaching, a career he’s been considering since seventh grade. While originally inspired by his art and music teachers growing up, he said last week that being a summer counselor has reminded him that he enjoys practicing patience and creative problem solving.

“I teach them but they also teach me,” he said, recalling when he learned last year how to play several card games from his campers.

He added that this summer he found himself making use of the many skills he learned during the school year at Common Ground. From frog catching and peer mediation to using geometry for dungeons and dragons, Ellervee-Dennie is now passing lessons learned on to the youth he works with.

Open farm day also sparked his interest in relationship building. Open farm days are hosted on Saturdays for New Haven families to learn more about farming and the campus’s offerings. He now has families that attended that listened to his recommendations to enroll their youth in summer camp or start composting at home.

Despite the abrupt funding cut last year, Common Ground Director of Community Impact & Engagement Joel Tolman said GJC remains committed to its mission to provide youth with community-based initiatives and job-development opportunities thanks to its partnerships with local partners like City Seed, URI, the Regional Water Authority, and Save the Sound.

While in the past GJC hosted 40-50 students each summer, Tolman said this summer still remains a success, as he said he’s grateful GJC could hire 25-30 students each season.

Previously GJC had 71 students on the payroll. The program pays students its local partnership funding and project opportunities.

Tolman concluded that GJC will continue to work to achieve three goals: helping young people grow into confident leaders; providing paying jobs for youth to invest in their and their families’ needs; and showing youth how to make New Haven a better place by planting native trees, composting, and farming thousands of pounds of food.

“We are continuing and committed to seeing what young people can step up to,” he said.

Common Ground seniors Cye Gonzalez and Ty’Ion Knight during a recent farm tour.