Nora Mills Boyd is an assistant professor of philosophy at Siena College. Building on her experience with an intensive summer urban farming project, she offers advice for building community partnerships.
The author stoops down to pick up empty plant trays amidst an in-progress landscaping project. 
A small, partly shaded lot on an intersection with thriving weeds and a bit of debris on a blue-sky day. 
A student and community members stand looking at a fence around a newly landscaped corner lot on a smoky summer day. 
A team of students and faculty pull weeds from an overgrown lot in an urban neighborhood on a sunny day.
What civically engaged project(s) or work do you do with students? What is your role?
During the summer of 2021, I took on an 8-week long research project dubbed Urban Farmers: Community Voice. Our primary goals were to build trust with the members of the Albany Victory Gardens (AVG) Garden Committee, to learn what is important to them about farming, and to generally make ourselves useful by, for instance, weeding and watering the blueberry bushes.
I was one of two mentors, the other being the incomparable Sarah Toledano, Assistant Director of my college’s Academic Community Engagement Office, whose background is in social work. The project was intentionally transdisciplinary. We had four students, each funded through AmeriCorps, with backgrounds in sociology, environmental studies and philosophy, anthropology, as well as nursing and art. To say that the project was 8 weeks long is misleading. Sarah, Erin Spence the sociology student, and I started preparing together several months before ‘day one’—e.g., working on our IRB proposal. Erin will continue her conversations with the farmers in the coming months using the photovoice methodology as research for her major’s capstone project. Our work was the first year of an ‘incubator’ project. My college has committed to two more years developing the research partnership we started.
Give an example of a successful project.
Our team helped transform a vacant lot into a pollinator-attracting garden and a free tabling space for community members. This lot is part of what AVG calls their “Front Lines Project,” which focuses on the interface between the heart of the AVG “Urban Farmer Training Area” and the West Hill neighborhood of Albany, NY, in which it is immersed. By incorporating plantings and installations that have multiple overlapping benefits—air-purifying greenery, beautiful flowers, useful herbs, pollinator-attracting perennials—and by inviting folks in the neighborhood to interact with and learn about those installations, AVG hopes to help community members feel welcome and at ease, and to contribute to the overall well-being of the neighborhood. The students’ first serious encounter with this particular lot involved very carefully working their way through the plants that were growing there—not pulling anything that they had not yet identified. By learning about these plants as they went, the students came to see that some of the ‘weeds’ were powerful and beneficial plants and some had in fact been seeded by others in seasons past. I for one will never look at plantain growing in sidewalk cracks the same way again.
What do you think students gain from doing this civic engagement?
The students that I worked with this summer gained valuable experience on several fronts, from new research skills to learning about the aspirations of a neighborhood in their home region. I think the most impactful experiences were 1) getting to know a group of individuals outside of their usual social sphere, and 2) stretching their comfort zones with respect to communication and taking responsibility.
What does the civic engagement project offer to wider communities?
This is somewhat more difficult to answer. Our community partners invested a lot of time and energy into articulating their expectations of us, developing suitable projects for our students, teaching our students how to do the relevant physical work, and negotiating concerns about safety. I do know that the transformed lot means a great deal to community members—someone stopped by to tell us so virtually every day we were working there. I also hope that the result of Erin Spence’s sociology capstone research will ultimately be useful for the garden committee in advocating for themselves and attracting interest. But to be honest, I think that substantive benefits to the community partner will only be feasible by building upon the rocky work of getting to know each other that we did this summer. Developing community partnerships takes time!
Why do you choose to be involved?
I got involved in this summer project with the hope of paving the way for a transformation of my Environmental Ethics course into a fully community engaged course. I want to get my philosophy students actually doing philosophically-informed environmental activism, rather than just talking about it. This hope turned out to be more ambitious than I anticipated! What I thought might be accomplished in a few weeks, will likely take a few more years.
Plus, I fell in love with urban agriculture during my time in Pittsburgh during graduate school. My partner and I had a plot in a neighborhood guerilla garden and I took the Saxifrage School Organic Agriculture course, where we practiced farming in a converted baseball field. Being involved in urban agriculture in my new home is part of how I am putting down roots. I’ve been learning from other agricultural projects in my region, such as the Radix Center, Collard City Growers, and Soul Fire Farm.
An urban farm is environmental ethics in microcosm. Clearing out another vacant lot this summer to make way for an apothecary garden, we dug up a tire, a syringe, and (I kid you not) a bowling ball. What sort of remediation should we do in order to safely grow medicinal herbs here? we wondered. It’s a short step from this sort of practical question to a visceral understanding of environmental justice. Connections to climate ethics, relationships to the land, and what counts as the ‘environment’ all leap out at you, asking for your full engagement.
What advice do you wish someone had given to you before you started doing civic engagement work?
One piece of advice would be: Realistically appraise what you can offer to the work and cultivate sane boundaries. When you think of ‘engaged’ philosophy, you might think first of something like public talks or service events. Doing community engaged research as participatory action research, with the aim of truly collaborative partnerships, is a whole different animal. We aimed to uncover common goals, make decisions together, build power jointly, and arrive at jointly meaningful outcomes. It is not an overstatement to say that this community engagement project temporarily took over my psychological and emotional life—and my calendar. My other research projects languished, I took early morning and late-night calls to address serious emergent concerns, woke up and fell asleep thinking about it, and generally failed to take much needed recuperation time after a year and a half of working hard in Virus World. The associated $1,000 stipend I received (a not insignificant portion of which went to sourcing plants, safety equipment, and other project-related supplies) from my college’s office for undergraduate research does not reflect the time and effort involved.
Another piece of advice: Do deep homework about community partners with whom you will work closely and have extended planning conversations with them in advance about project aims, expectations, assumptions, and values. I was, probably naively, surprised to find my own ethical standards challenged several times. At the surface level, there are problematic connotations of the very name “victory gardens.” But towards the end of our project, I was distraught to learn that AVG was accepting donations from Norlite, one of our region’s current most noxious environmental justice problems.
I would also say: Think carefully about how your engaged work is structured. Perhaps you are already savvy to the danger of exploiting or disempowering community members through attempts at engagement. Similar concerns apply to administrators and students. I was constantly feeling grateful to Sarah for the perspective and experience that she brought to the project, but I worried that she felt obliged to work on our project well beyond the scope of her job description. AmeriCorps is a fundamentally flawed model that straightjackets activism and is (to put it uncharitably) designed for well-off youth to have a ‘character-building’ taste of poverty. I worried about the fine line between the reasonable expectation that students exercise common sense when I wasn’t immediately at their side, and the very real possibility that they might not and face harmful consequences.
Finally, I wish someone had told me: The skills that you will need to do community partnerships well are not the teaching or research skills you already have. Instead, they mostly have to do with leadership, conflict resolution, and interpersonal communication. I felt under-equipped to help the students wisely face the reality of increased incidents of gun violence affecting the neighborhood where we were working. I wanted them to cultivate an appropriate level of situational awareness, to have a reasonable plan as to what they would do in case of a shooting, but also to avoid sensationalizing their caution into alienating fear. We asked for advice from others, we held a restorative circle conversation early on, we had them speak with anti-gun violence outreach workers from SNUG who are living and serving in the neighborhood, and we listened to their concerns. But I still felt out of my depth.
Oh yeah, and apply for grants.
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