Sustainability Consultant Kirsten Neil recently used some of her volunteering leave to help out at the at the Perth City Farm in WA. She spread her time over a period of five weeks, volunteering for half a day on Wednesdays. Here's how she found the whole experience.
Perth City Farm is located in East Perth (in the city proper) right next to a train station and is an Urban Farm supporting connected, sustainable communities. It's a wonderful environment to build community connections, and to educate and enable people to live sustainably.
Most of my jobs involved planting veggies, seeding, tilling, harvesting and sorting/cleaning veggies, weeding, collecting garbage that has made it’s way on to the property and picking fruit.
I chose to use my volunteering leave around the same time that my parents were visiting from Canada – this way I could spend more time with them during the week. My parents have a little backyard urban farm at home so they loved all the tips and tricks they were learning at this larger scale urban farm, including the use of tools like the drill-run cultivator.
Being surrounded by greenery/nature was so therapeutic mid work week and I would highly recommend people getting outdoors for their volunteer leave!