Sweet Serenade Posted on September 11, 2018 by wpengine Share this post My time at Grounded strategies happened purely by chance and man was it a stroke of good luck. I heard of Grounded from a Facebook advertisement after I had recently expressed interest in wanting to work on community gardens. The event was called a “Land Lab”: in which they go to different neighborhoods they want to invest in and give neighbors and stakeholders details of all the programs/resources they have to offer. After an hour of questions, jokes and heartfelt brainstorming for what we wanted to see inside the Homewood, Larimer, East Hills area their coordinator suggested I apply for their summer seasonal position as she thought I’d be a great fit. She was right! Grounded has shown me a medley of things in the time I’ve been here. I’ve gotten a great deal of experience in; planning/implementation of a garden, the different types of gardens and what uses each serves to a community and ecosystem, how to engage community members to initiate their own projects to collaborate on. As well as, being able to go into different neighborhoods and engage youth to create tangible change in their neighborhoods and promote entrepreneurship. Some of my favorite times involved talking to high school students about their “Jr. Ambassador Program” that allows youth 14+ to earn a stipend for maintaining dilapidated lots in their neighborhoods. After, we would talk about they could grow specific types of veggies and herbs to sell to local markets or Juicing businesses in their neighborhoods or how they could transform a space into a community event lot where they could showcase talents and have small markets to display their clothing lines/crafts. Though short, my time at Grounded has been a sweet serenade of on the fly thinking, frustrated grunts because a piece won’t fit and full laughter at ourselves as we struggle to figure out how to put a product together as a group. The Grounded team is filled with folks who have genuine care and empathy towards the people they work with and I’ll definitely can’t wait to come back.