1. Working together through volunteer work helps to build community among students, teaching them how to replicate that in the future.
2. Helping to grow organic produce for the Food Bank is a window into examining food security and all of the different ways local farms, the city, and the county are addressing hunger in our community.
3. Participating in the volunteer economy teaches that alternatives to corporate capitalism already exist, and offers an opportunity to learn more about how this huge sector of our economy works.
4. Hands-on, physical labor is important learning, and offers an entry point for talking about farm-worker labor and working conditions.
5. Long-term commitment and continuity with community partners has immense value, and helps to build relationships that span beyond the bounds of any one particular program or class, weaving a web of interconnection between the campus and the broader community.

At The Evergreen State College, we teach interdisciplinary programs for up to 16 quarter-hour credits, rather than individual classes. The same students and faculty come together every day, giving us tremendous amounts of time together. This structure offers us the opportunity to build a weekly community-based volunteer session into the schedule. While not every class could build in the same amount of time commitment, any educator at any level could work on developing long-term community partnerships.

As an anthropologist teaching Sustainability Studies, my programs introduce key sustainability and justice concepts. We examine social inequality and structural racism; environmental justice and climate justice; immigration and farmworker justice; food security and local responses including municipal policies that support urban farming; critiques of capitalism, and more. These frameworks offer the context for working in the community garden.

Building relationships with community partners will be more and more critical as the consequences of climate change continue to unfold. Making commitments over years can only help build community resiliency, and make our students more ready to join such efforts beyond their years in school.

At The Evergreen State College, we emphasize hands-on, field-based learning, and we value our relationship with community partners, whom we view as co-educators. We see our work out in neighborhoods and farms, or with community organizations, the city or state offices, as an extension of the campus. Rather than seeing our student internships or class volunteer hours as "service work," we emphasize the partnership that exists between these entities and the college. The students offer something, yes, but they also receive a great deal in terms of training, hands-on learning, connecting with the community, and connecting with one another outside of the classroom. The benefits are multifaceted and multi-directional.

At Evergreen, the majority of these relationships with community partners are fostered and nurtured through the Center for Community Based Learning and Action (or CCBLA at http://evergreen.edu/communitybasedlearning). CCBLA is a portal through which individual students or academic programs can find connections in the community that align with their interests. Many campuses have such offices to help facilitate student work in the community that stretches and deepens the classroom learning.

One of the perennial discussions between CCBLA and community partners is to what degree the college can commit to supplying consistent help. Having students show up for ten weeks one quarter, and not the next, or one year, and not another, means that the available help at an organization is always fluctuating and can never be counted on. The nature of the curriculum at Evergreen is that it is always changing and new programs—interdisciplinary, team-taught immersive experiences that last one to three quarters long—are formed each year. So the faculty are not necessarily teaching the same program or material from year to year.

Even so, I have committed to have whatever class I am teaching work with the Kiwanis Food Bank Gardens for one morning a week every summer during a summer program, and often in spring quarter and/or fall quarter as well. Two hours of work by twenty or so people can be the equivalent of 40 hours of work, which is a significant boost to the work-week at the garden. I have developed a great relationship with Garden Managers Don Leaf and Sue Lundy. Below are some significant learning outcomes from this long-term relationship, which could be considered and applied in similar teaching and learning arrangements.

1. Building Community and Strengthening the Learning Community. Working together off campus toward a common purpose strengthens the learning community and connects us to the broader community around us. At Evergreen, our students are together for one integrated interdisciplinary program rather than separate classes. The learning community model is a hallmark of an Evergreen education, and it is being replicated and adapted on many campuses across the country.

As students spend hours side by side on various projects—whether planting, weeding, building trellises or harvesting--they interact with one another in less formal ways than classroom interactions. Even as they discuss movies, bands, and favorite places to get a burrito, they are weaving threads of connection among themselves that are still present even after we go back to the classroom. This kind of informal interaction between students with one another, and also with garden managers and interns, widens their experience of "school". Community-building becomes a lived demonstration rather than something we talk about hypothetically in the classroom. Inevitably, we engage with others in the broader community: the neighbor grazing her goats, those who run the gleaning program with nearby farms, the person who built the giant biodigester, staff at the Thurston County Food Bank, the preschoolers over the fence, other volunteers, and so on. Being out in community shows students how all these people are interconnected, support one another, and move toward common goals.

2. Addressing hunger and learning concrete skills. In final evaluation conferences, students remark that the farm work stands out as significant to them. Some of them are simply grateful to learn how to plant things, and many have had no prior experience. We are given mini-tutorials by the Garden Managers on laying out and managing drip-flow irrigation, handling and planting small starts, fertilizing, weeding and composting techniques, building trellises, harvesting, and preparing the produce for market. Students learn how to use and care for various hand tools, tillers, and other equipment. They get a glimpse of seasonal garden planning, responsiveness to weather conditions, and prevention and treatment of pests.

I generally take the students to the Food Bank itself for a tour and for some volunteer time there as well. This gives them a chance to see the full circle of where the roughly 30,000 pounds of produce from the garden go, and to learn about how the Food Bank functions and whom it serves (http://thurstoncountyfoodbank.org/). We learn about the vast network of thousands of people and tens of thousands of volunteer hours that make the Food Bank function. We get to understand ourselves as part of that large network, without which the Food Bank would not function. Students learn about the gleaning program, which includes many farms in the area growing extra food to donate to the food bank. We also learn about ways that our local community came together and worked hard to change city ordinances to make growing food in urban spaces more possible.

3. The Volunteer Economy . When we teach sustainability studies, we invariably come up against the highly dysfunctional assumptions associated with corporate capitalism: that infinite growth is somehow possible on a finite planet and that individuals should work hard to succeed in a system that is not set up for everyone to succeed. We also wrestle with the underlying racist and colonial assumptions that some people in the world are more entitled to use up resources and contribute to global warming, while others suffer disproportionately. The structures of capitalism, and the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of it, can seem overwhelming and unwieldy.

Participating in a volunteer economy helps to teach us something about the vast networks at play in every community that support the needs of those without adequate food, housing or income, and those with mental health issues, and the availability of local farmlands and their relationship to the cities they surround. We learn about place, watersheds, natural resources, and ways that communities have partnered to reclaim, restore and protect certain areas such as the Nisqually watershed just up the road from our campus. Simply stepping into one little stream of work as volunteers can give us insight into the vast network of underground springs that support and sustain our local communities and environments in ways that formal government sector simply couldn't on its own.

Students get to extrapolate and consider other ways they contribute to the volunteer economy. Some of my students went on study abroad to Nepal this past winter, and connected with a network of organizations that enabled them to help teach English, assist in programs protecting women and children from trafficking, work in agricultural settings, orphanages and more. Through participating in these activities, they continue to bring important critical questions about connecting local and global needs, their own privilege, opportunistic ways volunteer hours and dollars get exploited, and so on. These critical questions are all part of the learning experience.

4. Somatic Learning and Appreciating Farmworker Realities. Literally digging in with our bodies means that we learn in a different way. Once students handle dozens of cabbage starts, they become aware of how fragile the leaves are, how to support the roots, how to shape a small basin for irrigation around the plant. When repeated over and over, we develop skills and expertise in particular areas. Only by handling tall young tomato starts, do we get a sense of the strength they have and the support they need. The repetition of moving up and down rows doing the same thing over and over means that the learning is embodied. Even as the conversation may range over other things, the hands are repeating and improving on particular skills. Students get a feel for how tools work and how the soil feels. They observe the growth of plants over time, and begin to understand them in terms of conditions needed for healthy development, when and how to harvest, and so on. Getting soaked in the rain, having mud-caked knees and shoes, digging into the soil with their hands all provide a tactile experience that shapes them differently than if they were in a classroom. This particular spring was a long and wet one, and we showed up to the garden for week after week of rainy conditions. This helped us to understand what it's like to adapt the sowing plan and to work around the rain, giving us an up-close sense of what farmers have to go through. Every single session, no matter how chilly, sleepy, and grumpy we felt at the start, after digging in and getting some work done, we always felt better. Many students appreciated getting even this small start of training toward their own personal aspirations of growing more food in the future.

While these small forays into the physical work of gardening are in no way comparable to farmworker experiences of super long hours, difficult working and living conditions, tough pay situations and chemical exposures, I found it gratifying that students talked about how the actual work helped them to relate in some small way to the ethnography Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies , for example and what life in the soil might feel like if it was all day, every day. Anthropologist Seth Holmes is concerned about the physical and mental health consequences of excruciating physical labor such as constant bending over, or creeping along on hands and knees. His ethnography resonates with students when they have had even the smallest physical experience of this kind of labor.

5. Long-term Commitment and Continuity. The fact that I commit to bringing students to the gardens again and again means that a long-term relationship is built. Significantly, new groups of students participate in this work over and over again. I think this experience of knowing they are part of a legacy of student labor at the garden is important: it's not about them, it's about something bigger. Stepping in and offering this little stream of help in the broader rich network of underground springs that fuel the volunteer economy is empowering.

Interestingly, I have noticed the strengthening of my own knowledge and confidence at the gardens. I feel more able to comprehend the work of the day, help offer instruction, select appropriate tools, gauge the pace of the work, and incorporate broader lessons into our learning. I can intervene in moments when students aren't being as safe as they might be, coach on the proper care for tools, and help manage the work in general.

I have developed a strong friendship with garden managers, and we plan together how to best set up the week's work. This unexpected outcome extends my own personal and professional ties to the broader community. The fact that many of the staff at the Food Bank are either members at my same gym, yoga students of mine, or former students stitches our community together more and more. Students get to both witness these ties and build their own. Some even apply to be paid interns at the gardens, gleaner coordinators, or interns at the food bank.

Building Community with Patience and Flexibility. One of the central things that teaching and learning at the gardens has taught me (and our students) is flexibility, and going with the flow of what the day and moment requires. I have learned to let time slow down a bit at the farm. Rather than hustle people into the fields to get after the tasks of the day, we begin by gathering up, sipping our coffee, and joking about the weather. We get to know the farm staff—and even some local animals. This time together is actually community-building time. It affects the quality of the group once we are back in the classroom.

The Value of Reflecting on our Learning. We try to circle up at the beginning and end of each session. With Garden Manager Sue Lundy, we often sum up what we did. If different groups of people were working on different things, we get to hear about and appreciate our collective contribution to the garden that day. At the end of the quarter, we have an appreciation lunch at the garden, and we review the longer list of "what we did," noting the culmination of all of our efforts over time.

Student assessment is based on their own weekly integration and reflection on their learning which takes place through both written form and group discussion. Students also write self-evaluations. My assessment of them is based in part on their attendance and participation in the work at the garden, on how they talk about it in their own reflective writing, and through conversations with staff at the gardens.

http://thurstoncountyfoodbank.org/

Holmes, Seth. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. University of California Press, 2013.