Community (Supported) Garden Scholar

Community-supported agriculture is where people provide a farmer with up-front support for their seeds, supplies, and labor, and in exchange, receive a bounty of locally-grown produce when it's harvested. I'm using this concept to get myself through the last phase of my doctoral program, only instead of supporting a farmer, you're supporting a community garden scholar.

My dissertation is about the relationship of community gardening and social identity. Drawing on ten years' experience in local food system efforts involving hunger, resilience, and community-institutional partnerships, I am contributing a new voice to scholarship that will challenge the boundaries of not only what we know about these issues, but how we go about knowing them. I'm building a collection of narratives that demonstrates how lived experiences can provide lenses to explore the cultural context of food systems, and in some ways, critique it.

It is about connecting the individual with the social, the personal with the political; it is about who we are and who we become through the act of growing food.

The outcome of this fund raiser is a community-supported garden scholar, which means the research and writing to produce a published dissertation so that I can finish my program and secure a position that will enable me not only to feed my family and community but also empower others to do the same.

Jess