Elon University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

The Elon Year of Service Fellows program is a partnership between Elon University and several organizations in Alamance County, which offers recent Elon graduates the opportunity to engage in one year of meaningful service work to improve the health, education and economic development of residents in Alamance County.

One option (with six position openings) is placement with one of the following organizations: Alamance Achieves, Alamance County Health Department, Cone Health/Alamance Regional Medical Center (ARMC), Economic Development Department - City of Burlington, Harwood Institute, Impact Alamance. These Fellows are considered Elon University non-exempt paid employees and are given a contract for the one-year fellowship. In addition, they are entitled to all of the benefits, including the option to participate in health insurance, available to a full-time Elon University employee. Throughout their year of service, the Fellows receive strong mentorship from Elon faculty mentors and their site supervisors, as well as access to professional development opportunities. Participants are also eligible for an incentive stipend at the completion of the one year program if they attend graduate school in North Carolina or accept employment in Alamance or a surrounding county.

Another option is teaching within the Alamance Burlington School System (ABSS). The Teach for Alamance Service Fellows Program is a 24-month, post-graduation program connecting Elon graduates with Alamance Burlington Schools to be hired as a teacher (under the residency license) who helps to support middle and secondary education needs in the county. This program is targeted toward undergraduate students who do not have their teaching license but aspire to teach in middle or high schools K-12. Candidates must have completed 24 credit hours in the discipline they wish to teach. Eligibility is dependent upon being hired under the Residency License Program with ABSS. During the fellowship, Elon University provides Teach for Alamance Service Fellows with financial support to earn their teacher licensure. Additionally, these Service Fellows receive a small stipend each year. Annual salary and benefits are handled through ABSS.

https://www.elon.edu/u/spdc/service-year/elon-year-of-service-graduate-fellows-program/

The Loy Farm at the Elon Environmental Center has a formal multi-year partnership with the Asheville-based Utopian Seed Project. Loy Farm is one of Utopian Seed Project's 'trial partners,' which are farms throughout the Southeast growing and providing feedback on crops to ascertain useful traits, such as flavor, hardiness, vigor, flood resistance and other interesting traits. Loy Farm is conducting variety trials of tropical crops to determine their viability in the changing climate of the Southeast. Utopian Seed Project provides Loy Farm with plant material in exchange for feedback on variety trials that informs their mission and goals.
Various Environmental Studies courses, including ENS 3140 – Agroecology and ENS 3110 – Sustainable Food Production, are involved in the variety trials as a form of active learning. Students learn about the impacts to the agricultural system due to climate change and then apply that knowledge by helping start different tropical crops in the greenhouse, planting them out in the spring and helping maintain and monitor crops throughout the summer and fall. Students, faculty and Elon Dining staff help assess the crops' viability in a production sense but also from the supply-side. Through recipe development, taste testing and integration into the dining halls, students are exposed to understanding the challenges of the supply and demand side of investigating new crops that will provide Southeastern farmers resiliency tactics in the face of a changing climate. Feedback is provided to Utopian Seed Project through course project deliverables and direct feedback from Environmental Studies faculty and the Loy Farm Manager.
Underrepresented groups and/or vulnerable populations are forefronted in the work of the Utopian Seed Project. For example, for the Taro project, Carter Family Farms (a Black owned farm that specializes in crops of the African Diaspora in southwest Virginia) is one of the primary stakeholders and is providing agronomic guidance on taro varieties to grow. They have recorded informational videos about the crops and are receiving plant material from the Utopian Seed Project.
There is not a website URL for this partnership.

The Loy Farm at the Elon Environmental Center has and will continue to partner with Alamance Community College’s (ACC) Feeding Hungry Minds Club to provide both cooked and fresh produce to students in need attending ACC. The club is student run with staff and faculty support. The club comes to the farm once or twice a week to participate in the harvest and be engaged with food from seed to plate, building an appreciation and knowledge for fresh, local food. The Loy Farm Manager and interns working at the farm help assist the harvest, post-harvest handling and weighing the produce alongside ACC students and staff. The produce is then taken back to ACC’s campus to be distributed or processed into frozen, ready to eat meals. The partnership helps ensure all food grown at the farm, particularly in the summer when Elon Dining is not operating all locations, is utilized by the local community and not wasted. It also helps build relationships between Elon students and students from different age, class and social backgrounds that are visiting from ACC. Overall, it has been a huge success (started summer 2023) and will continue moving forward.
This partnership provides local, fresh produce to low-income students and their families, as well as works with them directly to harvest this food to build reciprocity and a sense of ownership. The club decides what food they want to share with their community and how much they need each week. The club shares information on what produce items are preferred for the culture of their clients and that leads to changes in the farm production planning at Loy Farm.
There is not a website URL for this partnership.