Please give a brief background on yourself and your career.
Thanks in particular to my studies in political science and student activism around the wars in Central America, I left Wellesley very inspired to explore the world and equip myself to be engaged with human rights work. Because of knee surgery my junior year, I ended up taking my senior year abroad, in Sweden at the University of Stockholm. After graduation, I spent a year in volunteer service with children in Guatemala. From there I went to Columbia University for graduate study and left with a J.D., as well as a master’s degree in political science. My original intention had been to work internationally, but during law school I came to see that compelling human rights issues existed in the United States too, and found a focus on labor and workplace rights.
For the first decade after law school, I represented labor unions at a small law firm in Washington, D.C. In 2002, I shifted my work to Baltimore City (where I’d been living since 1993) to help start a low-wage immigrant workers rights project, where we organized and represented day laborers and service sector workers, most of whom were undocumented. My employer was CASA de Maryland, a Latino community-based organization, where lawyers served to support priorities that the community itself identified.
After adopting our third child in 2004, I left CASA de Maryland and was hired by the Women’s Law Center of Maryland to develop a statewide Employment Rights Hotline. In the meantime, because of my involvement with children and youth in the low-income Baltimore City neighborhood where my husband and I had intentionally settled in 1994 and because of what I was observing as my own boys (who we adopted from Ethiopia in 1999) were encountering the USDA school lunch program in their public charter school, I became increasingly interested in how our food system is structured, how public policies help shape it, and how income disparities and economic and racial segregation have consequences for access to healthy food, and, as a result, health and well-being. I first became involved in food issues as a parent and community advocate, and then out of that advocacy an entire new work-life emerged. I was trained as a food educator, founded several food literacy programs in Baltimore City schools, helped to create Great Kids Farm, a working educational farm operated by the school system, founded a community garden and was hired to draft a report on school food reform opportunities that contributed to the reshaping of Baltimore City school meals. In 2009, I was selected as a Baltimore Open Society Institute Community Fellow to further my work on these issues.
In 2012, I was recruited by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to teach courses on the food system as an adjunct professor, where I am now also an academic advisor in the Interdisciplinary Studies program (which supports students to develop individualized, integrative degrees). I’m working to structure my class around engaged student learning and community partnerships and have been supported in this by UMBC’s BreakingGround initiative. I’m also faculty mentor to UMBC’s student organization, The Garden, which has built a community garden and is generating student food activism on various projects. Central to my life, is also my unpaid vocation as a member of an intentional community in Baltimore City, where a group of us reside on the same block and seek – with all due humility – to live into some measure of reconciliation around the deep American wounds of race and class, as well ecological degradation. I’m happy to speak with anyone in greater depth about that!
How has your career changed since you originally envisioned it at Wellesley? What other careers did you consider as a student?
The shape of my career (or simply my “work life” as I have come to think of it) has been an unexpected revelation to me. At some point, I let go of the ladder metaphor for the career I thought I was supposed to be having, and instead embraced a path that was less linear, and, in fact, more like a garden, which grows more organically, from one stage to the next by responding to needs, opportunities and challenges that arise out of the context at hand. I still acted intentionally but the strategy was less around career climbing than around discerning at every decision point, what held most meaning for me, and what would work best for me and my family. I also don’t think I would have had any way in college to sense how the creation of a family would create its own gravitational pull and logic on my life. And, I am much more rooted in a particular place (my little neighborhood of Baltimore) and more philosophically committed to the local and the particular, than I had anticipated I would be.
How has Wellesley contributed to your career?
I remember so well the charge given at my first Convocation to “Be Bold!” That inspired me then, and still inspires me, as does our motto that calls us “not to be served, but to serve.” Some special professors also stoked my moral sensibilities about equity and justice, and these themes have remained as central animating forces in my work life. I think also that somehow the dignity and the beauty of Wellesley sunk in deeply and have remained with me as a motivating factor for how the world should be for all people.
What is a typical work day or work week like for you?
During teaching semesters I spend a lot of time preparing for classes, reading student work, and meeting with students in my office. I also advise students on their academic career and develop their Interdisciplinary Studies degrees. I’m also faculty mentor to the student initiated campus garden and support various student food related projects, such as students organizing for the Real Food Challenge (a national student group seeking to change college dining services practices to help transform the food system to be more just and sustainable), creating a Refugee garden in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee, and many more. I spend a good bit of time drinking coffee or meeting up with various people around Baltimore who are involved with food and justice work, to advise and consult, to connect people and resources, and increasingly, to connect my UMBC students with the vital food activism that we have in Baltimore City. I’ve also been offering my time with student volunteer efforts, such as alternative spring break programs. In addition, I serve on the Board of Friends of Great Kids Farm and coordinate the development of our neighborhood Peace Park and green space and related community activities. I consider those unpaid pieces my “work” as much as I do my paid job.
What piece of advice would you offer students looking to get into your area of interest and expertise?
If you are looking to work in the area of food system reform, there are so many opportunities now. It’s really an emergent field. At Wellesley, I would say scour course offerings that will provide you with knowledge, and also dig in and get involved with some work or project that interests you on any issue across the seed to table spectrum. After college, consider serving as a volunteer (whether within your home country or abroad) in some project where you can learn and develop relations with people in the field. Research possible graduate programs: there is an increasing number of food system or food studies degrees, as independent degrees and also as specialties within other disciplines, such as public health or environmental studies. Also, make sure to spend some time with your hands in the soil, where all food starts!
What do you wish you had known as a student?
I wish I had known, what I now understand as a college instructor and advisor, that most professors are eager to mentor students. I was a bit shy and did not want to infringe on their time. Now I see what a pleasure it is to support students as they are learning and exploring and moving into their adult lives. And, I wish I had found my way to whatever was growing in the greenhouse and gardens back then.
If you could come back and take one class at Wellesley what would it be?
What a hard question! I remember feeling dizzy when I first reviewed the Wellesley course catalog. At this point, I would truly love to come back to Wellesley and take “Environmental Horticulture with Laboratory.” Although it was social concern that brought me into the field of food system work, I have found the world of plants and soil and ecosystems to be ceaselessly interesting and would relish the opportunity to immerse myself in the study of these subjects. (Can I audit from afar?)