Gloucester FoodCorps

Grace Cherubino

While most kids go to sports camp or band camp, Grace Cherubino attended farm camp at The Farm School in Athol, MA. As a 5th grade camper, she saw first hand where produce, milk and meat came from, and came to understand the connections between all living systems. Her camping experience led to the question: “If we are all connected, then how should humans learn to change their habits to bring health to animals, themselves and the earth?” This question led Grace to join a climate change group in high school, and then spend her gap year before college on Maggie’s Farm in North Orange, MA doing a Practical Farm Training Apprenticeship, where she co-ran the veggie-producing farm with five other student farmers. There, Grace fed livestock, planted and harvested crops, cooked large meals for the farm community, and organized a CSA program and farm stands.
She then attended College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME where she studied Human Ecology while working on the university’s small organic farm. While at COA, Grace traveled to Ecuador and Mexico to study Spanish and work on a permaculture farm (Rio Muchacho in Canoa, Ecuador) and teach kindergartners art (at Musicalia in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico).
This wealth of teaching experience has actively helped her in her FoodCorps mission. Grace serves in Gloucester, MA, where she leads after school programs with The Food Project and meets with local PTOs, school teachers, administrators and community groups to evaluate how to bring more nutrition to Gloucester schools. She also is an integral part of building, maintaining and planning the gardens that are built at her Gloucester schools and other community garden projects.

To read more about Grace and her work as a FoodCorps Service Member, visit: http://thefoodproject.org/blog/2012/3/9/celery-schoolyard

Grace.Cherubino@foodcorps.org

Erin Taylor

Erin Taylor’s passion for healthy and nutritious food started with a report on chocolatier Milton Hershey. Erin, then 10, was impressed by Hershey’s use of chocolate to fund an orphanage and build a community. She decided she wanted to become a confectioner. Since then, she has experimented with all sorts of food (not just the sweet kind), and eventually, her passion for food began to gain social complexity. “As I grew up and saw health and environmental issues underlying many of the world’s problems, I became more committed to and excited about environmental justice,” Erin says. “In college, food emerged for me as the node connecting the passions I had cultivated since fourth grade.” Erin studied Global Health, Nutrition, and the Environment at Tufts, where she first fell in love with food justice. That love has since led her to a sustainable agriculture fellowship in Connecticut, environmental education work in the Boston area, restaurant management, and most recently to the Boston Truck Farm. As she says, healthy sustainable food has become her chocolate.
Erin serves at CitySprouts in Gloucester, where she coordinates a school garden at a local elementary school. She supports teachers in integrating the garden into their curricula and helps make use of the garden for after-school food and nutrition education as well.

Erin.Taylor@foodcorps.org

You can read more about Erin in this article in The Jewish Daily Forward and this one on the AMC Great Kids, Great Outdoors blog.


Sarah Rubin

Sarah Rubin knew she wanted to make change, but wasn’t sure exactly where. “I wanted to immerse myself in activism, but I wasn’t committed to any particular mission,” she says. “I just recognized that there were a lot of problems that needed solving, and I wanted to learn about them.”

Her focus narrowed during her first year in college, when she led the campus Hunger and Homelessness Public Interest Research Group campaign. While working on the campaign, Sarah began reading about factory farming and its connection to food security and nutrition, as well as it degrading effect on the environment. Her focus shifted to sustainable food, and she has been advocating for this cause ever since. She went on to join a student-run food cooperative in which she learned to cook vegetables she hadn’t even known existed for a group of 90 college students, and after graduating, she apprenticed for a season on an organic vegetable farm in Maine. Most recently, spent a year with AmeriCorps developing gardening resources for school kids.

For FoodCorps Sarah serves in Gloucester, MA, where she helps to integrate garden-based learning into the teacher curriculum at a local elementary school. She leads activities in the garden and the classroom, and works with food service staff to promote healthy and adventurous eating.


Sarah.Rubin@foodcorps.org

You can read more about Sarah in this article in The Jewish Daily Forward, this one on the AMC Great Kids, Great Outdoors blog, and this one from The Cape Ann Beacon.