Meet Rachel Winner, a College Farm and Dickinson alumni with the class of 2009, majoring in international studies with a Spanish minor! Learn where life has taken Rachel since her time on the farm…

 

“I had the great honor of being present for the initial years creating the farm. The first meeting after I was hired for the student garden (originally about 1/3 of an acre near the football field), Jenn (Halpin, Director of the College Farm) gathered us all together and told us we were now farmers and would be building the farm from the ground up. I remember building the big greenhouses and using an old canoe we found in the barn to haul compost from the Caf before a road existed. We would distract ourselves from the bitter cold while mending fences by quizzing each other on foreign policy for our International Studies oral exam. We’d talk about what we wanted adulthood to look like and how we were going to fix all the world’s problems as we harvested rows of tomatoes. The farm became an ever-expanding hub for creative engagement with campus – we started experimenting with salsa and hummus to sell at the Underground and would host classes from the environmental science and art departments with increasing regularity. I know the farm is a keystone of the school’s identity at this point, but these were the prototyping years. I don’t know that we could see all that was coming, especially when we had just a couple of years to invest there; but we deeply believed in Jenn and Matt’s (Steiman, Assistant Director of the College Farm & Energy Projects Manager) vision. I still think back on the speech I got to give at the local food dinner my senior year, and I would say the same thing now that I did then. The farm is special. It was as much of an educational space for me as the classrooms of Dana and Denny, perhaps even more so. I remember being given tremendous responsibility with the tools and the trust to figure it out. I remember laughing a lot, sweating and swearing, and feeling truly at home there.

Dickinson College, and the farm specifically, shaped my relationship with the land and my food and absolutely shaped my life path. For years I had wanted to go into the Peace Corps after graduation, but a senior seminar on imperialism shifted my plans (thanks Ed Webb) and I wound up choosing to learn more and work domestically first and then move abroad with a local initiative. I worked on an urban demonstration farm in Knoxville, TN with AmeriCorps for the year after college and then moved to Mexico. There, I worked with a small nonprofit that focused on indigenous land management techniques and educated students visiting from the US about trade policy and its impact on emigration. It was a beautiful confluence of my academic interests and my farm work and though I enjoyed the work, I wound up returning to the US after about a year.

I spent the next two years back home in Asheville, NC, where I worked for an organization called Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP) and started a writing business. For someone interested in nonprofit work, HIP was a fantastic place to learn. I got an insider perspective of local grassroots organizations and both national and regional funding organizations and best practices at all levels. But I wasn’t yet mature or grounded enough to have this environment be a place in which I’d thrive. I also hated running my own business. I just wanted to write, and realized that in whatever business, the service is just a fraction of the work when factored with the marketing, client relations, administration, accounting, and so many other tasks. Plus, I was getting itchy feet again and wanted to see more of the world. I found an opportunity to live and intern in the Middle East for a few months. I was going to work at an organization that was building a platform for religious leaders of different faiths uniting around climate activism. Yet another motif from Dickinson College, where my favorite class (Professor Staub’s New American Religious Diversity) had centered on an ethnographic research project that my group dedicated to interfaith organizations. 

I left that role to pursue a master’s in Global Community Development Studies. I was living in Jerusalem – one foot in Israel and one foot in Palestine – though for a brief time I lived in Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank, while I interned with CARE International. Four months turned into 7 years as I realized I had so much more to learn. I dedicated myself to and became conversationally fluent in both Arabic & Hebrew because I wanted to communicate with everyone around me. Everything I studied in foreign policy classes and history and religion classes at Dickinson was ever so much more alive – and complicated – when living amongst the people, shopping at the markets, making my way through checkpoints and different zones designated by the Oslo Accords, occasionally getting caught in tear gas and terrifying moments of violence, banking, taking buses, having tea with mothers, taking classes inside classrooms and out in the streets.

The academic lessons weren’t the only Dickinson connection. The year I graduated (2009), my captain of the Ultimate Frisbee team told me about this organization called Ultimate Peace over in the Middle East. They brought youth together through Ultimate – a sport that has both self-officiation and spirit of the game as a mechanism of sportsmanship and good character – built into the rules. I started volunteering and eventually got a job with them. It’s what grounded me in my life there. I coached in Palestinian and Jewish communities year-round; I was a summer camp director and ran annual tours, but my favorite aspect was being with the teens in the Leaders-in-Training program that I directed. I loved getting up for work every day, despite (and sometimes because of) the deeply layered challenges. The work was complemented by another role I loved with an organization called PATHWAYS Institute for Negotiation Education. There, I managed fellowships and facilitated for English teachers and their students around Harvard’s Program on Negotiation content.

In 2020, the pandemic shut everything down and I made the hard decision to return home to North Carolina to help my parents with their business. When they retired, I traveled a bit and got to fulfill a longtime dream of hiking the Camino de Santiago and playing at the Ultimate World Championships in Ireland; that trip also allowed me to fine-tune my Arabic language skills by volunteering with refugees in Greece. I’m no longer working with my parents and have been walking the long and challenging road of returning to a career in international development (any leads welcome!). While job-hunting, I’ve been working as a Spanish interpreter with an immigration lawyer and with the local schools, reviewing government grants and working for political campaigns, volunteering, hanging with my farm animals, and captaining a local women’s Ultimate Frisbee team in the Asheville area. One final farm connection is that last year I visited my dear friend and fellow Dickinson farmer, Ben Sedlins (2009), and his family in the DC area. Ben is still active in the agriculture world and now manages the vineyards for Walsh Family Wine. I got to tour the farm and sip some fantastic rosé, which inspired me to explore work in this sector again while I pursue a return to my career. I’ve been enjoying selling our own lovely rosé (among other wines) for a local NC vineyard called Marked Tree since I returned from that trip.

I am profoundly grateful to the professors I had at Dickinson, who helped me find my passion and taught me how to think; to the Ultimate Frisbee team, who gave me a sport that provided me community, travel, and work around the world; and to Matt and Jenn who taught us how to be in partnership with the land, and sparked a creativity not just for me, but for generations of students, as to all of the ways that such a relationship could manifest.”

 

The farm team could not be more proud of Rachel and excited to hear what she does next! Stay tuned for more alumni spotlights coming soon 🙂