Alumnae Work To Preserve Washington State Farms
 Two '07 graduates of Antioch University Seattle's Environment and Community program are part of an innovative team that is breaking new ground through their work at PCC Farmland Trust—relying on the creative and collaborative skills that they honed at AUS to keep farms in the hands of Washington farmers. Contributing to this kind of pioneering effort is what Kristin Vogel and Melissa Campbell expected to do after earning their master's degrees through the university's Center for Creative Change. Now, they contribute every day to realizing the trust's mission of saving farms.
PCC Natural Markets founded the Farmland Trust in 1999 as a separate, nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving threatened farmland and moving it into organic production. It is believed to be the only land trust in the U.S. dedicated to organic farmland preservation and actually takes a step beyond most land trusts by working to place farmers on the property, actively producing food for the local community.
The trust began when Nash Huber, a local Washington farmer, approached PCC with an urgent request for help in saving a local farm from becoming a housing development. That farm was the Delta Farm in Sequim which Nash now leases. The trust secures farm land by purchasing organic agricultural conservation easements which restrict development and guarantee organic production in perpetuity.
Vogel works as communications project manager while Campbell serves as a stewardship and land associate making contact with farmers and monitoring properties to ensure compliance with conservation easements and other requirements. For her AUS change project, Campbell worked with a classmate on a land acquisition project with the Hmong community. In actuality, the project morphed into a disaster and flood relief project when the Snoqualmie River jumped its banks destroying crops, bulbs and farm equipment. Today, she taps into the same flexibility of spirit in her work at the trust that was needed during her change project.
Campbell did her undergraduate work at Ohio State University where she obtained "a pretty heavy science background." She credits the AUS Center for Creative Change with fostering an ability to look at a situation systemically with an eye toward community development and participatory processes. "I also learned not to be a fixer. This is especially important when you are working with diverse cultures," she said.
Vogel said her coursework at AUS emphasized social change and how to facilitate it using experiential models, the process of making meaning from direct experience. When she started at the trust more than three years ago there were only three employees. She found herself living out the experiential model in a job that required her to be mentally nimble, flexible and creative every day. Vogel said she is excited to be entering a time when she will have the opportunity to do more education and outreach in her work.
The trust, which is primarily supported by individual and community donations, finds its operation surging as more and more people are becoming informed about the downside of industrial farming and eating thanks to the popularity of books such as The Omnivore's Dilemma by author and activist Michael Pollan. Pollan suggests that what we eat affects not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. In addition, the growing awareness of organic food grown in sustainable ways is driving the trust itself to grow rapidly.
"How do we build this organization so it makes sense in the long-term and continues to be a viable, relevant organization? At Antioch we learned to be intentional about that process, to have a conscious understanding of ways to build something that will last," reflected Campbell.
For more information about what the PCC Farmland Trust has achieved and to read about the farms that have been preserved go to www.pccfarmlandtrust.org.
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