TogetherGreen

This year, one of the PFP’s full season interns, Irene HongPing Shen, comes to us with a fellowship through the TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Program. TogetherGreen is an Audubon program funded by Toyota that selects 40 fellows a year to inspire communities to improve the health of our environment through conservation action projects. The focus of Irene’s TogetherGreen project is on the connections between climate change and food, a good fit for the PFP’s mission of growing food for local communities using environmentally sustainable practices.
Irene’s TogetherGreen project began in Brooklyn, New York, where she created a curriculum to teach students at the public high school, Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, about the topic of climate change and food. When she moved upstate to intern with the farm crew at the PFP, she decided to spend the rest of her fellowship award with the PFP, expanding her curriculum into three workshops for groups of young people visiting the PFP throughout the season.
During the spring, she facilitated interactive activities, discussions, cooking and eating local food with students from Oakwood Friends School and urban youth from Beacon that gave the teens opportunities to think about and experience the issue from different angles. Summer plans include working with urban youth from both Poughkeepsie and Beacon (participating in the Rooting for Change and Green Teen programs, respectively). The staff at the PFP will also be trained on the workshop content so that the curriculum can be taught by others.
Irene reflected on completing her fellowship at the PFP: “The PFP is a wonderful model of food production and distribution that keeps energy usage at a minimum all along the food production chain. Because we grow food for local communities in the Mid-Hudson Valley and we grow our crops naturally – without chemical pesticides and herbicides – we are able to keep the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change at a minimum. The farm is a great learning tool for all visitors to understand important relationships between climate change and food. People can actually see how a system of food production works with energy conservation practices.”
We are happy that through Irene's TogetherGreen fellowship, teen visitors to the PFP from the Mid-Hudson Valley will gain more awareness about being energy conservationists by choosing locally and naturally grown foods when accessible. For more information on Irene's TogetherGreen project, go to: http://togethergreen.org/People/FellowDetails.aspx?fellowID=78 or for more information on TogetherGreen, go to: http://togethergreen.org

Irene leads a group of teens in an activity to visually represent the distance different food sources travel to reach our plates.