New Village Academy Internship
Grow food. Build things. Learn with your neighborhood.
Joy Grows is an organic vegetable farm in a public housing neighborhood in Eastport, a greenhouse, a youth hub, and a learning and resource center for the community around us. The farm isn’t being built for this neighborhood. It’s being built by it.
10 full-day Wednesdays · October 14 – December 16, 2026 · Eastport Community Farm
About the farm
30,000 sq ftfarm in Eastport, run with the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis
4,000 sq ftgreenhouse, opened May 2026: the home of our project learning
6 hensplus vegetables, flowers, and a kitchen that is developing
4 gardensin the neighborhood: Harbour House, Robinwood, the Healing Garden, Burnside Sanctuary
300+ peoplehave visited the farm this year
2,000+ lbsof produce grown this year, shared with neighbors and pantries
First things first: wellness. Before anything else, we focus on our team members’ wellness. There is always nourishing food here. You’ll eat well, and you’ll work alongside people who care whether you’re okay.
This is not a desk job. It’s hands-on, community-rooted, genuinely meaningful work. You’ll learn alongside growers, builders, engineers, organizers, and entrepreneurs, and we write down the skills you build so you can name them on a résumé or college application.
What we look for
You don’t need experience. You don’t need growing skills. We look at how you show up:
- You learn outside of school: you follow your curiosity on your own time
- Initiative: you see something that needs doing and start
- You know how you work best, and can tell us
- Valuing community and believing in the power of good food
- Pride in your work: doing things well because they’re worth doing well
- Positive communication, toward yourself and others
- Patience and grace with people who are sometimes difficult
- Enjoying vegetables. Genuinely.
Open roles
Building team 3–5 spots
Design and build with our build lead: a cob pizza oven, planter tables, and greenhouse projects. Real tools, real structures.Community outreach & media 2 spots
Connect the farm with the neighborhood: gather stories, promote volunteer days and events, take photos and short videos, plan social media posts.Youth engagement 1 spot
Help plan youth programs, workshops, and hands-on activities; build positive relationships with younger kids; document activities.Nursery 1 spot
Work with our nursery manager on seed starting, transplants, and native plants for the farm and our neighborhood gardens.Projects you could take on
Build
- Cob pizza oven
- Planter tables
- Hydroponics & aquaponics
Grow
- Native plant propagation
- Perennial fruit & pollinator plants
- Soil science: study one potting-mix ingredient and present it
Create
- YouTube videos
- A social media series on the farm and its people
- Photos and stories for the new joygrows.us
Research & lead
- Community research with neighbors
- What makes a great shared garden? Visit our satellite gardens
- Nonprofit leadership: see how partnerships get built
How your ten weeks progress
You will do real work on a real site: learn the basics, define what good looks like, build something with a team, and share what you learned. Here is how the weeks move.
| Stage | When | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Expectations and ways of working | Week 1 | Agree on how we work, investigate, and communicate. |
| 2. Foundations and metrics | Week 2 | Learn the basics of each area: growing and nursery work, composting, building and carpentry, bikes, kitchen, art, heating, and outreach. For each, we write what success looks like (the minimum that shows the work did its job), what excellence looks like (what we are proud to show anyone), and how we will measure it. |
| 3. Focus projects | Weeks 3–8 | Pick a project, plan it using our success and excellence criteria, and build it in a mixed team (marketing, building, growing, art). Document as you go: photos before, during, and after, and short notes every session. |
| 4. Evaluation and sharing | Weeks 9–10 | Compare each project to our criteria, gather the photos and notes into one record, and present what we found, learned, and innovated. |
Week 1: we set our expectations together
These are starting ideas, not rules. On the first day we talk each one through and decide what to keep, change, or add for our space.
How we go about things
- Arrive ready to work, on time, dressed for the site.
- Safety first: ask before using a tool you have not been shown.
- Leave every space better than we found it.
- Finish what we start, or hand it off clearly.
How we investigate things
- Look before acting: observe the site, plants, and materials.
- Ask: What is this for? Who uses it? What has been tried?
- Test small, then scale up.
- Write down what we find, including what did not work.
How we communicate
- Say what you are working on and what you need, early and plainly.
- Listen first, and credit other people’s ideas.
- Disagree with the idea, not the person.
- Share photos and notes so everyone can see progress.
Project menu: concepts to investigate and develop
Many of these overlap, so they work well as team projects. You can also propose your own.
- Kitchen space: developing the kitchen space
- Art space: developing an art space
- Heating systems: heating for our buildings and growing spaces
- Site organization: cultivating growing spaces, and the stone border around the greenhouse
- Entryways: building doors and entrances
- Community outreach and service: visiting other garden sites and working with community members who grow things
- Maker space: youth building and community self-sufficiency, with carpentry infrastructure and a bike lab
- Nursery production: starting native and vegetable plants from seed, leading into greenhouse growing systems
- Composting: compost and worm compost development
- Audience growth: helping everyone know what we are doing and why, including inviting collaborators, for example through our social media
- Mentor and collaborator recruitment: finding and developing skilled mentors and collaborators
Let’s discuss. Which project interests you most, and why? What would success look like for it? What would excellence look like? What skills do you already have that a team could use? What do you want to learn? Who would you like to work with? What helps you thrive?
Your Wednesdays
This is our first draft of how your Wednesdays will work. It isn’t final, and we want your input. Tell us in your interview what would work for you.
| Part of the day | What happens |
|---|---|
| Arrive & eat | Food first, every time. Check in on how everyone is doing. |
| Huddle | Pick up where we left off last week. Say your one goal for today. |
| Learn | About half the day. Hands-on basics: potting mix, soil testing, seeds, tools, photography, working with kids. Later on, interns teach some sessions to each other. |
| Lunch | Together. |
| Project time | The other half. Work on your team’s project, and team up with other teams when it helps. |
| Wrap up | Leave the site better than you found it. Did you hit your goal? Write down your first step for next Wednesday. |
| Sessions | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1–2 · Oct 14, 21 | Try every department and learn the basics. Then choose your team. |
| 3–4 · Oct 28, Nov 4 | Start your project. Set a goal with your mentor. |
| 5 · Nov 11 | Halfway check-in. Want to switch teams or projects? You can. |
| 6–8 · Nov 18 – Dec 2 | Go deeper. Work across teams. Start teaching what you know. |
| 9 · Dec 9 | Finish your project. |
| 10 · Dec 16 | Wrap up and look back at the skills you built. Optional: your team can show its work to staff, NVA, and families. |
Dates may shift around Thanksgiving week.
Teams working together
- Outreach & media films the cob oven build
- Nursery and youth engagement run a seed-starting activity for younger kids
- Building makes planter tables for the nursery
- Everyone helps plan a school-wide day at the farm
On track, never stuck
- One goal each Wednesday, checked at the end of the day
- You choose what you do in project time
- You can switch at session 5
- Once you learn something, you teach it
- Have an idea we’re not doing yet? Pitch it, and we’ll help you build it
School-wide intensives. We’re exploring days when a whole class, or the whole school, comes to the farm for one hands-on theme: a build day, soil to seed, harvest to meal, a photo and video day. Interns could help plan and lead them.
Prepare for your interview
There are no trick questions. Real examples from school, home, sports, church, or a job all count. Here’s what we might ask, so you can think it over ahead of time.
About you
- Which role or project caught your eye, and why?
- What relevant skills do you have? (Something you taught yourself counts.)
- What’s your greatest strength? What’s something you’re working on?
- What motivates you and helps you succeed? What drains your motivation?
- What’s your preferred work style: on your own, with a team, with clear steps, or figuring it out?
- What’s something you’ve learned outside of school, just because you wanted to?
- Do you want to be around younger kids?
- Which direction interests you most: a workplace role, a creative project, a research project, or nonprofit leadership? What are your career goals?
Help us build the day
- Half of each Wednesday learning and half on projects: does that sound right? What would you change?
- When do you do your best work: first thing, after a break, after lunch?
- Would you rather stay on one project for all 10 Wednesdays, or switch halfway?
- What helps you stay on track without feeling stuck: a checklist, a check-in, a partner, a deadline, or freedom to figure it out?
- A week between sessions is a long time. What would help you pick up where you left off?
- Would you like working on a project with interns from other teams?
- What theme would get your classmates excited about a school-wide day at the farm?
Practical questions
- Do you have any allergies: pollen, animals (we have hens), stinging insects (bees and wasps are part of farm life), peanuts or other foods (we eat together every session)?
- Is there anything else that could get in the way of your time with us?
- Are you familiar with the Eastport neighborhood? Have you been to the farm? How would you get here?
How we’ll give feedback
It’s practice. Every student gets one specific strength and one thing to try next time. We pay attention to:
| What great looks like | |
|---|---|
| Real examples | Specific, with what you did |
| Interest in the work | You named a role or project and why |
| How you show up | Initiative, learning outside school, knowing your work style |
| Reliability | You can say who you’d tell, how, and when if you’ll be late or miss a day |
| Presence | Clear, friendly, and you asked us a question |
Good questions to ask us
- What does a normal day on the farm look like?
- How do interns end up leading a project or teaching their peers?
- What happened with the last project interns worked on?
Ready to grow? Real skills. Real mentorship. Real community.
Download the info packet (PDF)
Download the info packet (PDF)