At City Farms, I primarily focused on enhancing the nonprofit and outreach capabilities. I ran the social media accounts and was able to accrue more attendance than average to City Farm’s community events. I also updated their website to include new partners and professional photos. I transitioned the organization’s email list from multiple pen and paper documents to an automatic system in Substack, and used it to create a newsletter for the organization that promoted donations. I then consulted people with previous experience to help my boss create an auction that will be conducted after my internship. In addition to outreach and organization, I also helped my boss in multiple garden sites and learned an extraordinary amount about urban agriculture.

As an American Studies and Human Rights major, my degree has given me the skillset to navigate complicated social dynamics with care. City Farm’s work is primarily engaged with communities in food deserts, which are vastly composed of Black and Brown people and have a disproportionately high immigrant population. While a lot of the productive work I did was in online spaces, my day-to-day at City Farms was spent working in gardens in the middle of these communities. My degree has helped me understand the systemic factors that oppress the people I worked with, and in turn helped me avoid paternalistic models of engagement that damage a community’s trust.

During my onboarding, City Farms had just discovered a new location for a Youth Farm. The model for the farm prioritizes Black-led and student-led organization, so it was important that the location be accessible to the student population we were working with. We found a neighborhood that a lot of our students lived in, and established a strong relationship with the social worker there.

The site was perfect, but another agricultural-based organization had just started their own project there. While there was plenty of space for both projects, over time we witnessed this organization fail to involve the community in their decision making and neglect components of their existing project, to the community’s detriment. This organization was already notorious in our city for utilizing Black youth in a way that many found exploitative, so we saw the writing on the wall and unfortunately had to pull out of using that site.

This significantly delayed the progress of the youth farm and required us to quickly rearrange plans. I was given the responsibility of reengaging the social worker at the previous site to inform her of our withdrawal and help her utilize the resources we had already invested to benefit the neighborhood. It was a challenging conversation, but it was ultimately productive because we were both acting in good faith despite the frustrating change in plans.

I discovered that there were far more people engaged in community work in my city than I previously assumed. Our meetings were full of people from a variety of demographics and organizations who all ultimately wanted to solve food access issues in Chattanooga. It made me realize that my pessimism surrounding other people’s willingness to serve their communities was rooted in nihilistic ignorance. It made me wonder how many other causes that I care about are being tackled by my community members without me even being aware of it.

On a practical level, I learned a lot about how to engage a community ethically. I thought I understood how to avoid white saviorism, but once I actually got onto the ground I realized that I was lacking the practical experience to even spot it as it was happening around me. I learned that nice people with good intentions often don’t do enough groundwork to prevent their efforts from harming the communities they’re trying to help. To prevent our work from making similar errors, my boss was adamant that we do nothing without explicit permission and guidance from community leadership. If strong community leadership didn’t exist in the area we were working in, he sent out surveys or advocated for a residential board to be created. As a very small nonprofit, this meant our work was sometimes slow or had to be delayed. However, that is a far better approach to take than the large nonprofits around us did — who do have the resources to do things like community surveys efficiently. They often chose to meet “needs” that did not actually exist in communities, because they followed their assumptions rather than what community voices were saying. While it is a much harder path to take, I now know how and why to advocate for following community leadership in any service initiative I’m involved in.