5 Years Later: Alumni Stories
Place Corps’ first fellowship ran in 2019-2020 at Hawthorne Valley Farm, in Ghent NY. Together eight fellows spent nine months living, learning, and creating together through a year of rigorous training, independent research and hands-on work experience on the Farm and in workplaces in the region. This group of young adults developed a deep bond through their shared experience at Place Corps, and have since gone on to do many things while remaining in conversation with one another. Place Corps alumni have continued to follow the guiding interests which brought them to Place Corps in the first place, each finding their own unique path forward as they take their skills, hopes and ambitions to the next level. As young adults they are building authentic and purposeful lives centered on personal values, sustainable practices, and a commitment to serving their places through their own individual talents and abilities.
Alessia Cutugno:
Alessia received her undergraduate degree from NYU where she concentrated on cooperative economic development, land redistribution and affordable housing, and was searching for an opportunity to understand these subjects in the context of her own community in the Hudson Valley. After serving an Americorps term in Poughkeepsie and working with local nonprofits and an affordable housing coalition in the region, she was longing for a new kind of experience. Alessia came to Place Corps from a desire for something radically different, responding to Place Corps’ focus on cooperative governance and economics, social and ecological permaculture and values-driven work.
“Humans, we–people in the United States under capitalism don’t usually get a chance to just focus on being in relationship with each other, and that was what we [were at Place Corps] to do. I was thinking a lot about the roles of relationships, work, and community.”
During Place Corps Alessia found herself captivated by the practice of co-governance used to navigate the communal living experience and manage an eight-person household, and the relationships that were growing and changing through the fellowship. In addition to exploring gardening, farming, cooking, and her own relationship to the land in the Hudson Valley, she began pursuing a deep interest in human relationships, the potential they hold and the work that they require. This interest has become a path. After Place Corps Alessia decided to pursue teaching.
I think the most valuable thing I have [from Place Corps] is that embodied knowledge and those practices to know that we can repair a relationship, we can work through conflict, we can work together from very different places.
Over the past few years Alessia has trained and practiced childhood education, working in the lower school at Hawthorne Valley. In teaching she has found a calling which allows her to dedicate her time and energy to nurturing young people's relationships to one another and the world around them.
It makes a lot of sense to me that this culture is the way that it is with the schooling system that we have. I think ultimately that’s why I decided that education felt like my theory of change more than legal theory of change. Because we learn from first grade, from kindergarten, that we're in competition with each other, we have to completely sever our heads from our bodies.
She is currently developing her teaching practice through graduate studies and is currently pursuing a Masters of Education at Harvard University where she is assembling a holistic curriculum for herself, ranging from early childhood psychology to ethnic studies. Her hope is to bring her belief in emotionally and socially grounded, culturally informed, community-oriented education into practice in a small learning environment in the Hudson Valley.
That was the biggest thing to have an embodied experience of trust with other humans and to know what can happen when people are committed to working together and working at the speed of relationship, and being in deep relationship, and when that is the work itself. Now in my teaching practice, that’s all I care about. I taught first grade last year, and I was like, I don’t care what knowledge in the standard school definition you gain, I just want you all to know that you can work together and the most important thing is that we take care of each other.’
Lila Rimalovski:
Lila received her undergraduate degree from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she concentrated on ecology, farming and food systems. During college Lila began exploring an interest in communal living and intentional communities with a focus on sustainability and agriculture, spending summers living and working on cooperatives farms of this nature. She was searching for a way to continue pursuing these interests while transitioning into work and adulthood. Place Corps answered the call in more ways than one.
I was living in Brooklyn and had been studying ecology, farming and food systems, and really wanted to [go more deeply] into that and work in communities in a rural place. I didn’t feel ready to get a job on a farm team, and so Place Corps was a beautiful transition for me. There were a lot of questions that I had as I was leaving college that I didn’t feel like my school was able to fully answer for me. I felt ready to continue learning, while also beginning working at the same time.
During her fellowship, Lila focused her research on cooperative leadership design and social permaculture. She sought to understand how the ways in which resources are shared within natural systems such as forests or regenerative farms can be used as a model for cooperation and creation at a human level. Also during her fellowship, Lila began to investigate her own relationship to the places she has lived and her heritage as a part of the jewish diaspora and the shared journey across centuries, nations and continents.
I began to turn to my own roots and that has since shaped a lot of my life since the fellowship. So many seeds were planted while I was [at Place Corps]....I feel a lot of love and connection and commitment to the northeast, contextualized within an expansive interrogation of my relationship to places that make me who I am. My relationship to place is now forever contextualized in the lens of diaspora which I think is more specific to my [jewish] lineage and my family story.
In the years following Place Corps, Lila's intertwined interests have continued to guide her life; she worked in regenerative agriculture on farms in the Hudson Valley and beyond before making her way to California where her own early roots are. During her time in California she has explored communal living projects throughout the state, invested herself in the Jewish spiritual community in the region, and continues to explore regenerative farming and ecological practices while seeking communal living experiences.
I always need work that is intellectual, social and manual. I need those three in order for my life to feel grounded. No matter where I am in my life I’m always weaving the three together.
Her next step is graduate school where she intends to bring together the guiding threads of her adult life: spiritual practice, ecological permaculture, and environmental science. Meanwhile, the relationships she developed at Place Corps remain central to her life and she expects they will continue to give and grow in years to come and inform her way forward.
Place Corps set the foundation for so much that is in active practice in my life right now. The relationships that I built during that time are still extremely important to me and active. The experience that I had at Place corps will forever be something I will not be able to truly explain to anybody else because of how unique of an experience it was, but undoubtedly it [has] shaped so much of who I am now.
Sophia Hampton:
Sophia received her undergraduate degree from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she concentrated on food systems, animals and the environment. During her college years she worked on regenerative farms in the Hudson Valley, interned with Stone Barns and worked in upscale restaurants in New York City, circumnavigating her fields of interest through real-world experience. After graduating she sought an opportunity to think critically about what she had learned within and without academia, and hone in her own values before pursuing next-steps in the professional world. Place Corps’ emphasis on independent research contextualized within Hawthorne Valley’s biodynamic farm offered her the opportunity she needed to ground herself intellectually, personally, and professionally.
There are no programs that really support people coming out of college, to really think about what it is to be, to really hone in on their values, have a year to reflect on being indoctrinated, not in a bad way, but in all of these different [academic] lenses. How do they want to form it going out into the world? [Place Corps] made me a better human and it made me more able to be grounded in who I am and move forward.
During her fellowship, Sophia focused on sustainability and land stewardship, and the values and intentions underlying these interests, and facilitated tree-planting on a portion of Hawthorne Valley’s acreage. The relationships Sophia formed during the fellowship have become foundational in her life, and have been guiding voices on her path post-fellowship.
We’re all best friends and want to do something similar in the future, have land together, or some sort of project because of the trust that we were able to build with each other through [Place Corps].
Following Place Corps Sophia spent a year working in regenerative farming in the Hudson Valley. She observed the critical need for legislation to enable regenerative agriculture on a larger scale, properly house farmers, and support sustainable and respectful land use. In light of these observations, Sophia decided to pursue a dual degree in environmental studies and law as a two-fold path to addressing these issues on a policy level.
I got really interested in land access and land tenure and property while I was at Place Corps. I started applying to grad school because I [felt] ready to take everything that I’d been simmering with and keep moving towards something.
She has since been immersed in graduate studies through a dual degree program between Vermont Law School and Yale School of the Environment. Her graduate research is focused on interrogating the field of agroforestry in the northeast in relation to climate change, private land ownership and social change. During her time at Yale she has been working at the Community Economic Development Clinic and the Chester Agricultural Center around the issue of farmer housing. She intends to return to the Hudson Valley after graduating to contribute to her home region's transition to more just and sustainable, economic, food and agriculture systems.