Growing Strong: Student volunteers support nonprofit Common Roots

By the time they finish fifth grade, students who have been in the South Burlington School District since kindergarten will have received 54 lessons about eating local, healthy foods. The curriculum, developed and presented by South Burlington nonprofit Common Roots, often includes food samples.

Some South Burlington High School students who fondly remember their Farm to School lessons — the one where they got to try salsa was an especially big hit — are now Common Roots volunteers.

Now in its 15th year, Common Roots’ mission is to provide food education and food access and to practice and promote land stewardship. Its efforts include growing organic vegetables to donate, sending educators to teach and run cooking classes in South Burlington schools, providing internships for local college students and hosting festivals, camps and field trips.

High school senior Avery Adamson and sophomores Gracie Morris and Sam Jones each show up about once a week to help wherever needed — they plant, weed, harvest, clean vegetables, and box and sell the meals that Common Roots offers to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Avery volunteers during his free periods at school. Common Roots executive director Carol McQuillen said that he will contact her and say, “I have an hour and a half on Monday; do you need any help?” Then, when it’s almost time to get back to school, he’ll say, “I have 10 more minutes. Is there anything else you need?”

Avery, like Sam, often bikes or walks from school, which is nearly a mile away. “It’s not very far,” Sam said. “But it is all uphill.”

Sam started volunteering at Common Roots when he was 12 or 13, tagging along with his dad, Anthony, when he came as a volunteer chef to help prepare meals for Farm to Fork, the Tuesday night program that sells house-made dinners. Anthony has since become Common Roots’ certified executive chef, and Sam has (voluntarily) increased his volunteer hours, working every Tuesday and Friday after school and during summers.

“I do dishes, lots of dishes,” he said. He also pitches in with housecleaning and helps new college interns find their way around the kitchen. Last summer, he learned how to operate the outdoor wood-fired clay oven.

His photographs of lush Vermont landscapes and luscious Common Roots-made meals adorn the Wheeler House dining room walls and are for sale. Sam and Common Roots share the profits.

McQuillen credits Sam with the idea of giving away meal vouchers at the South Burlington Food Shelf. Common Roots goes to the Food Shelf to give away vegetables and recipes, Sam reasoned; wouldn’t it be nice if Food Shelf patrons could come to Common Roots?

One day this past winter, the first 20 food shelf visitors got a $50 voucher to spend at Common Roots.

Sam’s favorite thing about volunteering? Meeting new people and feeling a sense of community, he said.

Gracie contacted McQuillen last spring to ask about volunteering.

“I was 14, so I wasn’t really old enough to get a job,” she said, adding she still wanted to learn new skills and gain experience interacting with the public. McQuillen invited her to Common Roots and the two spent an hour and a half talking while planting sunflowers, Ukraine’s national flower, in a garden designed to symbolize solidarity with the country.

McQuillen was impressed that Gracie was already planning her summer, wanting to use her time well and talking about giving back to Common Roots.

“That’s so adult!” McQuillen said. “That’s not a teenage mindset, right?”

Since that day, Gracie has logged more than 120 hours weeding and mulching that sunflower patch, cleaning silverware, teaching kids how to cut vegetables, stretching pizza dough, topping flatbreads, taking customer orders and processing payments.

Gracie records her volunteer hours and tasks on her phone. For example, on Aug. 10 last year, in addition to trimming parsley, deadheading flowers and teaching kids how to make salad dressing, she wove scarlet runner beans through the wooden archway near the pizza oven, “and that was pretty cool because … it was kind of like a piece of art afterwards,” she said.

Avery had done a little gardening at Common Roots as part of a school project when he was a sophomore. Last year, as a junior, he was looking for a service thesis project, “and I wanted to do something outside, something involving farming,” he said.

Starting last spring, he helped organize the workshop, start seeds in the greenhouse and till and fertilize fields. He parlayed the project into an AmeriCorps job for the summer and stayed on, planting, weeding, harvesting and cleaning vegetables. He also made signs to label farm structures, including greenhouses, hoop houses, Haygroves and the propagation house. The job ended last August, but, Avery said, “I just keep coming back.” He shows up during his free time at school and after school on Fridays.

Why? “It’s more fun than having a free period,” he said, “and I like having something to do.”

Farm manager Colin O’Brien said Avery is motivated and self-directed. “It’s really great on a farm to have people who just can kind of see a problem and take care of it and don’t need to be told to,” O’Brien said.

The work, Avery said, has taught him lots about farming and introduced him to new vegetables, such as tiny pickling cucumbers. “My favorite thing that we grew is a Chioggia beet,” he said. Sometimes called a candy-stripe beet or a bull’s eye beet, its interior has alternating red and white concentric circles. Avery put it on his salad every day. “It was so good, and I just never heard of it before.”

His work at Common Roots provided another, unexpected lesson. “I guess I was surprised by how much I like manual labor,” Avery said. When he looks to the future, he sees himself doing similar work, he said. “I can’t imagine having a job inside.”