Farm School Beginnings.  

Farm School NYC’s origin story is one of collective visioning and volunteering -- from its roots at a winter retreat for a few radical women to its growth through the gifted labor of more than 30 farmers and activists from our city’s low income, black and brown communities.  Our founders were a collective, holding collective power in this living, growing organization they birthed.  

One initial seed from which Farm School NYC flourished was planted 70 miles from the city. In 2007, a handful of self-proclaimed “farmy ladies” — active NYC farmers and gardeners — gathered at The Grail Center, a retreat space in Cornwall-on-Hudson, to help plan a large community garden. Those gathered reflected on the dearth of options for farmer training locally; so much so that those with the resources opted to put their lives on hold and head to the west coast to learn to grow food, where the climate was very different both ecologically, socially, and culturally. The need for an alternative was clear.

Returning from their retreat, they engaged fellow farmers, community gardeners, social justice advocates, and educators working and living in low income communities in New York City in their visioning. Together, they centered our school on social justice, believing that farming in community can be a tool for liberation and self-determination for the marginalized and the oppressed. They grounded our school in popular education techniques developed for labor movements, particularly welcome in Black and brown communities underserved by traditional hierarchical educational institutions. When Farm School NYC welcomed its first class in 2010, many of those farmer / volunteers became faculty members and staff.

Yonnette Fleming

Yonnette Fleming is an urban food justice farmer and lifelong musician who is committed to advancing systems of knowledge which build healthy individuals, families and communities and provide community solutions to the issue of food insecurity, health disparities and social inequities. Farmer Yon, as she is known, has worked to grow food and advance community resilience to food insecurity through intergenerational education and operating food-based ventures in the Central Brooklyn community since 2003.

Farmer Yon serves as project catalyst/Vice President of the Hattie Carthan community garden and general coordinator of the Hattie Carthan Herban Farm and its two community-based markets in addition to teaching at Farm School.

Karen Washington

Karen Washington, our beloved former teacher and OG Board Member, believed deeply in our mission, which she helped craft. “This isn't a school to just teach how to grow stuff but it also has social value and is rooted in social justice. It's about COMMUNITY – a healing loving community full of humility, good, diversity, inclusion, and intention.” 

Farm School NYC is changing the landscape of urban agriculture with a focus on food justice and equity. Karen brough questions of equity to our work like figuring out how to capture the wisdom of people who have jobs, and make it possible for people who work to participate as students or faculty. Farm School classes are still outside of normal working hours and all board meetings still begin by grounding in the shared mission vision and values of FSNYC.

Lorrie Clevenger

Lorrie Clevenger is a farmer, educator, and community organizer with over 7 years of experience growing food and organizing around food and land access specifically for historically disenfranchised communities. After two years farming at the University of California Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), and launched a cooperative farm, Rise & Root Farm, in Chester, New York. She is a founding and active member of Black Urban Growers (BUGs) and Farm School NYC.

Owen Taylor is a seed keeper, farmer, and co-founder of Truelove Seeds, a seed company that is a collaboration between over 50 small-scale urban and rural farms committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture. Our model stems from Owen's 15+ years of work with food justice and urban agriculture and four years spent learning the art of seed saving from William Woys Weaver while managing his Roughwood Seed Collection. Find Owen @seedkeeping on Instagram and peruse truly-loved seeds and more at www.truloveseeds.com.      

Bilen Berhanu is a certified permaculture designer/educator with extensive experience in urban agriculture and food justice. Bilen is currently a grief guide and death doula with an established full spectrum/birth/postpartum doula practice in NY. Her care work is grounded in liberatory practices of reclaiming agency and providing pathways to empowered experiences in life’s monumental transitions. Bilen has served as an Outreach Coordinator at GreenThumb (Department of Parks & Recreation - NYC), where she developed educational programming, and provided technical assistance with material support to over 1200 community gardens and urban farms throughout the five boroughs. She has sat on the Executive Board of Farm School, NYC, and is the co-founder of the Black Urban Growers. She has worked as a Program Manager at Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, where she was part of the school creation team for the Academy of Environmental Leadership in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in Environmental Studies. She later earned an MA in Social Sciences in the Environment and Community from Humboldt State University.

Ursula Chanse

Ursula Chanse is the Director of Bronx Green-Up and Community Horticulture at The New York Botanical Garden. Since 2005, she has managed Bronx Green-Up, the community gardening outreach program of The New York Botanical Garden, which provides horticulture education, training, and technical assistance to Bronx residents, community gardeners, urban farmers, local schools, and community organizations. Her background includes organic agriculture, public health, community education and advocacy work.

Michaela Hayes-Hodge is a co-founder and farmer at Rise & Root Farm, a teacher, food stylist, classically trained chef, and value-added producer.

Michaela has been working in farming, food justice and food preservation since 2007. As part of that justice work, Michaela believes that building deep communication - about race, gender, sexuality, class, age and more - is vital to liberating ourselves. Michaela grew into farming through cooking and food preservation. She cooked for years in restaurants and taught canning workshops in community gardens around NYC, after being taught canning by the outstanding Classie Parker. She was a co-founder of the NYC Ferments Meetup group. In her former food preservation business, Crock & Jar, she created fermented products and continued to teach all types of food preservation in NYC and beyond. She is a founding member of Farm School NYC and currently teaches the Community Food Arts course.

John Ameroso has been working in the fields of horticulture and agricultural production since 1964. He received a degree in Agronomy from the University of Georgia in 1968. From there he volunteered with International Voluntary Services and went on to study tropical agriculture at the University of The Philippines. He then spent 4 years in South Vietnam working with agricultural projects involved in small scale vegetable and animal production, and establish farmer’s buying and selling cooperatives. In 1976, he piloted the Urban Gardening Program with Cornell University Cooperative Extension, and through his efforts successfully set the ground work for Extension education in urban agriculture and food production for New York City. Retired since 2010, he currently sits on the Boards of Directors of Just Food, Added-Value and Bissel Gardens, non-profits involved in urban agriculture. He also performs farm inspections for GrowNYC, sponsor of the GreenMarkets program in NYC.

More than 30 farmers and food justice advocates co-founded Farm School NYC, working together on our vision, our values, our educational focus and our approach.There are so many stories, names and relationships connected to our foundation. These folks grew the roots of our FSNYC community.  Below are names and afew of the stories shared by founders to learn about the intentions behind FSNYC and the ways that their groundwork still impacts our work to this day.