Adam is the Education Manager at Garden for the Environment, a San Francisco nonprofit that focuses on community education in sustainable landscaping and composting. As the sole full-time employee, Adam not only has his hands literally in the soil, he also can find himself scheduling seminars and coordinating community workshops, running the social media presence, and even leading school field trips. When not at the nonprofit, Adam can be found acting in commercials, films, and television shows in the Bay Area!
Transcript
I'm Adam Long and I'm the education manager at Garden for the Environment. A small non-profit in San Francisco and I also work as an actor on the side. So we're a non-profit in San Francisco that has a small garden in the Inner Sunset neighborhood. It's been around for 28 years. We were founded to raise awareness about drought tolerant plants and growing a beautiful garden that doesn't use a lot of water. Doesn't use toxic chemicals that can get into these water system and we've since expanded and have veggie beds, a greenhouse, toolshed, beehives, composting system. We host about 35 field trips a year from local school groups. Have adult workshops on Saturday mornings and a bunch of other opportunities to volunteer and learn about gardening. So I'm in the garden with my hands in the dirt, I'm leading field trips with kids. I do more coordination of the workshop program, I don't teach workshops so much myself but coordinate our teachers who come in and are experts in particular topics. I do social media, I work with our fiscal sponsor to make sure everything is running smoothly. A little bit in the way of fundraising and reporting to our funders. Giving people tours. Planning our schedule, everything. So, yeah, for our school field trips we have a program with the Public Utilities Commission. They do the water and sewer for the city of San Francisco and they have given us funding to bring in 32 field trips per year free of charge to the schools. So they come in at about 10 a.m., we introduce our staff, kind of talk with them about what the garden is all about, water conservation and sustainable gardening. Take them on a tour, they see the whole garden end to end, get to stop at all the different major points. Quick snack break and then we do hands on activities with them. So the kids are actually like working with the compost or planting plants or pruning shrubs, or pulling weeds, spreading mulch, doing any kind of little task we have in the garden. We have a big picnic lunch together, kind of wrap up and reflect, see what they thought, what they learned and that's it. Sort of a three hour experience.
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