Summer 2012 with Adelante Mujeres

La Esperanza- Please click on me to enlarge.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the summer 2012 edition of my blog. For the next 2 months or so I will be interning with Adelante Mujeres in Forest Grove, Oregon. This is an organization which I volunteered with in the summer of 2009 and really wanted to re-connect with, so I set up an internship proposal with them and then received funding from my college to do it, so here I am!

Adelante Mujeres is a non-profit organization whose mission is the education and empowerment of Latina women and their families. Their main focus is adult and early childhood education courses, but the organization wears many other hats. In addition to holistic education, they have a girls empowerment program and a small business development (micro-enterprise) program.

For the summer I am more or less situated under the micro-enterprise division with the Adelante Agricultura program. Adelante Agricultura provides a 12-week sustainable agriculture training course to interested participants, and upon completion graduates have access to start their own small farming operation on a portion of Adelante Mujeres’ organic-certified La Esperanza Farm. I will be helping out occasionally with the demonstration plot at the farm, which the Adelante staff uses to teach agricultural principles.

Adelante Agricultura also operates the Forest Grove Farmer’s Market (founded by Adelante Mujeres in 2005). Some graduates of the Agricultura class sell their produce here (but the majority are too small or too busy), and a variety of other types of vendors from the local community also sell at the market. Every Wednesday I will be helping with the set-up and general operation of the market, which I also helped with back in 2009.

A third main task I have this summer is helping with the start up of La Esperanza Distributors, a project which Adelante Mujeres is creating in order to help the new farmers at La Esperanza Farm sell their produce. As with any produce distributor, farmers will sell their product to the distributor and the distributor will then sell product in bulk to local businesses. In the case of La Esperanza Distributors, the buyer is Adelante Mujeres and the local businesses who are buying the bulk product will be local school districts, local businesses, and local grocers. The buyer list includes Intel (serviced by Bon Apetit), New Seasons, and Head Start. As I research different supplies and procedures we will need to make La Esperanza a success and helpful for the farmers, I am finding that my 2010 summer with Green Corps (a group of 6 education-focused urban farms in Cleveland, Ohio) is coming in really handy.

I hope to post a blog every week about what I’ve been up to with the ag program at Adelante. I’ve already had 5 days of work thus far and have really enjoyed it: Adelante Mujeres is full of some really great, friendly, hardworking staff who are motivated to help me succeed in my internship.

Peace,

ET

P.S. About the photo: I spent Saturday untangling drip tape and doing some planting on the demonstration plot at La Esperanza, and all the farmers were out on their own plots doing the same. They couldn’t get anything in the ground earlier because the land was flooded during the winter months and the soil needed time to dry out. Thankfully, the farm also has a nice greenhouse where the plant starts are growing really well.