In its initial form, the upcoming Community-Supported Sustainable Agriculture Symposium would only have lasted one day, but with speakers coming all the way from Missouri, Kira Kirk ’18 decided to expand it from Feb. 22 to 25. Kirk completed her career-funded internship at the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture in Columbia, Missouri and found the experience highly beneficial, claiming: “[CCUA] changed my life…It was the first time that I had a job that I liked.” In an attempt to expand her life-changing experience into a project of greater public influence, Kirk decided to organize an event open to members of the public interested in learning about community activism and sustainable agriculture.
Kirk first began to think about bringing the keynote speakers to Connecticut College during the Fall 2017 semester, when she attended two conferences for her independent study. When Kirk attended the 7th Annual Black Urban Gardeners conference in Atlanta, Georgia, she encountered keynote speakers Trish Woolbright and Matthew Dolan also in attendance, and she thought, “Why not bring them here?” Dolan is an AmeriCorps Opportunity Gardens Associate and has a passion for teaching refugees to feed themselves and their families through agriculture. Woolbright is the Opportunity Garden Manager who works to “enhance the community health by connecting people to agriculture and the land through hands-in learning opportunities,” Kirk put it.
Kirk initially planned the symposium as a one-day event, but the expansion into a four-day series offered more programming opportunities. Thus, Kirk began to plan the rest of the days, including a New London community tour, a composting workshop, and multiple community meals with speakers. One featured event will be a “chicken happy hour” on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 10 am where Sprout Garden will let the chickens out for Conn students to be able to play with them. Kirk says that the process for putting together the symposium was relatively easy, despite having to do most of the work and planning around it, because she knew that she had support on campus. She split up the budget among different staff, faculty, and centers on campus in order to be granted the needed amount in the end.
Last Thursday, SGA voted in favor of funding the Community Supported Sustainable Agriculture Symposium. Kirk will use the $3,500 to fly speakers in from other parts of the country and the world to speak about community support in sustainable farming. The funding comes from the Sustainable Projects Fund (SPF), which has $40,000 to spend each year to support student initiatives like Kirk’s symposium. However, despite the large budget for SPF, some projects with good potential are not funded due to either skepticism from the student body or push back from the administration.
Another issue with the SPF is the lack of projects being proposed, especially by younger students. According to Lera Shynkarova ’20, the Chair of Sustainability, all of the projects proposed this year have been from seniors. She feels that there is “a common misconception when we are talking about sustainability, people always think that it is something related to [the environment]” which can be discouraging to students who may not have ideas regarding this aspect, “but when you actually think about sustainability, there are three different pillars,” those being environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Therefore, the projects submitted to SPF don’t have to focus entirely on improving the college or the New London community’s impact on the environment, but if a student were to have an idea regarding social or economic equity, it could also be supported by the fund. It is important that as many students as possible propose ideas because the money comes out of students’ tuition. The SPF collects $25 per student, and if the money is not spent, it does not carry over into the next year, but instead is returned to the College. The SPF is, therefore, entirely enrollment-driven and specific to each academic year, so if students want to get the most out of their yearly tuition, they should take advantage of existing sustainable projects or pursue projects of their own.
