Across all its schools and programs, experiential, hands-on learning is at the heart of an Antioch education. This rings particularly true for the Environmental Studies Department based on Antioch’s New England campus, where food as a form of both sustenance and social justice is at the forefront of academic and community-based action. And it’s perhaps truest of all with Community Garden Connections, an Environmental Studies Department that aims to build and sustain community through food justice and agricultural education.
Community Garden Connections—CGC for short—had humble beginnings in 2010, but over a decade-and-a-half it has grown to a large-scale project that aims to support local organizations by means of agricultural education and the simple act of growing food. At numerous sites across Keene, CGC coordinates the creation of garden beds and assists in planting, harvesting, and donating food. These garden beds and fresh vegetable donations are eaten by folks at assisted living communities, community centers, and even the local YMCA. But it doesn’t end there. When CGC workers aren’t busy helping to create and maintain garden beds across the community, they’re busy tending to Westmoreland Farm, a full-scale vegetable growing farm located in the greater Keene area, as well as a small garden that can be found on the New England campus itself. Here, much of the food grown and harvested is donated to local organizations, including food banks, with hopes of increasing community access to healthy, freshly grown produce.
However, the people most directly impacted by CGC are, doubtless, the student workers who spend their time and labor making CGC what it is. Libby McCann, CGC’s founder and its faculty adviser (she’s Core Faculty in Environmental Studies), says that the student experience was a key part of the CGC design from the start. She explains that from the start she saw CGC as an “immersive experience for students where they could gain practical professional applied learning opportunities.” She continues, “Even if they didn’t go on to do food justice work, they would still know how to do authentic community engagement, how to design programs and workshops, how to do budgets, and how to do evaluations in culturally responsive ways.”
Fifteen years after CGC’s founding, how has that been going? We caught up with seven CGC alumni to hear about their current professional roles within the wider field of environmental studies and food justice. Today, some are in charge of large-scale agricultural organizations, gardens, and community initiatives; others are pursuing their PhDs, studying for advanced certifications, and leaning into the programmatic development involved with agricultural and horticultural pursuits. In their own way, each is doing work characterized by the same fierce dedication to community support and connections that CGC is named for. And one other thing is true for each alum: CGC propelled their professional lives forward, opening new vistas of meaning and service.
name Susan Baron grad year 2012
current location St. Louis, Missouri
current job AIP and Adult Programs Coordinator at Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, a division of the Missouri Botanical Garden
key quote “I don’t really know how to describe my Antioch experience without Community Garden Connections. It was so integrated with my learning, and such a wonderful place for me to practice everything we were talking about in classes.”
Susan Baron ’12 (New England, MS) decided to move from Minneapolis to Keene after an admissions interview with McCann, which she remembers gave her “a confirmation of what I wanted in a program.” When she began studying for her master’s degree in 2010, CGC had not yet launched. It was still mostly an idea, with talks of grant proposals and outlines for community engagement very much in the planning stages. But by her second semester, CGC was officially off and running—and Baron was part of it.
A key moment came when Baron helped install and maintain garden beds at Woodward Home, a local assisted living community in Keene. While some of the residents watched from their windows, curious to see the new garden project, one resident came outside to help students himself. “There was this older man who came out and he was using the power drill and helping us,” remembers Baron. “We were holding everything, but he was going to help, too. And it was just the sweetest thing ever.”
Today, the work experience Baron received from working with CGC serves her well. As the Missouri Botanical Garden’s coordinator for the Advanced Inquiry Program, a Master’s program offered through Miami University, Baron’s job is to create courses that will provide students with hands-on learning opportunities while also benefiting the Garden and the wider St. Louis community. As part of the Garden’s team at Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, Baron also helps manage the volunteer program, and she likes to get her hands in the soil with native plants and habitat restoration when her schedule allows.
Baron credits her time at Antioch and CGC as vital training for her current role. “I have to create programs that are useful for a really broad set of students,” she says, “and I think certainly all of the things that I learned at Antioch and was able to put into practice in my time with CGC were really foundational for me to be able to do what I do today.”
name Tori Dahl Green grad year 2017
current location Minneapolis, Minnesota
current job University of Minnesota’s Student Organic Farm Manager
key quote “I have said over and over, farming has helped me not be so much of a perfectionist. Things are going to die and and things are going to not succeed. It helps you remember that you can’t control everything.”
Baron’s career led her from Antioch to St. Louis, but for Tori Dahl Green ’17 (New England, MS) things went the other way around. After growing up in Minnesota and attending college in California—where she got involved with her school’s local garden initiatives—Dahl Green found herself working on an organic farm in St. Louis. The farm’s manager was an Antioch alum, as were several of the other apprentices. They all spoke highly of the MS in Environmental Studies program, and as Dahl Green says, “I just fell in love with the idea of teaching about farming as a way to have my work extend beyond what I was doing myself.”
Once she enrolled at Antioch, she began working with CGC, and soon she got to do exactly what she had hoped: teach about farming. She co-led composting presentations, ran garden bed preparation workshops, and designed environmental education programs, all while still a student herself.
After graduation, with these experiences under her belt, Dahl Green landed her dream job: serving as a university-based farm manager. She is currently the University of Minnesota’s Student Organic Farm Manager. In this role she has to “be everything,” as she says. This includes managing a team of up to seven, ordering seeds and supplies during the off-season, coordinating volunteers, and overseeing and helping with actual planting and harvesting of crops, among other responsibilities.
Despite her many accomplishments as a farmer-educator, she still feels the burn of an ex-boyfriend’s remark that farming was not a “good enough” career path. “It tore me up for years and years,” she says. But as she’s thought about it, she’s come to think he could hardly be more wrong. “Growing food is the entire basis of our world,” she says. “The core of the entire world is eating.”
name Jennifer Trapani grad year 2017
current location Burlington, Vermont
current job Burlington School District Food Science Coordinator
key quote “I think one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is how important it is to step back once you’ve set things up, so that this garden space can be a gathering space and a community space for the community it’s intended to serve.”
Jennifer Trapani ’17 (New England, MS) came to Antioch with a desire for connection. For undergrad she had attended a large research university, and she craved community to go along with her previous work with scientific experiments and data collection. At Antioch she found this community in part by joining CGC.
One of her projects with CGC was partnering with the Keene Senior Center. While doing this work, she discovered an interest in making agriculture and gardening more accessible to those with limited mobility. Her capstone research focused on interviewing older adults on their lived experiences with community support, the way garden-based activities played into that, and their experiences with the lessons she ran on gardening and agricultural topics.
Stepping back, listening, and promoting autonomy among those she serves is an approach she continues to follow in her current role as the Food Science Coordinator for the Burlington School District. In schools across the district she organizes community garden initiatives, cooking clubs, and nutrition-based lessons. During the warmer months in fall and spring, Trapani leads outdoor projects revolving around each school’s garden, ranging from color identification lessons for young learners to hands-on planting and harvesting of crops for older students. In the winter, she leads nutrition courses around healthy cooking and food education. A proud moment came last school year, when she helped fifth graders across the district develop a curry recipe from scratch: they created the recipe, taste tested, adjusted based on cafeteria standards, and eventually served it on the menu for the entire district.
In the long term, Trapani dreams of creating an intergenerational education model around food and community. One of the Burlington schools is located directly across the street from a nursing home and Trapani wants to find ways to collaborate. One early step is an elementary after-school cooking club that prepares extras to share with local community members and organizations. Trapani hopes to continue bolstering partnerships between schools and elder care facilities in the area. “A lot of what I learned at Antioch and through CGC is directly applicable to the students I’m working with now,” she says. “And I still have a deep desire to get back to older adult populations through the lens of a school.”
name Madison Walter grad year 2018
current location Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
current job Urban Agriculture Coordinator at New Castle Conservation District
key quote “Don’t get me wrong—I still love horticulture, floriculture, botany, and all other ways people engage with our chlorophyllin friends. However, nothing quite tops seeing the positive impact on individuals, communities, and the environment that comes from growing food together.”
Community care is also at the heart of the story of Madison Walter ’18 (New England, MS). Prior to coming to Antioch and working with CGC, Walter had little experience with the cultivation of edible plants; however, her undergraduate degree in landscape architecture had equipped her with knowledge around horticulture, floriculture, and botany. With this foundation, she began to work on CGC’s Westmoreland Farm. That was when she began to see what she describes as “a whole other avenue of career opportunities.”
“I distinctly remember harvesting the first batch of that year’s lettuce,” she says. “That was the moment that things changed for me. It was an early morning, the sun just starting to get some height in the sky, and I picked up my harvest basket, full of romaine, to take it over to the wash station.” She continues, “As I nestled one edge into my hip and started carrying it, I was completely overtaken by the power of what we were doing. I mean, I stopped dead in my tracks. We were helping to feed people. And not only that, we were helping to empower people to take back ownership of their food system.”
Today, Walter is working right at the heart of that realization through a job supporting community and urban farms in northern Delaware, both by means of direct agricultural work and by administrative and programmatic development. She uses the lessons and skills from her coursework and her time with CGC, particularly what she learned about community engagement. As she says, “CGC provided me the opportunity to first recognize the impact of community gardening and community agriculture, and it laid the foundation for what I do today.”
name Rachel Brice grad years 2019 & 2025
current location Walpole, New Hampshire
current job Land For Good Program and Development Director; Doctoral Candidate in Antioch’s PhD in Environmental Studies
key quote “Nothing happens without community relationships. And I think that’s a really important reminder to us that nothing in the world happens without relationships.”
Rachel Brice ’19 (New England, MS) worked as a high school English teacher in Texas for years, but it was when she transitioned into nature-based outdoor education for K-5 students that her professional identity as an educator began to connect with her lifelong interest in gardening. That set her down the path that eventually led her to enroll in Antioch’s MS in Environmental Studies and relocate from Texas to New Hampshire—even though she had never been to New England before. The multifaceted nature of the program made her excited to get started, and this enthusiasm only built once school started and she got to chart her own path through the field. As she explains, “It’s an interdisciplinary program, and so there’s a lot of space for people to really lean into looking at human and natural environments and the ways in which they intersect.”
This spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry served Brice well in her time as a student worker with CGC. She mainly worked as the manager of Westmoreland Farm. Between her work with CGC and her coursework, Brice found herself exploring topics as both an academic student and as a practitioner learning by doing. In Program Planning courses, Brice helped plan and coordinate Keene community member volunteers in helping to build a greenhouse at Westmoreland Farm, directly connecting residents of Keene to the farms and gardens they were consuming food from.
Today, Brice is employed full-time at Land For Good, a Keene-based nonprofit dedicated to farmland access. Here, she is responsible for fundraising, development, and securing grant funds. She also maintains her own home gardening practice and finds time to volunteer with several organizations in the greater Keene area. She’s also been back at Antioch, this time for a PhD in Environmental Studies. She will graduate in May, 2025. Her dissertation research explored the resilience of food sovereignty organizations in the northeast—once again a research topic informed by her work experience.
name Ximena Gallegos Gutierrez grad year 2023
current location Seattle, Washington
current job Student in the PhD in Learning Science and Human Development at the University of Washington; Research Assistant at the University of Washington’s Institute for Science and Mathematics Education
key quote “My passion for life-changing initiatives guides me to seek knowledge and foster real change in the world around me.”
Ximena Gallegos Gutierrez ’23 (New England, MS) similarly came to Antioch to, as she says, “embrace the interdisciplinary nature of its programs, where academic exploration meets the tapestry of a diverse human community.” One of the ways she achieved this was by working at CGC. CGC demonstrated for her how organizations, no matter how small, can have big effects on the lives of families and community members. “I’ve had the incredible opportunity to witness firsthand the profound impact that grassroots organizations can have,” she says. “This experience has deepened my commitment to bridge theory and practice, fueling my passion for life-changing initiatives.”
Gallegos Gutierrez moved from Arequipa, Peru, to Keene, NH, on a Fulbright scholarship for graduate studies. Her drive to bridge together theory and practice continues to propel her forward. Today, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington, and at the same time, she is working as a research assistant on instructional design in science education, climate change education, and teacher development. Last summer she traveled to Peru to run an experiential teacher workshop that explored the teachers’ relationships with the land and how they impact their instruction. In her professional path, Gallegos Gutierrez draws on her time coordinating CGC initiatives.
name Lea Kablik grad year 2021
current location Keene, New Hampshire
current job Community Garden Coordinator at Keene Housing
key quote “I ultimately chose Antioch because it just felt like the best fit for me. I liked how small the campus was and how personable the faculty seemed, and I loved the focus on systemic thinking. I felt like I could belong there.”
When Lea Kablik ’21 (New England, MS) began her studies at Antioch, she had no experience with gardening. But she was very interested in the world of horticulture and agriculture—an interest that grew out of her experience running STEM programs for children in shelters across Western Massachusetts. She says, “Gardening seemed like a very tangible way to get kids outside who may have less access to outdoor spaces, and it had the added benefit of providing nutritious food that may be harder to access.”
Kablik began working with CGC in the summer of 2020. Now, five years later, she is the Community Garden Coordinator for a local affordable housing authority, Keene Housing. Using gardening skills and also those related to program development and implementation, she runs an extensive network of community gardens at Keene Housing properties, working to learn the needs and desires of residents and taking care of providing all necessary supplies. During her time in the job, Kablik has expanded the gardening program, adding more garden beds and involving more residents in community decision-making and the development of the gardens.
Plus, Kablik gets to continue working directly with CGC: one Keene Housing development has a partnership with CGC for implementation and guidance around its community garden. It’s a sweet and fitting connection. As Kablik says, “Antioch very directly got me working with gardens and food systems, and I still get to partner with Community Garden Connections! I am grateful for what I learned.”
