Alumni

2003 – 2004

Lainie Ori August 03 – June 04

Lainie spent two years as an Americorps volunteer after college. She first worked in Asheville, NC at Children First before moving to Knoxville. Beardsley Farm and Knoxville will always hold a special place in her heart, though, because she met her husband at the Knoxville Food Co-op during the weekly compost pick-ups. Lainie, her husband, and their two cats now live in Des Moines, Iowa where she is a medical student at Des Moines University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. She will be graduating in 2011 and hopes to be a primary care doctor.

Lena Warren August 03 – June 04

Lena Warren joined the AmeriCorps “UrbanAg” team in 2003 after completing a Masters degree in Plant and Soil Science at the University of Tennessee. She had intended to come to the program to reinvigorate a passion for helping people grow food; but instead, she discovered that her passion had more to do with helping people in general, and less on the quality of their produce. In 2005, Lena, with her husband Lee and her cat Søren, packed up and moved to Philadelphia where Lena completed a Masters of Divinity degree at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. After that, she moved to Connecticut to work as a pastoral intern at Salem Lutheran Church in Bridgeport. While in Bridgeport, community gardening captured her attention again and she worked with the Bridgeport Community Land Trust to reinvigorate a garden in the summer of 2009. Lena is currently back in school working on a Masters of Sacred Theology at Yale Divinity School which she anticipates completing in May 2010; after which she is hoping to be ordained as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. No doubt, her experience at the farm has deeply shaped her understanding of the divine as well as how she engages community development and her task as a community leader.

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