Standing outside the silent auction tent at the 16th annual Duveneck Dinner I was taken aback by a vision.  This vision was of Frank and Josephine treacherously climbing the mountainside and looking down on the canyon and I wondered what they saw all those years ago. Could they see then the potential this land had to bring communities together and collaboratively work towards a just and sustainable future? Surrounded by the diverse group of staff, board members, donors and honorees, I stopped and thought about how this farm has changed so much since the Duvenecks came here but how their legacy still continues to inspire so many.

 
When I came to Hidden Villa four years ago I was searching for a place to find myself.  I grew up in a very conservative Midwest town in Indiana, a place where I never truly felt comfortable in my own skin and was left searching for confidence.  It’s funny  but reassuring that I ended up in a place that teaches kids to have that confidence in themselves; something that I had never been able to do though I understood all too well the challenges of loving yourself as an individual.

Guest post by Tenaya Schnare

I am standing with a group of eight second-graders on a trail at the edge of the farm. We can still hear the goats bleating into the crisp fall air, but this spot on the path marks the transition from farm—the sound of tractors heaving bucket loads of animal bedding, chickens strutting and scratching in their yard, the earthy, sweet smell of goats—into the wilderness. I crouch down at eye level and in a soft, almost sing-song voice tell the children that we are going to do something called a caterpillar walk.

Guest post by Daniel Chmielewski

"Connected, connected, everything’s connected.” One of the well known songs at Hidden Villa, it strikes a central point in the ecological imperative of our times: "to recognize and understand that humans are intrinsically related to all life and the systems which support it (water, air, soil).” Once “unconnected” we risk alienation from the natural flow of life processes and education, whether through formal or informal experience, is a bridge into being connected. My internship at Hidden Villa has been rich in education and in my eyes, most importantly, exposure. In my second year here, seasonal changes of weather, edible and ornamental agriculture, animal husbandry, environmental education, and sustainability have deeply connected me to the land and to the future. 

The interns have been talking a lot about collectives and cooperative living recently. On Monday, November 14th, we went to The Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley where a member, who has been there for over twenty-five years, talked to us about the pros and cons of working in a collective. We sat on benches in a horseshoe shape and listened about how it took years of consensus decision making to decide on credit card machines or raises, all the while posing questions about how they deal with conflict resolution when there is no “boss”, about profit sharing, and how to hire someone new when every one of their thirty members has to give the okay. It was all very interesting and exciting, if not a little daunting. It is a radical idea in today’s society that everyone gets equal pay and equal say in a business no matter how long they have been working there.

A lot of our time here at Hidden Villa is dedicated to food, one can infer this simply by reading these blog posts.  We spend our time talking theory, everything from organics to nutrition, and sometimes it can get out there with wild sodas bubbling in the corner and meat-slab looking kombucha mothers drying in the courtyard. But things aren’t always up in the ether. What it comes down to is that we love food. Real food. (Guest post by Liz, our Public Programs Intern)

Hello from Hidden Villa’s Garden Outreach program! My name is Carey Fritz. As Garden Outreach Teacher Intern, I spend 2 days a week teaching off-site at Taft Community School and at John Gill Elementary. I am excited to share how I have been involved in our partnership schools in Redwood City in this guest post.

After graduation, I headed down the well-trodden path of a 9-to-5 office job, and under fluorescent lights I whistled while I worked inside a world of spreadsheet cells and cyberspace.  I was more than lucky enough to have access to a grocery store with copious amounts of fresh organic produce and live where a farmer’s market took place almost every day of the week. Despite the knowledge gained about the food system through my education, my work and lifestyle kept me very removed from the production of my food.  It’s the same systematic distancing that keeps most of us from seeing the connection between our strawberry milkshakes and manure.

Last week I attended an event at Stanford University, Food Summit 2, aimed at bringing together "community activists, university scholars and others who are coming together to discuss strategies to address and solve the most challenging and important food-related crisis in our communities, our country, and around the world." Among the many panels and conversations was the implicit agreement that there is a food crisis happening and that any solutions will need to be interdisciplinary. 

(A brief plug: the third panel on Hospital Food was most excellent, and Marydale DeBor and Frank Turner deserve an extra round of applause for their candor and hard work.  They've taken the daunting task of reinventing the way hospitals feed people and created simple and elegant solutions.)

One of the earliest audience questions brought up an important, and perhaps missing, component from the day - Who is training young people to farm?  A good question, considering that at the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 40% of farmers in the US at 55 years of age, or older.

If you haven’t ever thought about it (and until recently, I hadn’t) the word “intern” has an interesting etymology. From the French interner or “to confine within set limits,” the word has use as both a noun and transitive verb. However, the definition can very greatly depending on its grammatical use.

Intern (in-turn) -  vb
1. ( tr ) to detain or confine (foreign or enemy citizens, ships, etc), especially during wartime - noun
2. chiefly  ( US ) a student or recent graduate receiving practical training in a working environment

(Source: Collins World English Dictionary)

But in common parlance, especially among twenty-somethings an internships is often known as “the modern equivalent of slavery, except nowadays, people are actually willing.”

So where do we fall? Confinement, like on an enemy ship? Or practical training?

Mondays have a bad reputation, definitely the underdog of the week. It is the day when you see a pile on the desk, when messages are checked and coffee gets spilled, the day blamed for the end of weekends and vacations. Mondays have even become the most likely day for a break up. But at Hidden Villa? Not quite the same, especially for interns...

This week marked the beginning of a flood.  And while it is unusual for it to rain in Los Altos in the summer, it is perfectly normal to drown in a tide of basil, cucumbers, and summer squash.  This is second only to the yearly drenching in tomatoes and eggplant.  Eating so much highly anticipated produce has my stomach and brain thinking about farms and how much I enjoy knowing farmers (a brief explanation:  most of my actions, professional or otherwise, are motivated by my stomach.  Freudian interpretations aside, I look forward to each meal and snack more than all holidays, vacations, and birthdays.  Unless they also happen to involve meals). 

Considering farmers I know brings up several former interns at Hidden Villa who have all dove into the world of farming headfirst, and to excellent results.  Some highlights:

Being the first post, I’ll start with introductions….I am a former Hidden Villa intern now in the year-round position of Food Education Liaison and Intern Coordinator.  Coordinating the intern program means, for the most part, answering questions –  questions from interns, from other staff, and from many curious and motivated people who feel like Hidden Villa would be a great place to intern (first answer: it is).  So let me take this opportunity/soapbox to toss a few things out there.

FAQ’s about the Intern Program at Hidden Villa:

This look great! What internships are there?

We offer ten residential, year-long internships in the following departments: Community Programs (Public Programs) (one position), Animal Husbandry (one position), Agriculture (two positions, plus a more advance Journeyman’s apprenticeship), and Environmental Education (six positions).