Hi everyone! This is Tommy Goulding, from the class of 2024. I am a prospective Comp Lit or History Major looking to pursue a certificate in European Cultural Studies. On campus, I sing for the Chapel Choir and hope to write for the Prince this semester, and in my free time I enjoy reading literature and philosophy, as well as stumbling my way through piano pieces and running. I spent this past summer at Unity Gardens, a non-profit in my hometown with the mission of providing food and green spaces to the most disadvantaged members of our community. Unity Gardens is both a well-maintained seven-acre urban farm and a beautifully cultivated space open to the public, often described by my boss, Sara Stewart, as an “edible park”. Visitors came to our main location (we have 60+ satellite gardens in the area) from all over the city, but especially from the low-income housing nearby, and represented every walk of life. From schoolteachers picking fruit and flowers for students before the school day, to electricians and watchmen after a day on the job, to our homeless visitors, I met hundreds of people this summer coming to use the garden for its free food or simply to spend time in the late evening glow and atmosphere of welcome.
Often people would ask me what the requirements of picking or receiving food from the garden were. I was always proud to tell them that Unity Gardens had no threshold for its visitors, no need to prove worthiness or industriousness to receive the help we could provide. Instead, we worked hard to grow food and create connections that could begin to break the unhealthy cycle of poverty, hunger, and poor diets.
In my daily life at the Garden, I would continually make laps around the seven-acre campus, finding things to do and maintain in the Garden off of a master-list posted in our team groupchat. I would greet and help patrons as they came into the garden, discussing what they were picking, their daily lives, and anything else that might come up. Often these would spill over into longer conversations about the strange COVID months and how people had coped with them, as well as the mission of the garden generally and even how they might contribute to it. These conversations were some of my favorite parts of the job. I would eat lunch under our shaded shelter, next to the free library and the sharing shelf of produce dropped off by local farmers, before returning to an afternoon in the sun. I would finally bike home at the end of the day, tired but glad to have served with an interesting group of people and for the community I love.
