For nearly three years, Providence Day School and Carolina Farm Trust have partnered in support of the Urban Farm at Aldersgate, a collaboration of Carolina Farm Trust and Aldersgate Retirement Community, which is a 6.7-acre farm that will grow culturally relevant produce year-round. This farm aims to serve the residents of East Charlotte with a convenient and reliable source of nutrition.

It all started in January of 2019 when PD teacher Dr. Jennifer Bratyanski reached out to Carolina Farm Trust President and CEO Zack Wyatt about a volunteering opportunity for the 9th Grade Charger Challenge which seeks to engage PD students in solving local challenges in the Charlotte community. 

“I grew up in northern Virginia outside of DC in an agricultural environment and we were caretakers for an old dairy farm. I’ve been in Charlotte since 2003 and founded Carolina Farm Trust a little over six years ago,” Wyatt says. “We’ve learned how intertwined climate change, health, nutrition, upward economic mobility, racial injustice, and inequities are. They are rooted so deeply in our food and agricultural systems and it starts with health and nutrition. Our vision is to decentralize our food system and build an urban farm network with a distribution platform we are trying to get off the ground.” 

In March of 2019, over 40 PD students went to the Urban Farm at Aldersgate and prepped the hillside for elderberry and blueberry bushes. A month following that experience, a newly-created Upper School service club of 15 students called the Urban Farming Club planted additional blueberry and elderberry bushes with another volunteer group from Bank of America. Through the summer of 2019, the work continued as Dr. Bratyanski worked with the Mecklenburg Beekeeper Association Board to partner on site plans for an apiary. Additionally, that autumn, 20-30 PD students adopted the creek running adjacent to the Urban Farm at Aldersgate as part of the Creek Clean Up service club.

Despite the pandemic, the work continued in the first half of 2020 as PD worked with partner school Windsor Park Elementary to support the apiary and built it with the help of 7-10 PD faculty and students. This was the first community engagement and sustainability-sponsored project by PD with an investment of over $3,000 that provides a teaching and learning space, increased pollination for the farm, a revenue stream from honey collected on the farm that will be sold at a farm stand, and maintenance supported by PD.

Wyatt believes that the partnership providing volunteer opportunities is an answer to the yearning many people feel right now to help. “Parents and kids are asking, ‘what can I do’? We all feel lost and there are so many physical things to do for the urban farm networks. You can see the transformation of what the Urban Farm at Aldersgate looked like three years ago until now. It’s easy and doing something to help.”

During the 2020-21 school year, the Urban Farming and Creek Clean Up clubs continued in a limited capacity while PD’s partnership with Windsor Park Elementary formed. 2nd-grade teacher Paris Harrell at Windsor Park received training to become a beekeeper and integrated concepts about pollinators, math ratios, and a honey naming contest into the curriculum. During this time, bees moved onto the farm and three more hives were introduced into the apiary with a donation by Dietlinde Zipkin and the Mecklenburg Beekeeper Association mentors.

In the summer of 2021, PD student William Kirshbom ‘22 began apiary inspections on the farm as a natural extension of his interest in beekeeping and his company Cherry Tree Bees. “Volunteering at the Urban Farm has allowed me to use my passion and skills to help Ms. Paris [Harrell] manage the apiary,” Kirshbom says. “I love helping expand access to fresh honey, and being a part of a community that [partners] with the people in the Windsor Park [neighborhood].”

Lorena Rodriguez joined the Carolina Farm Trust team as the Farm Coordinator with a focus on community outreach and helping other schools are following PD’s lead by developing their own Urban Farm Club. “I spoke with the leaders of Providence Day School’s Urban Farm Club and they are so excited about the partnership,” she says. “We hope you get as much out of it as we do. We are so excited to build up this relationship and have the students benefit from learning about all of the new experiences.”

Today, 45 students in the Urban Farming Club are ready to jump in and offer hands-on help on the farm. PD looks forward to sponsoring Rodriguez for Bee School through the Mecklenburg Beekeepers Association this spring while the 9th Grader Charger Impact Challenge participates in their “Day of Impact.” In the summer of 2022, under the leadership of Middle School teacher Sarah Goodman, PD hopes to develop a summer apprenticeship program that provides an introduction to beekeeping for students in Middle School. 

The work that Carolina Farm Trust does is far-reaching for Charlotte. Rodriguez runs farm stands in pop-up markets, organizes volunteers, and communicates with organizations outside of the farm. “I work with schools, non-profits, and other people who want to work with us. We are trying to make urban farms a community hub,” she says. “We are trying to create an even playing field for food access. Windsor Park is considered a food desert because they can’t get fresh produce within a certain mile radius and we are trying to make that accessible.”

One of the ways they are doing that is through the Char Meck SNAP program offering Double-Up Bucks that can be used at farmer’s markets across the city for lower income families. “There’s a stigma that a farmer’s market is for a certain demographic or it’s too expensive,” Rodriguez says. “What we have done to help with that is using double-up books, so if you go to a farm stand and have EBT, they charge you half price for everything. At the Urban Farm at Aldersgate, we have meat products, fish, and the EBT discount applies for everything.” 

Wyatt’s vision is to have city, state, and national leaders coming to Charlotte to learn how to scale programs like this that can feed a sizeable portion of the Charlotte metro area in five years. “We are doing this for everybody and it’s going to impact everyone,” says Wyatt. “We are a small organization with a huge vision. We need help; I’ve got great people who want to work at the Urban Farm at Aldersgate but I don’t have the funding I need. There are so many ways we can work together to change our relationship with food.”

For more information on Carolina Farm Trust and ways to get involved contact Zack Wyatt.

PD students worked at the Urban Farm at Aldersgate in October of 2021