Scholarship and Activism Help Cultivate Community Farming Movement: Just weeks after the three crop-yielding hoop greenhouses went up on the backside of one of Northeast Baltimore’s battered, but still striving, Black high schools, vandals struck.“A troubled kid. Somebody who probably doesn’t know what was going on in here,” says John Ciekot, executive director of Civic Works, the nonprofit human services and youth development organization that erected the year-round, tunnel-shaped greenhouses eight months ago.
After postulating a reason for the destruction at the site of what’s officially known as Real Food Farm, Ciekot makes what he believes is the more essential point. His six-person paid staff and the neighborhood and high school volunteers who are the sweat and sinews behind the greenhouses kicked right back in.
