On a recent winter Monday in the meeting room of a local church, the farmers in the Refugee Agricultural Program of Middle Tennessee stood under fluorescent light rather than rays of sunshine. But with their training task of the day choosing seeds for planting, the room buzzed with the energy of hope and promise for a new season.

In the cooler months when the gardens offer more brown patches than green, growth continues in the form of preparation, training and relationship building. But beyond learning ways to market and work together—and hearing how the growing seasons differ in Tennessee than their native countries—the trainings help make deeper connections.

Participants build stronger relationships with one another; they learn with neighbors and members of their community and with other communities through selling their food.

“Sometimes farmers come to us with other issues that they are facing in life, such as the complicated nature of obtaining citizenship,” says Lauren Bailey, the Agricultural Programs Director at Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. “In these moments, we’re faced with the opportunity to listen and to find ways to connect and advocate with our farmers. As our relationships grow, our understanding of our farmers’ lives grows.”

In March, the trainings move outside to the one-and-a-half acre Market Garden off Haywood Lane.

 

Each of the 11 farmers in the Refugee Agricultural Program’s Market Garden will have a plot measuring 12 feet by 120 feet (and 24 feet by 120 feet for second-year farmers).

The communal activity of growing food together hopefully helps participants assimilate to life here more naturally.

“Growing food brings us into contact with the earth we all share, with the traditions of agriculture that have kept our species alive, and spirit of abundance that pervades all well-cared for gardens,” says Christina Bentrup of The Nashville Food Project, CRIT’s partner in the Refugee Agricultural Program. “Participants build stronger relationships with each other, with the physical land, with neighbors and members of their community and with other communities through selling their food.”

Indeed, the farmers will be raising crops for their families and communities. But this year, they also will sell to restaurants, and they will offer their produce for purchase at a local farmers’ market. From this foundation of growing with the seasons, farmers can build upon their lives here to thrive even more independently.

“In five to ten years, our hope is that Nashville will be bustling with more community gardens made up of many different nationalities,” Lauren says. “We recognize the need for adapted resources to meet community members where they are and the need for land access. So really, our aim is to provide this for a small number of interested community members in hopes to strengthen this access for future community members.”

I’m Jessica and I’m the intern. I love cross-cultural agricultural development as a sustainable way to engage multiple cultures, needs, and skills for good. After two summers in East Africa I decided that I wanted to get some hands on experience with development in Nashville, my hometown. Thanks to a quick Google search I found CRIT, loved what they were doing, and asked if they would be interested in taking on an intern. I convinced them to say yes, so I’ve been learning and working alongside them ever since. Every day is an opportunity to learn how to use a new tool to grow a new plant in a new way for a new purpose. Beyond that I have developed a new appreciation for the value of food, the value of partnership, and the value of home.

 

The Value of Food

 Y’all – this gardening stuff is no joke. It is hard. As a college student I have spent many hours in the grocery store thinking, “Wowza, that’s an expensive apple!” Now I look at the greens that the CRIT gardeners are selling and think, “They shouldn’t charge a cent under $100 per leaf.” Growing healthy and sustainable food takes so much time, effort, sweat, dirt, and occasionally blood. And who knows when you could lose it all to a beetle! In a society that often feels separated from agrarian life it is easy to get a false sense of the worth of our food. Going to the garden to pull weeds, prepare soil, seed new plants, twine tomatoes, pull weeds, dig holes, squish bugs, mulch raised beds, pull weeds, and watch the other gardeners do the same and more has helped me to see food as a worthwhile investment in my health and community rather than an incessant expenditure.

 

The Value of Partnership

Partnership in the development sphere is often easier to talk about than it is to practice, but the CRIT gardens have shown me an incredible image of what partnership should look like. CRIT offers land and training to refugees who have recently moved to Nashville and in turn these people diligently work to grow food that strengthens their family, stimulates the local economy, and benefits Nashville restaurants with sustainable and healthy foods. Even people who can barely speak English are enabled to positively impact their new community with the resources that the community offers. From exotic foods sold to local restaurants to resourceful ideas on how to trellis tomatoes to sharing a laugh about how hot it is in the garden, everyone involved is empowered to learn, share, and grow.

 

The Value of Home

When I started looking for something to do this summer I had just one qualification: it had to be at home. After spending several summers away it has been so great to spend time with my friends and family. The saying still holds true: there’s no place like home. But finding home is not so simple for a refugee who has been forcibly removed from their home. That’s why these gardens exist. They’re pieces of Burma and Nepal. They’re places where refugees can go out and farm like they did at home, grow bitter gourds and noodle beans like they did at home, speak like they did at home, and build community like they did at home. The CRIT gardens aren’t mere income generators or a means of integrating cultures. The gardens are a place for people to come home.

By Claire Cooper
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. – Theodore Roosevelt

When I decided to move back to the United States after living abroad for three years, I was skeptical that my passion for cultural exploration, foreign language, ESL teaching, and diverse empowerment work could be satisfied by employment I’d find in America. While abroad, I’d developed these passions into skills – developing communication, teaching, mentoring, and entrepreneurial skills for a cross-cultural environment – and I didn’t want to allow them to fade.
Thus, I was thrilled to have to opportunity to join the Refugee and Immigrant Student Empowerment afterschool program and the Center for Refugees and Immigrants Tennessee as a 2014-2015 AmeriCorps member. Through this position I’ve been able to continue to teach and mentor students, support empowerments activities, and learn about the vast cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of the student body in Metro Nashville Public Schools.

 
Students in the RISE program range from second-generation immigrants from Mexico to newly resettled Somali and Karen refugees. The needs of the at-risk youth in our program are diverse and unique due to their international backgrounds. Thus, while our program has naturally sought to support them in English language acquisition and academic achievement, we’ve also striven to support development of their cross-cultural adaptability, personal resiliency and self-direction, and physical and emotional health.

 
Now, my service is coming to a close, and next year I will pursue my international and community development interests through continued studies in a Masters of Public Health in Global Health/Epidemiology at Vanderbilt University.

 
As I’ve reflect on how my year with AmeriCorps has changed my professional and personal aims, I’ve realized that my concept of what improving the health of the global community looks like has broadened and deepened. For one, I no longer feel that I must work internationally to be of service to high-need, culturally diverse communities. There is much work yet to be done at home. Secondly, I more deeply understand how complex public health concerns are - neither confined by national borders, nor constrained to medical concerns, extending instead to systematic justice issues like education inequality and violence.

 
Going forward, I will always keep in mind what I’ve learned from my students, AmeriCorps supervisor, and my co-members: that were are a wealth of ways one can meet global needs with what we have, where we are.

 

 

 

 

 

by Ellen Larson, RISE Site Coordinator

Our RISE students at McMurray Middle School saw January bring students’ favorite enhancements from last semester and also new enhancements. Enhancement follows our academic period and involves members from the community or RISE staff teaching our students new skills, from photography to sports. As a site coordinator, I think what makes our program so great is that students have a genuinely good time and see the RISE afterschool program as a positive part of their day. One day, as I drove home some of our Iraqi students, they explained to me, in broken English, what school was like in Iraq: “There no good. Here, good,” the student said. Many of our students have already had traumatic life stories, and I consider RISE successful because students enjoy coming to RISE.

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by Sarah Risely, Assistant Program Director

Reflecting on last season as we prepare for this season!

It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and you can already smell the sticky August heat—today is going to be another hot one. Like clockwork everyone drives up and parks or strolls in across the field, armed with sunhats to beat the heat and laundry baskets for harvesting. Morning greetings come in English and Burmese, and then everyone gets to work.

We start our day by walking among the rows of roselle, bitter gourd, mustard, and long beans—hunting for (and squishing) pests and making plans for daily projects. Lifting up a row cover, Lu Lu spots tiny green sprouts and shouts out “Look! Oh look they grew!” Ree Lay and Than Tin valiantly yank out Bermuda grass, while Mu Mu cuts mustards and discovers a softball-sized watermelon beneath the leaves—“We will wait until Wednesday to harvest,” she says. In the next plot Ma Ree Yar skillfully sharpens bamboo into trellises and then cuts a bunch of zinnias to bring home to her daughter.

      

This garden is a special place. The gardeners are a long way from home: refugees from Burma who have arrived at this piece of earth thanks to the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee, but more importantly thanks to their own love for growing and a desire to begin again in a new place. The garden is a place for them to come and be with friends and to share with their families and children. Refugees can make a big impact on their own families and communities by bringing fresh produce to the table, while at the same time strengthening their own health and wellbeing. In the often tumultuous and challenging time of resettlement, the garden is a place of consistency and growth.

With the heat we all rest in the shade of the two willow trees on the property. Removing hats and wiping shining brows, the gardeners talk about their day and sort through the fruits from their garden plots. “I am going to make kimchi!” exclaims Ja Sam.  Saying goodbye, they help each other load up and then drive off with baskets of fresh vegetables to take home and share with family and friends.

 

 

by Claire Cooper

In my AmeriCorps position with the Center for Refugees and Immigrants Tennessee, I enjoy the opportunity to mentor and tutor students in the Refugee and Immigrant Student Enrichment afterschool program at Apollo Middle School. Our students come from diverse national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Through my role as an AmeriCorps member, I support our students as they complete language and math related activities, their homework assignments, and a variety of enhancement activities such as art, cooking, sports, and music making.

For me, the most enjoyable moments usually come during our “book club days,” on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when my group of young ladies delve into reading Lois Lowry’s Gathering Blue. To begin with, students were responsible for brainstorming book options for the club and then they had to democratically narrow down the list. This small initial step of providing students more autonomy and an opportunity to direct their learning during RISE – an opportunity that is rare in the larger classrooms of the school-day - has clearly led to an increased and sustained excitement for this part of the day. Though we have been reading the story together for over a month, the students’ interest in the story and their investment in analyzing the book has only increased. The students initiate and sustain active discussions regarding the motivations of the characters and value differences evident in the dystopian world of the book, and they work together to evaluate the text. I’ve also been impressed by the way the students in lower grades strive to persevere reading the text that is above their level – something they may not be reliably exposed to elsewhere.

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Since the school year started, we have been learning so much together at RISE Stonebrook. The students at Stonebrook are an energetic bunch to say the least, always inquisitive, motivated to learn and to help one another. Together we have been exploring so many new things and have been having a great time doing it!

During our group academic time, students have been mastering their math skills with card games, math Jenga, and word problem games. To grow our vocabulary, students have been playing Scattergories. Just last week, students laughed as they read Diary of a Wimpy Kid together, and reflected on how they can relate in their journals.

During our enhancement time, the students have had the opportunity to explore their talents through a variety of lenses. Students at Stonebrook have captured images of things they love in photography, learned about teamwork, agility and endurance in soccer, learned about stress-relief and relaxation in yoga, and reflected on the meaning of imagery in music videos. Recently in their songwriting workshop, students wrote a song together about celebrating differences. It goes a little something like this, “Let’s have a celebration, let’s have a conversation. whether we’re near or far… Let’s have a celebration, let’s have a conversation, this is the story of who we are! The story never ends….”

Just last weekend we had the opportunity to explore the outdoors on a field trip to Long Hunter State Park hosted with Great Outdoors University! Students were excited to learn about edible plants, the ecosystem, and the life of a park ranger, not to mention enjoying fire-roasted marshmallows in s’mores!

 

#NAZA #AmeriCorps #VolunteerTn #MNAC

 

      

 

We have had a great beginning of the year at RISE Apollo. Our classroom is always full of energy, and with that we have already learned many new skills and have had so much fun doing it!

During our group academic time, we have been busy with book club on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The students loved discovering the goofy poetry of Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. Now we have broken into smaller groups and are busy reading novels. On Mondays and Wednesdays, we hold math competitions. The students love playing relay races, jeopardy, and they learn and improve important math skills at the same time.

During our enhancement time, the students have enjoyed trying out many new skills. This past week, we cooked and ate delicious food from all over the world and learned about the important role food plays in our shared experiences.

Each Monday we start off our week with soccer, something the students are always excited about! This past week we challenged PACE, another NAZA program, to a friendly match on the field. It was tons of fun as the students worked as a team and roused up their RISE spirit!  #NAZA #artembrace #AmeriCorps #VolunteerTn

By Zoe Yim, Social Media Intern

We left the Nashville Public Library Tuesday, July 22, 2014, but instead of going directly home, I dropped off a few members of the elder program. The intern just became a soccer mom.

Thus, I had to ask Grant Yoder, elder program director, the elder’s choices of transportation in order to come to Hillcrest Methodist.

Here’s what I learned about these immigrant elders. Several walk. Talk about dedication.

In order to foster community interaction, CRIT host field trips through the elder program. Since immigrants have more difficulty interacting outside their own subcultures, these program are a chance to practice English and also experience the dominating in Tennessee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In CRIT’s elder program, we serve refugees or asylees ages 60 and older.  This summer, we have had 10 regular participants. They come to Hillcrest Methodist Monday- Thursday to learn English from 8:00 a.m. to 11 a.m.

 

Partnering with the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, a volunteer teaches the program members for four hours.

 

This program has three major components.

• ESL classes
• Citizenship classes
• Enhancement

- a period during the scheduled program which helps the individual with physical, mental and emotional health.

 

 

 
 
 
By Zoe Yim, Social Media Intern

By Zoe Yim, Social Media Intern

A green chaos before my eyes, last Friday, I felt overwhelmed by what seemed to be a micro-jungle at Wedgewood Gardens. But to some, it appears that this greenery is more like an organized pattern of abundance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Look tomato!” calls Christina Bentrup, garden coordinator for Nashville Food project.

Eggplant, tomato, squash, red noodle bean, and - the plant that gardeners were most excited about – bitter gourd are ready to pick.

The Nepalese speaking Bhutanese dexterously pick their crops from their designated plots. Carrying plastic and vinyl totes, colorful, lush vegetables go from bush to bag.

It all seems so natural to them. In those moments, when I’m taking pictures of the Nepalese Bhutanese immigrants, I forget that I’m in Nashville, Tennessee. It seems like we could be anywhere – even Nepal.

 

This gardener proudly shows his red noodle beans.

Badri Adhikari hoes the ground before he transfer a tree to this plot.

 

Leela Rai picks her tomatoes.

 

I think it’s symbolic of what we’re trying to do – creating a place that feels like home, says Lauren Bailey, director of agricultural programs.

Many of these gardeners had an agrarian lifestyle before coming to the U.S. Allowing them to build upon the skills that they already have, empowers them.

At the garden off of Blackman Road, refugees from Burma also seem to be at home. This morning, they were looking for pests, making trellises and mulching by layering hay to keep weeds out and moisture in the soil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Zoe Yim, Social Media Intern