Community: Teen Internship

At the Farm, we have over 17 years of experience working with students of all ages, fostering connection, resilience, and wellness through hands-on farming experiences. From summer camps to after school programming, to field trips, to animal rentals, we’ve partnered with local schools to engage youth in meaningful ways—connecting them to the land, animals, and the food we grow.

This Spring, we plan to launch the Teen Farming Internship to support middle and high schoolers. This program will be small and flexible, so we're best able to meet the individualized needs of students. We will co-create this internship with the students based on their interests, capacities, and availabilities. For example, students unenrolled from school can come from one to five days per week; other enrolled students can come for as little as two hours per week.

This work-based learning internship offers an outside-of-school opportunity to build capacities around farming skills, such as milking cows and goats, caring for chickens and bunnies, fencing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, carpentry, etc., and soft skills, such as communication, adaptability, resilience, time management, and problem-solving. In this program, we will help teens take on responsibility, build confidence, gain an expanded perspective of the world and a deeper understanding of their ability to contribute to it.

This program is for anyone: teens who are struggling with truancy, anxiety, depression (or other mental health challenges), kids who want to learn outside of the classroom, kids looking for more outdoor experiences, etc. We’ve seen firsthand how time spent on the farm helps youth re-engage with the world around them. 

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We are in the process of working with local school districts, so our students can earn academic credit for their time on the Farm.