Amy Calandrella
"I learned about nonprofit management, about working with few resources, about being creative."
CESL Program: Citizens Scholar Program
I started working at Nuestras Raíces in fall of 2006, volunteering four hours a week through CSP, and now I am a full-time staff member.
I decided to remain working at the farm after graduation for a million reasons! I’ve learned and grown an incredible amount since I came here. I learned about agriculture. My Spanish vocabulary has grown tremendously here. I can speak about farms. I learned how to talk to large groups of people and tell a good story. I learned how to lead work crews, to distribute tasks. I learned how to work with people who are not like me. I learned about nonprofit management, about working with few resources, about being creative.
Currently, I recruit, manage, and coordinate volunteers and also the volunteer projects. I fundraise, so I write grant proposals and report on them. I manage our youth program; I recruited and hired people to manage the youth program. I work with the farmers and bring them to trainings, organize UMass people to come down here and do trainings for us. I will coordinate with different partners, maybe work with someone from Holyoke Community College to bring a class down here. I’m developing policies here on the farm.
For my public policy project, I worked with the Holyoke Food and Fitness Policy Council on some mobile marketing ideas. For the organizing project, I worked with the culinary arts students at Dean Tech and organized with them to take control of the salad bar they have there.
I totally wouldn't be here if it was not for CSP! And even if I was here, I would not have the same perspective. I would not understand the relationship between environmentalism and social justice. I would not understand exactly how the money comes down, and I would not ask those questions about why things are the way they are. And I wouldn't push; I wouldn't see myself as a player in that question/answer thing. Mostly, I just met a bunch of awesome people. What I usually say about CSP is that it gave me a vocabulary and a community: a way to talk about social justice and people to learn from and live with in a community.