Jocelyn Reflects on Her TWK Internship
For six weeks in January and February, I had the pleasure of working with TasteWise Kids on a farm programming internship. Visiting Baltimore (and the USA!) for the first time from my home city of London, I was looking to get involved with an organization or project that related to my background in farming and environmental education. TasteWise Kids was recommended, and after an online meeting I was invited to join the remote-working team as an intern.
Very early on it became clear that I would learn a lot from this experience, not only about food education but about organization, people management and working relationships. Wendy, my point of contact throughout the internship, had structures in place to track of what I was working on, list new projects to move onto, and track the amount of time I was putting into the internship. My time was understood as a donation – accounted for in the non-profit’s records – and an exchange, reciprocated by weekly check-ins that provided a place to ask questions, get feedback and share progress on the work I produced.
Several ways I could apply what I had learned from farming and in a previous environmental education role emerged in early meetings – the internship was tailored to suit both my background and skills and the needs of TasteWise Kids. I worked mostly on the Days of Taste, Day Two program, which takes 4th graders to a farm to learn about where food comes from, how it’s grown and who grows it. I had a lot of freedom to be creative with the projects that were suggested to me, coming up with ideas, working them through and then presenting them to gather feedback.
Over the weeks, my activity log became a growing list of accomplishments and tangible progress. I created a farm visit guide for the Day Two trip, including logistics planning, activity ideas, preparatory questions for farmers, and guiding questions farmers to address. I curated a resource of educational videos relating to food and farming, accompanied by questions and reflective prompts, which could be used for Day Two preparation, post-visit reflection, or a classroom based farm experience. Finally, I developed an existing TasteWise Kids activity about the different parts of plants that we eat (leaves, flowers, fruit, roots…), relating it to the life cycles and stages of growth that plants pass through, and the diversity of plants that we could be eating.
All these projects related to my own interests, and as a result I learned a huge amount while working on them. I was excited by all the new discoveries I was making – like how bananas grow, or what sumac and clove flowers look like. I learned about farms that are leading on food justice, often BIPOC- or queer-owned, and operated in cooperative, intentional and economically successful ways. I started thinking about how to learn about different and unusual plants with kids, and even started compiling a list of crops I would grow in a school garden. And I made connections with new people, doing great food education work, in a place I’d never visited before but have every intention of returning to. Thank you for an amazing and impactful experience!
Interested in an Internship with TWK?
We are always looked for passionated and skilled individuals who want to form a relationship that sparks growth for both the organization and the individual. We are firm believers that we all have something to learn from each other. When Jocelyn presented her final activity around different plant parts, the whole staff marveled at the species that she brought to our attention we may never have thought of before.
If you are interested in an internship or would like to volunteer your time, please contact info@tastewisekids.org to start a conversation and get connected! And a big thank you to Jocelyn and all our other interns and volunteers who have contributed to TWK over the years.