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