Greetings from the Green Ambassador team!

This year, we piloted a new program for our returning Green Ambassadors called the Guild. For Green Ambassadors who joined our program at the first tier as Farm Crew members, the Guild is the next tier of community engagement and garden-based experiences they can participate in.

The Guild’s main focus is to develop leadership and professional skills by fostering meaningful community projects in the food and agriculture space. To do this, Guild members have executed different strategies to engage their communities one-on-one in phone conversations to ask the questions that matter, like “What is your biggest frustration with the current food system” and “How has your neighborhood changed since you were a child”?

We then took the data we collected and turned our focus to implementing a community project that made an impact. In our search to do good work with our community, we engaged in a collaborative effort with DC Community Fridge Collective (DCFC) to build protective and functional structures for their community fridge initiatives.

Community fridges are a grassroots response to the dire food insecurity crisis in local DC neighborhoods. The model is simple — local volunteers and community members keep fridges stocked with donated food and other supplies, and people can take what they need, no questions asked.

The Guild is currently working to support these efforts by building structures that will provide additional shelving for canned goods, toiletries, and other basic needs in our communities. We are also helping DCFC take their incentives to the next level by adding cool utilities like a hand sanitizer dispenser and a garden wall of herbs that users of the fridge can take home with them.

We still have a couple of weeks of hard work before patting ourselves on the back for a job well done, but I’m already proud of what we’ve been able to manifest so far. Stay tuned in the coming weeks to hear how our project wraps up!

— Christin Riddick, On-Site Program Manager

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