On Service Day, Albertus Tends Its Garden

A day of working in a garden — weeding and putting in kale and asparagus and bounty that will all be given away to food pantries and nonprofits — doesn’t usually begin with an assembly of 120 people and a reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians in the New Testament, followed by a prayer. 

It does, however, if the green acre in question happens to be the garden at Albertus Magnus, a Catholic college in the Dominican tradition, where service and community are pillars of the faith of equal importance with the two others, study and prayer.

On Thursday morning, a dozen Albertus students entered the garden on the Prospect Hill / Newhallville campus while another 100, in teams of about a dozen each, spread out to nine other sites — parks, schools, other churches, and non-profits, including the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing. That took place as Albertus closed down all its formal classes for the day so students could participate in the school’s fifth annual service day.

While it’s not uncommon in New Haven for distinct groups within a school community, such as a sports team, for example, to devote a part of a day to raking, planting, weeding, picking up litter, gardening in the spirit of community service, dedicating an entire school community to that function for the better part of a day is unusual.

The day of service was part of the vision of an invigorated engagement with New Haven that Dr. Marc Camille, Albertus’s president, brought when he took the helm five years ago.

In that time about 900 pounds of produce have been produced and given to local nonprofits. The garden has also served meditational purposes on the campus, as well as being the site of research and experiential learning.

“One of the distinctive features of the college is its Dominican message that we are called to lift others up, and a day of service is part of that,” he said Thursday as he donned a blue Albertus T‑shirt and prepared to head out, visiting all the sites around the city where the students, bearing rakes, gloves, and trash bags, were headed. 

“The first year, before the first planting,” said Ross Edwards, a political science professor who was part of a group of faculty members who launched the garden, ​“we brought in Swords Into Ploughshares; they make guns into garden tools. They talked to us about how to make something life-affirming of what is not.”

As students gathered their equipment and found their site coordinators, another faculty member, Sister Anne Kilbride, said service and, importantly, a reflection on service (be it in a garden setting or interning or tutoring) is not a one-off but a kind of habit to be cultivated.

“It’s not just the service, but the meaning behind the service,” that the day is intended to foster, ​“not plugging in hours,” she said.

To that end the plan was to have the students return after lunch in mid-day and gather where they could begin to reflect on the gardening or whatever activity was engaged in. ​“The hope is they’ll become committed to service beyond college,” she added.

Another impetus for the creation of the garden — where students like junior Charisma Prince, who hails from the Bahamas, were already out wielding small trowels, weeding, and readying a first planting in 2023 of kale, asparagus, and kohlrabi — was experiential learning.

Every semester, said Edwards, a half-dozen classes or more use the garden in some learning capacity as part of their curriculum. For example, there was an accounting class, he recalled ​“and we were the clients. They had to do budget projections for us three years out. We sat down with them, we were interviewed, like clients, in a [role-playing] professional setting.”

Out in the garden Associate Professor of Psychology Bonnie Pepper, who was busy turning the soil in one of the raised beds, described how she uses the garden for the course she teaches on the relation of food to child development.

Her students come to the garden, she reported, and hands-on help to raise crops (which they’ve given over the years to the Keefe Center, a senior center in Hamden).

“We harvest the crops and talk about food insecurity’s effect on child development,” she said. 

The students then read the literature on the subject in coordination with working at a pantry or running their own food drives. Importantly, they make presentations at the end of the course on their findings and what was learned.

One student reported, she said, that the free lunch program for all, in New Haven, was instrumental in reducing kids’ sense of stigma, whereas that wasn’t the case in other area towns where only a portion of the student population qualified.

“The reflection paper on the activity,” she said, also focuses ​“on how it links to the four pillars [study, prayer, community, and service].”

Pepper admitted candidly that she’s a mediocre gardener and that she learns much from her students and brings her own family to the garden in the summer to tend the beds when students are away.

“I also use the garden in my art therapy/counseling class,” she added, ​“where there are presentations on mindfulness, on how [for example] when your hands are in the soil, you connect to that, and you listen to the sounds of nature around you.”

Pepper, who became a full-time professor at the college in 2017, teaches that course as part of the school’s graduate program; Albertus’s art therapy program is the only graduate program in that subject area in the state.

That’s the program that drew Amina Khokhar to the college. 

The day of service to her was powerful in how it brings the athletes, faculty, and staff all together. And she’s not even religious. ​“You don’t have to be [here],” she said. ​“We have the pillars, the foundation is religious but it’s not overbearing. I’m a spiritual person, but I chose the school for the art therapy.”

She wasn’t sure if her participation in the day of service would have her in the garden. ​“My only requirement,” she said, ​“is to stay with my boyfriend.”

The Biblical quotation from Philippians with which the school’s chaplain, Father Jordan Lenaghen, sent the kids out was: ​“Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.”

Sister Cathy Buchanan, one of the lead organizers of the day, added, ​“And don’t get lost or hurt or forget to take your coupons for ice cream and lunch.”

Have a favorite garden around town that you’d like this vegetable-flower correspondent to check out and write about? Send an email to [email protected] or leave a comment below with details.

And see below for other recent Independent articles about New Haven’s many gardens and gardeners.

• Farmer Savage Preps For Mushroom Season
• Kid Gardeners Grow On Clinton Ave
• Whitney Gardeners Dig In On Leek Landfall