Day 6: Greater Boston Food Bank and Mill City Grows

Today was our last workday in Boston! As the week wrapped up, we visited two community partners we have previously worked with; it was our third day with Greater Boston Food Bank and the second day with Mill City Grows. We all helped out with spring-cleaning and organizing food donations at the food bank to prep for 80 volunteers the next day, and then after lunch, we split up to go to two different locations with Mill City Grows.

One team went to go finish the project we started the previous day at the Decatur Way arch, which involved more planting and mulching. It was nice to see the final product. The other team went to a large, nearly four acre farm and helped water plants, dig trenches, create beds for crops, and plant a lot of sweet potato plants! Cole found a small carrot in the ground because they used to plant carrots where the potatoes were. We accomplished a lot in just one day. 

The weather was unbelievable yet again – sunny in the upper 70s – and we got to try out homemade caramel flavored marshmallows after our final service was completed. They were DELICIOUS! (Crystal was sad she couldn’t eat them because they were made with gelatin). Everyone at Mill City Grows made us feel at home. 

We went to our last celebratory dinner at a vegan Thai food place in downtown Boston and ate great food on the cheap. THE BUBBLE TEA WAS UNBELIEVABLE. Our final reflection was super cute and was centered around what we all thought of each other and our final impressions of the team after a week of service and bonding.

Peace, love, and leafy greens. This trip was so real.

-Crystal and Cole

Day 5: Mill City Grows and Greater Boston Food Bank

This morning we headed to Mill City Grows in Lowell, which was visited by the AB Boston group last year.   The alleyway we were working in was once a hot spot for trouble, drug sales, and drug use.  Someone in the Lowell community said that they saw this place to be an opportunity for people to come together to make this a more enjoyable location.  The land use planners worked on this project because they too recognized that if they changed the alley, the entire neighborhood could change and it could become a place people would want to live.

Today when we walked on the job site the once run-down alley was an 80foot concrete sidewalk with a beautiful arch way above.  The arched sidewalk then led to the back alley that was also freshly cleared and paved.  There were a lot of potted plants, including small grasses, some flowers, and little trees, that the planting team was asked to line the walkway with to make the walk scenically enjoyable.  These plants need water, especially since no one will be there regularly to hydrate them, so an irrigation team helped a leader install a soaker hose system. There was an artist there working with hydrophobic paint that shows up invisibly and when it rains the culturally diverse sea animals she was drawing will appear.  Down the alley way there were large murals that were done by a well-known, local graffiti artist that gave the grey space a lot of color.  The ribbon ceremony for this alley was proposed for next Wednesday, and thanks to our help they believe this deadline is obtainable.

This afternoon we went back to the Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) to take on a new task. We worked in the sorting room and checked all the donations for damages and expired products.  There were two other groups with us today, which were Twitter and some Latter Day Saint Elders, which was really fun and we were extremely productive (despite Kelli -the room manager- jokingly throwing his fake mice in people's sorting bins). With the collective 20,860 pounds of food we sorted, the remaining donations will now be sorted on the conveyer belt before distribution to the community.  Today was a lot of fun with beautiful weather, and we're looking forward to working with both of these organizations again tomorrow.

-Candice and Elizabeth

Day 4: Revision Urban Farm & Beach

Day four of our service started with Revision Urban Farm. We had previously worked on this farm on day three of our service and were going to finish where we left off. The group was split into two. One half worked on finished weeding, and digging beds in their much larger farm while the other half focused on planting seeds to be germinated in their greenhouse. Crystal really enjoyed working with the group of single mothers which lived across from their farm. Arion, who was interested in learning the beginning stages of growing stayed with the other half. He really liked mixing and creating a moist soil for the seeds to be bedded into. James was fond of digging and creating the beds for the plants to be put into.
The other half of our day was spent relaxing at Carson beach which was not too far from Revision Urban Farm. We ate lunch and spent a lot of time digging up clay from the shore line. Arion even took some home. This was refreshing considering the weather was in the high 80's. After the beach we spent the rest of the day venturing through the center of Boston. We watched street performers, visited comic book stores, and walking along their famous freedom trail to Bunker Hill.
The last part of our day was spent reflecting. We each wrote three questions and passed them around in a hat for everyone to answer. This was a strong team building exercise, so much so that we decided to choose the two most popular questions for everyone to answer. Some of the group members took the conversation to the roof and others went to sleep. All in all yesterday was an awesome day!

-Arion, James, and Crystal

Day 3: ReVision Urban Farm and Greater Boston Food Bank

Today, we had our first of multiple days with both Revision Urban Farm and Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB). We started our morning volunteering at the former non-profit organization. Revision Urban Farm is a community based urban agriculture project that works with a ReVision Family Home, a women's shelter. They had a couple plots of land. The first one we went to was across the street from the shelter where there was a greenhouse full of seedlings. After that, we went to a larger plot a couple blocks away where we had a lot of work to do to begin their new planting season. On the field, we created rows of bed to be able to plant. We are looking forward to going back this week to continue our work and see our progress.

For the second part of the day, we visited the GBFB which serves all of Massachusetts and is the largest hunger-relief organization in New England.  It was huge!  Neither of us had ever seen such a large scale food bank operation, it was impressive.  We weren't entirely sure what we would be doing here, but some of us expected to be directly serving people from the community.  However, we realized that GBFB acquires, stores, organizes, and distributes food for a number of much smaller scale, local food pantries. Our task was to sort all kinds of various food items into categories to be boxed and distributed.  This was an interesting and fun experience.  Each person was responsible for a category and stood at a designated post around a huge conveyor belt, grabbing their items quickly and carefully off the belt.  The man in charge enthusiastically directed us on the detailed categorization of the items; he had it down to a science.  His approach was entertaining, but was clearly important to the proper sorting of the items.  We look forward to working with GBFB again.

-Amanda and Eda

Day 2: New Lands Farm and The Daily Table

Today, Monday, we went to the New Lands Farm in Sutton.  This farm is interesting and unique in that it provides plots of land at a subsidized cost to “New Americans,” recent immigrants and refugees from around the world. These people farm produce native to their homelands, which lets them continue the activities that they relied on back home. They use the crops they harvest to sell as supplemental income, and to help feed their families. The farm also provides a sense of community for the families. They can get to know other recent immigrants and refugees, and adapt to their new lives together. We helped weed raspberry plants and mulch. We also got a chance to speak with some of the families with plots. The farmers were really helpful in answering our questions and we got some cool insight on what the farm means to them. Many of the people said that they were farmers in their homelands, and it was nice for them to be able to continue farming in Massachusetts, since it’s such an integral piece of their identities.

            After the farm, we drove to the Daily Table. The Daily Table is a grocery store in Worchester that is working to help serve communities facing food insecurity. It was an amazing place to visit. The store is so cool: it’s a nonprofit retail store, so they sell food but are also a nonprofit organization. The store was created by one of the founders of Trader Joes. The goal is to provide healthy and nutritious food at a low cost. We all thought this was such a cool concept, because unlike normal food banks they’re working to provide nutritional food.  Since it’s a store and the customers still pay for their food, they’re also trying to help people keep their dignity and reduce the stigma that they might feel at accepting charity. Because of this, the store encourages people from diverse backgrounds to shop there, so it does not feel like a “poor people’s store.” We asked a lot of questions about their plans to expand because we thought it seemed like such a great way to address food insecurity and the issue of junk food being cheaper than nutritional food. They said that they have plans to open another store soon.

            We’re excited about tomorrow, when we’ll be volunteering at the Greater Boston Food Bank and visiting a farm outside the city!

-Cole, Felisha, and Briony

Day 1: Dairy Farm

Today, we spent the morning and early afternoon at Great Brook Farm State Park in Carlisle, Massachusetts. An educational interactive fully-functional for-profit dairy operation, the farm combined a classic New England agrarian landscape with cutting-edge robotics technology for the milking process. On a guided tour, we learned about stages in the cows' development in relation to the output of the farm, as well as ethics of animal agriculture, technicalities of the organic label, locally-sourced food products, and public field educational programs.
We got to meet some of the calves, steers, and heifers, and observe all farm operations firsthand along the way. While we got a pretty in-depth look at input into the local food system today, we're looking forward to seeing the impact and human and labor issues of these processes in the city of Boston later in the week, starting tomorrow with immigrant farm worker communities.

-Meg and Casey