What We’re Protecting
Community Garden Connections
A garden can provide fresh food. It can also create a place for people to learn together, strengthen relationships, and build greater influence over the systems that shape their lives.
For more than 15 years, Antioch University’s Community Garden Connections has brought that belief to life throughout the Keene region. Students work alongside local organizations to create and maintain garden beds, lead educational programs, and grow produce for assisted living communities, community centers, food banks, and other partners. The initiative also supports Westmoreland Farm and a garden on Antioch’s campus.
The work is grounded in a distinctive approach to education. Students do not simply study food systems or arrive with predetermined solutions. They learn to listen, understand local knowledge and priorities, and develop programs with the people who will sustain them. Along the way, they gain practical experience in community engagement, culturally responsive practice, program design, budgeting, and evaluation.
Those lessons continue well beyond Antioch. Seven alums who helped shape Community Garden Connections are now advancing food justice through schools, universities, conservation districts, affordable housing communities, land-access organizations, and public gardens. Their work ranges from helping residents guide the future of their neighborhood gardens to teaching children how to grow and prepare food, supporting beginning farmers, and researching the resilience of food-sovereignty organizations.
Their paths are different, but each reflects an understanding that meaningful change grows from relationships. Food justice is not only about what is planted or harvested. It is also about who participates, whose knowledge is valued, and whether communities have the resources and authority to shape their own futures.
Antioch’s autonomy protects our ability to sustain this kind of education: rooted in place, developed through long-term community partnerships, and designed to connect learning with consequential work in the world.
This is how we keep Antioch, Antioch: by cultivating knowledge in community, and helping it take root wherever Antiochians go.