There are multiple opportunities to be involved in the garden, including cob shed building, pollinator related activities, and caring for the permaculture portion of the garden that features berries, fruit trees, and other edibles and medicinals. Join Newberg Center in making the garden a beautiful community space and active learning lab, that will also be a food producing garden, providing wildlife and pollinator habitat, and serving as a tangible example of sustainable food systems.

Contact Moonrose at��moonrose.doherty@pcc.edu���ǰ���971-722-8610

Position Summary

PCC Newberg Center is looking for an enthusiastic individual to join our team in a temporary part-time capacity, and play a crucial role in the development of the Center’s new learning garden. Under direction of the Newberg Center Director, the Coordinator will play a leadership role in implementing the first phase of the Learning Garden master plan and completing construction of the garden’s cob shed. The Learning Garden Coordinator will also be responsible for recruiting and guiding volunteers during the development stages, and build connections with faculty and staff to integrate the garden into classroom activities, programs, and events at Newberg.

Essential Functions (to include, but not limited to):

• Lead implementation of the Learning Garden master plan in conjunction with college and community stakeholders.
• Coordinate completion of the learning garden cob shed
• Complete day-to- day Learning Garden activities such as digging, planting, weeding, harvesting, etc.
• Arrange work with outside vendors as necessary.
• Coordinate deliveries, donations and purchases for the Learning Garden.
• Recruit and oversee volunteers and coordinate work parties.
• Design and create outreach materials to market and publicize Learning Garden events and initiatives.
• Maintain garden website and online presence.
• Work with faculty and staff to integrate the garden into classroom activities, programs, and events at Newberg.
• Maintain necessary paperwork and adhere to all college policies & procedures.
• Other duties as assigned.

Position Requirements:

• Hands-on experience growing food in medium-scale garden environment.
• Experience in project or program coordination.
• Strong organizational skills, both in the office and outside.
• Experience with social media, e.g. website and Facebook and basic computer skills.
• Ability to serve independently and collaboratively with diverse groups of people.
• Ability and willingness to communicate in a positive, professional manner with a wide range of stakeholders, including students, staff, and college organizations.
• Ability to serve in all types of weather, ability to dig, kneel, and lift 50 pounds.
• A cooperative manner and the ability to serve as part of a diverse team.
• 18 years of age or older, at beginning of service term.
• U.S. citizen, national or lawful permanent resident.
• Possession of a high school diploma or equivalent.
• Must successfully pass a criminal background check.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Cob or natural building experience preferred (training available)
• An Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree is preferred
• Background in sustainability, food systems, environmental studies or related field
• Experience developing a garden from inception
• Experience working at a garden in a school environment

Position Details:

• The pay rate is $15/hr.
• This is a part-time, casual position with a maximum workload of 599 hours through June, 2017.
• Hours will vary and some evening/weekend work may be required.

To Apply:

Please��send your resume and a cover letter briefly explaining your interest and qualifications for the position to Lynn Montoya Quinn at lmontoya@pcc.edu. Application materials will be accepted until the position is filled.

Natural building instruction and consultation

Learn to work with Clay, Sand, and Straw: Truly sustainable materials for planet earth.

A course that provides a blend of collaborative design and hands-on experience with a variety of materials, course content will explore how natural building materials and techniques can be used independently or integrated with conventional construction.

Course Content includes: Straw-bale, Cob, Earth-bag, Slip-straw, Clay and lime plasters, Earthen floors, Integration with conventional construction, Codes, Design, Building science for natural structures, Life cycle analysis, and more.

• Fridays
• 8am to 1:50pm
• Spring term 2017: April 7 to June 16
• Rock Creek Campus
• 3 credit hours, CRN 21709

The initiative is called the Mini-Max System, co-sponsored by the Sustainability Office and the Custodial Department that we are implementing college-wide. The Mini-Max trash bins are little black boxes that hang on the side of your desk-side recycling bins (in place of what used to be your normal desk-side trash bins).

How it works

• Your desk-side trash can is replaced with the Mini Max can. Place your landfill garbage into the Mini-Max, and all your recyclable materials into your normal desk-side recycling bin.
• ��When they’re full, or when you want them emptied, take them to the closest��centralized trash��and recycling area��and empty them. Custodians will continue to empty these larger units daily.
• We are suggesting that people take their food and wet trash directly to their central bins, to avoid dirtying the Mini Max. This also helps reduce pest issues! No liners will be provided though reusable towels for cleaning will be available.
• Once you have your Mini Max, the custodians will no longer empty your desk-side container; you will need to do it yourself.

Why we are doing this

• The program is intended to help meet��PCC’s��sustainability goals.
  • Studies suggest that when people handle their own waste, they are more mindful of it and ultimately produce less waste and/or recycle more.
  • In fact, a Recycling at Work study found that��mini trash cans improved recycling by 20%!
• It reduces plastic consumption.
  • Most trash cans hold plastic liners. District-wide there are approximately 1,400 desk-side trash cans, which means up to 7,000 plastic liners go to landfill each week.
  • Eliminating the desk-side trash cans and the need to purchase liners will��divert nearly 15,000 pounds of plastic��from the landfill alone, totaling almost fifteen metric tons of CO2 annually (which is��like taking four cars off the road for one year).
• Custodians have more time to focus on other cleaning tasks.
  • Custodians have the responsibility of taking care of all the buildings on campus and cleaning up after more than 90,000 students, faculty and staff (on an annual basis).
  • Per campus, they spend 8-12 hours a day/40-60 hours a week emptying desk-side trash cans, most of which hold only a few items.
  • Centralized trash collection will cut this time significantly, allowing custodians to focus on other important work, such as cleaning��restrooms and dining areas and tackling deep cleaning.��No custodial positions will be eliminated as a result of this initiative.

Please provide your feedback via our survey. Thanks for your support of this initiative!

Poppie the Panther, ˿����Ƶ’s mascot, was on hand to get his food during lunch. Poppie was quoted saying to a student , “If my big paws can use the Preserve 2 Go container, this should be a piece of cake for you!”

.

College students, faculty, administrators, and staff have long been among the nation’s most stalwart champions for sustainable environmental practices.��˿����Ƶ Interim President Sylvia Kelley said, “We are proud to be named the fourth certified Bee Campus USA in the nation. There already are many students, faculty and staff working on pollinator health and sustainability issues and the members of our newly formed Bee Campus USA Committee will provide good leadership to these pollinator conservation efforts. PCC students and faculty are excited about our Bee Campus efforts across our five campuses and four centers.”

Said Bee Campus USA director, Phyllis Stiles, “Imperiled pollinators are responsible for the reproduction of more than two-thirds of the world’s plant and tree species. ˿����Ƶ is a stellar example of the influence community colleges can have on their students and larger communities. Their talented faculty, staff, and students offer an invaluable resource for the entire community seeking ways to manage ornamental landscapes in more wildlife-friendly ways.”

According to the Lead Groundskeeper at the Rock Creek campus, Anne LeSenne, ˿����Ƶ plans to develop a Campus Pollinator Habitat Plan for its combined 412-acre landscape to include a locally native and pollinator friendly plant list with regional sources for plants. In keeping with Bee Campus USA commitments, PCC already utilizes Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices at all of their sites, meets or exceeds Oregon State IPM statutes, and uses the most Earth/pollinator friendly products. PCC staff are regularly educated on best IPM practices and chemicals (used as a last resort) are on the low impact list. Each certified campus is expected to post educational signage in appropriate places. For example signs in the cafeteria might explain the role of pollinators in food production. Some of PCC’s designated pollinator gardens already have educational signage about the bees at work.

Interim Sustainability Manager for the District, Brian Schoon, said, “Through ongoing dialogue among members of the Bee Campus USA subcommittee, ˿����Ƶ will become a student and a teacher of sustainable practices. Its membership includes faculty, students and operations and maintenance staff. Our goal is to model pollinator-friendliness in our landscaping practices by incorporating as many locally native plants as possible.” Schoon continued, “District-wide, we have two established Learning Gardens and two in development where we grow herbicide and pesticide-free produce for staff, students and the greater community. The Rock Creek garden grows enough food to supply a weekly farm stand, campus food service, and campus and community food banks with fresh produce weekly amounting to over 11,000 pounds in 2015. In 2014, the Rock Creek campus initiated a fundraising program called ‘Flowergrams.’ Bouquets of flowers grown in our Learning Garden and on campus can be purchased and delivered to staff, students and faculty for a small fee. The program has increased the plantings in the garden as well as fostered more conversations about replacing grass with more pockets of perennial flower beds on campus grounds. The Sylvania campus is also home to a robust Learning Garden which focuses on smaller scale food production as well as butterfly and other pollinator habitat. Other campuses are installing perennial fruits and other edible plantings in the coming year.”

Biology faculty Dr. Jaimie Powell said, “We believe Bee Campus USA certification will provide our college with an important platform for fostering wider conversations on and off-campus regarding pollinator awareness and initiating student service projects that could benefit our area. The Organic Gardening class at the Rock Creek campus uses the Learning Gardens extensively and has installed native bee houses. Working with the Community College Undergraduate Research Initiative, a National Science Foundation- funded grant, several biology faculty are designing research projects incorporating bees and other pollinators, pollen and honey. At the Sylvania campus, biology faculty are using pollen identification to help students learn how to use light microscopes and scanning electron microscopes. At the Rock Creek campus, chemistry and biology faculty are collaborating on a project to extract pollen from honey from our hives to determine from which plants pollen is collected. We hope to include the math department eventually to do some statistical analysis”.

About Bee Campus USA and Bee City USA

The Bee Campus USA designation recognizes educational campuses that commit to a set of practices that support pollinators, including bees, butterflies, birds, and bats, among thousands of other species. For more information about the application process for becoming a Bee Campus USA affiliate, visit beecampususa.org. Bee City USA® urges local governments, individuals, organizations, corporations, and communities to promote and establish pollinator–friendly landscapes that are free of pesticides. Since its inception in Asheville, North Carolina in 2012, fourteen more cities have been certified and many others are in the process of preparing applications. For more information about the application process for becoming a Bee City USA community, visit beecityusa.org.

The award recognizes how the campus has served its student population, half of which receive financial aid. Through the Rock Creek Learning Garden, college resources and AmeriCorps members, staff were able to increase access to fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food using hands-on learning opportunities, implementing incentive-based programs and using the space to teach sustainable farming practices.

“The Learning Garden provides open access that engages students in learning sustainable farming methods and collaborative problem solving,” said Sandra Fowler-Hill, Rock Creek Campus president. “It is a highly effective teaching lab that has become a focal point on our campus. It is a well deserved and prestigious honor for the college.”

AASHE received 113 submissions from 84 institutions spanning three countries (U.S., Canada and Singapore) for this award.

“This validates what we strive for, which is to do innovative and important food justice work,” said Rock Creek’s Sustainability Coordinator Elaine Cole, who planned the garden’s success along with garden coordinator Nora Lindsey. “My team feels very passionate about the food we grow, soil we build, minds we educate and community we cultivate. We strongly believe that our rural campus, farm and learning garden, is in a unique position to be offering an agriculture or food systems degree program that could address the issues we are facing today.”

Established in 2007 on a 3.64 acre space where faculty, classes and community members can dabble in growing food, the garden has been developed to the point where today it functions as a working farm and produces more than 5,300 pounds of food annually. This transformation was made possible in 2010, when a master plan was commissioned and infrastructure such as raised beds, walking paths and irrigation was developed.

Today, the garden is home to a 65-tree fruit orchard, 32 large raised beds and approximately a half-acre of row crops and areas for grapes, kiwis, blueberries, and cane fruits. In addition to the crops, staff and students have built solar-powered irrigation, a cob tool shed with solar-powered irrigation, an earthen oven with a green roof, rainwater catchment systems, and installed eight beehives, mason beehives, an indoor hoop house and hydroponic growing areas for winter farming. This year, nearly 50 staff, faculty and students had access to 16 raised beds to grow their own food.

To address food insecurity on campus, staff partnered with campus food service and the Women’s Resource Center’s student food pantry to make donations, provide a weekly campus market that accepts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and established volunteer work opportunities for a food incentive program. The garden’s work-for-food program encourages student volunteers, who receive $5 per hour of work to buy fresh food or flowers from the Portlandia Farm Standia.

Besides developing the garden and increasing production, the Sustainability Office has brought in programs and divisions to provide community-based learning opportunities and created on-site classroom collaborations. The garden also regularly joins forces with student government, student clubs, resource centers, and faculty to create both special events and student-centered projects that benefit the garden and the community.

As a result, the garden hosted 24 classes and 32 sustainability tours, and had more than 1,000 contact hours with students in 2014. During spring term of this year, volunteers clocked 675 hours in the garden double the previous record of 265.

For the future, garden coordinators said they are planning to build a classroom structure that will be a center for beginner urban farmer training. Plus, expansion of bee and other pollinator habitat on campus is in the works.

“We hope to keep increasing production in the garden through the winter months, grow more specialty items like flowers, herbs, and fruits, and work with the new Rock Creek food lab (a demonstration kitchen) to be able to produce added-value products from what we grow in the Learning Garden,” Lindsey said. “Our long term goal is to develop for-credit sustainable agriculture classes that are based out of the Learning Garden.”

is a national membership-driven non-profit organization that works to advance sustainability in higher education. It provides resources, tools and professional development opportunities to faculty, staff, students and administrators as well as those in businesses that support higher education.

• Climate Change course��– G184��(Sylvania)
• Climate Change course��– G184 (Southeast)
• Eco-Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship course – BA199 (Cascade)