When I type the last word of this blog post and close my laptop, I will no longer be a Business Development Intern for Green City Growers. The past three and a half months have offered me amazing insight into the local urban farming movement and for that I am incredibly grateful. I came into my interview knowing that this was a cause that I was interested in and being a part of the movement has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Our food system is broken and GCG helps home and business owners do their part in remedying it. That’s something I can get behind.
My interest in the past has always been in the agricultural side of things and when I took this position in the office I wasn’t sure what to expect. As a farmer I’m not used to sitting at a desk, typing emails, and making phone calls but I am so glad that I took this position. Nothing builds your interpersonal skills quite like cold calling big shots at architectural firms and nothing gets you comfortable cold calling big shots at architectural firms quite like working your way through 50 contacts on your second day. I was taken out of my comfort zone and got a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes of a successful company. It’s a lot of research, hard work, and dead ends but when it pays off (and it does!) it is so worth it.
One of my bigger projects over the course of the internship was a marketing campaign about our Garden Education Program. This was something I was really excited to take on; not only is it something I’m super passionate about but it was also an opportunity to learn more about marketing (something I have zero experience in). I learned how to create buyer personas to figure out who I should be marketing to and what kind of language I should use in my outreach. I was also given the assignment to write a case study on the benefits of garden programming in schools (of which there are numerous) and it is now being sent out to potential clients as a part of our official marketing literature and is on our website. I think that’s pretty cool.
Green City Growers offers one of the most important and unique services to the city of Boston. The amount of work they have done over the past few years and the scope of their reach is incredible and humbling to think about. This is a company that I’ve been following for quite some time and I’m so glad that I got the opportunity to come in twice a week for the past few months and contribute to their work. It’s a great group of people doing exceptional work in the city that I love. I’m going to miss it here.
