Bruce Willis '16 and Breanna D'Antonio '17 interned with Weavers Way Community Programs this summer, gaining hands-on experience in urban farming and teaching children about sustainable food production.
After interning with the student-run Haverfarm last year, this summer Bruce Willis '16 and Breanna D'Antonio '17 continued cultivating sustainable food production with Weavers Way Community Programs (WWCP) in Northwest Philadelphia. Founded in 2007 as a non-profit extension of the Weavers Way Co-op, WWCP promotes local food production, economic literacy, sustainability, and healthy lifestyles. Haverford's Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (CPGC) sponsored Willis and D'Antonio's internships as part of an on-going partnership with WWCP.
Both interns come from extensive backgrounds in agriculture, but they hail from different parts of the globe. D'Antonio, a psychology major, grew up on a family farm in central Kentucky. Willis, a Fine Arts major, grew up in the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, Greece.
This summer, Willis and D'Antonio divided their time between working in the WWCP farm in Awbury Arboretum, selling produce at a weekly farm stand, and providing educational lessons to groups of children from summer camps, Bible schools, and the Stenton Family Manor homeless shelter. The lessons covered a range of topics—composting, healthy foods, how food gets from farms to plates—but were generally aimed at creating a better relationship between the children and the food they eat (and could be eating).
The interns' hard work did not go unnoticed. Margaret Guthrie, a board member of WWCP and a regular volunteer, says“I am heartened by the quality of the young people you [the CPGC] send to us; they actually give me hope that ‘things' may change for the better when they move out into the world.”
