In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Food as MedicineVermont Youth Grow Food for the Hungry
  • Alexis Lathem (bio)

When i join the farm crew on a late morning in midsummer, they are just finishing up the day’s squash and cucumber harvest. Crew leader Jeremy Schleining, dressed in Carhartts and a ball cap, is standing between the rows of sprawling waist-high zucchini plants that have become so prolific they seem to grow right before my eyes. I can hear the voices of the harvesters, who are crouched down between the rows, drifting softly in the air with the sweet fragrances of summer.

“Everyone!” Schleining calls out gently. “We’re going to wash-pack now.”

The harvesters appear as they stand, dressed in their Vermont Youth Conservation Corps uniforms—short-sleeved green button-down shirts with a VYCC patch over the shoulder—lifting totes full of vegetables to be hauled to the far end of the row and onto an old pickup. I follow behind a Nepali girl named Anjou, who wears sandals, her arms adorned with bangles.

The first indication that this is no ordinary organic farm are those green shirts. Modelled after FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the Depression era, the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps is an educational and conservation program, and like its predecessor, VYCC is dedicated as much to healing bodies and spirits as it is to repairing abused soils and degraded forests. At the farm at VYCC, the principle of food as medicine is in operation, in more ways than one.

The nine members of the VYCC farm crew, who are between fifteen and eighteen years old, are hired to work on the farm through the Labor Department’s Workforce Investment Act. The farm crew and their mentors—apprentices in their early twenties who live and work on the farm—can claim a sizable share of the thousands of hours of labor that go into growing and packing vegetables for some three hundred farm shares every week for twelve weeks. Almost all of this food is distributed free of charge to families who would otherwise have no access to fresh local produce. Cooking and nutrition classes are included.


Click for larger view
View full resolution

The Vermont Youth Conservation Corps (VYCC) provides employment, leadership training, and mentoring to at-risk youth. Farm Crew Leader Jeremy Schleining (left, foreground), with summer farm crew members (left to right) Olivia Camp-Allen, Sumitra Acharya, Joe Preston, Ethan Spier, Tracy Streeter, Stephanie Bartlett, Khada Acharya.

Caelan Keenan

A Holistic Approach to Food, Work, and Health

In a unique partnership with area hospitals called Health Care Shares, the farm at VYCC offers weekly farm shares throughout the growing season to income-eligible patients who have been selected by their physicians. In both 2013 and 2014, the farm delivered over 50,000 pounds of organically raised produce, and the occasional pasture-raised chicken, to poorly nourished Vermonters, while providing meaningful full-time employment to at-risk youth. Most of the crew are working their first jobs, and will leave here, says Schleining, “with a solid job experience on their resumes—and a reference.”

I walk back to the wash station with Bruce, an eighteen-year-old with light blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, who is working his second season on the farm. To be eligible for a job on the crew through the WIA program, applicants must be economically disadvantaged and must have at least one other “barrier to employment”: either they have a disability, are homeless, or are in foster care. Bruce (who asked me to withhold his last name) would qualify for at least three risk factors, although since he turned eighteen he is no longer a legal ward of the state. He was about ten years old, he tells me, when he first went into Department of Children and Families custody. It wasn’t until two years ago that he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, inflicted by his birth father, who smashed his head against a cement floor when he was a small child.

“I finally spoke up about the abuse that was going on,” he explained, regarding his injury. “I had no choice.”

As we walk...

pdf

Share