
The Loomis Chaffee Class of 2022 connected with community members and took part in local service and stewardship projects during Freshman Service Day on Wednesday, October 11.
Harkening back to the school’s farming roots, the Loomis Chaffee sustainable agriculture program teaches students about the importance of local, sustainable food systems. The program reconnects students with a sense of place and enables them to get their hands dirty while working the land, planting and harvesting crops, and helping to tend the school’s flock of laying hens.
Each year students help to prepare the campus’s community gardens, where faculty and staff maintain plots throughout the growing season, and students sow, maintain, and harvest the school’s nearly one-acre agricultural plot, where we grow a variety of vegetables and fruit. Produce from the agricultural plot is used in the school dining hall and donated to a local food bank. Students also enjoy using the harvested produce in recipes, making grape jelly from our Concord grapes, and concocting green smoothies, for instance. The agriculture program also partners with community service groups to teach local young children about cultivating vegetables and the important of growing healthy foods. Students can choose to participate in the agriculture program as an extracurricular interest or as an afternoon activity in place of a sport in the fall or spring.
Beginning in the fall of 2015, all sophomores began to learn about the importance of growing local, healthy food, thus benefitting their own health and the world at large, as a module in their Fitness and Wellness classes. Through agriculture, students will learn about personal wellness on both a physical and mental level and will have the opportunity to reconnect with the rich landscape and agricultural history of Loomis in a way that is healthy for both them and the earth.
The Loomis Chaffee Class of 2022 connected with community members and took part in local service and stewardship projects during Freshman Service Day on Wednesday, October 11.
Sustainable Agriculture Program students fired up the school's apple cider press for the first time this fall on Friday, October 5, and pressed more than 18 quarts of cider.
Loomis Chaffee Summer Program faculty welcomed more than 120 student participants to the Island on June 15, for a five-week enrichment program of fun, learning, and self-discovery.
Forty-one members of the Loomis Chaffee Class of 2018 were awarded Global & Environmental Studies Certificates at a ceremony in Founders Chapel on Friday, May 11.
Loomis Chaffee celebrated Earth Week April 9–15 with a program of activities organized by students in the school's Environmental Sustainability programs with support from the Alvord Center for Global & Environmental Studies.
Gratia Lee attended graduate school at Antioch University of New England where she earned a masters of science in environmental education. After working on an organic farm in northern Michigan, she realized that growing food is what she wanted to do. She has worked on farms in both Michigan and Connecticut. Gratia manages all the gardens and the chickens here on campus.