Written By: Marvin V. Church, Associate Executive Director of Environmental Leaders of Color
There is a moment in education when a concept on a page finally becomes real — when a definition turns into a memory. For students in the Environmental Leaders of Color (ELOC) summer program, that moment came with dirt under their fingernails, a goat nuzzling their hand, and a potato pulled fresh from the ground.
Over the past two weeks, teens from six partner communities — Peekskill, Ossining, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, and Port Chester — traded desks for dirt at Hilltop Hanover Farm & Environmental Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. What began as a simple suggestion turned into one of the summer’s most memorable learning experiences for Environmental Leaders of Color (ELOC), and a reminder of how powerful it can be when classroom instruction steps outside the classroom.
Where Lessons Meet the Land
This summer in 2026, ELOC students in grades 9 through 12 studied ecology, with a focus on invasive species — the kind of subject that can feel abstract behind a desk: diagrams, species lists, discussions of environmental balance. At Hilltop Hanover Farm, those lessons stopped being theoretical.
Walking the grounds with Farm Director Adam Choper as their guide, students saw the exact concepts they’d spent the school year discussing: how ecosystems function, how species interact and compete, and how the balance of an environment can shift. The farm didn’t just illustrate the material — it made it tangible, turning a page in a textbook into a plant students could touch and a system they could walk through.
This is the kind of experience educators often point to as transformative: instruction that moves from learning about something to learning through it. For students who had spent months studying ecology from behind a desk, the farm offered something no classroom could — direct, sensory, hands-on proof that what they’d learned was real.
A Hidden Gem, Rediscovered
Adding to the significance of the visit was the discovery itself. Hilltop Hanover Farm has been part of the Westchester County Parks System since 2003, when then-County Executive Andy Spano led the effort to acquire the property — preserving it as farmland and open space at a time when the land was at risk of being sold for condominium development. More than two decades later, the farm sits just a short drive from the communities ELOC serves, yet it remains unfamiliar to many residents. Few students — or their families — had ever set foot on the property, let alone knew it existed so close to home.
That unfamiliarity felt less like a routine field trip and more like an introduction to a resource that had been there all along, waiting to be discovered.
Firsts That Stick
The day was full of firsts: petting goats, seeing cows on a working farm, and walking through all eight greenhouses, each growing something different. But the moment that stayed with students most was pulling potatoes from the ground themselves.
For many, it was the first time they’d harvested food or seen fresh produce grown from the earth. It replaced the abstract idea of “where food comes from” with a physical memory — soil on their hands, a vegetable they pulled out themselves, proof that food begins with land, labor, and care long before it reaches a store shelf. For young people who haven’t always seen themselves represented in conversations about agriculture, land stewardship, or food access, that moment of direct participation matters.
Thank You, Farm Director Adam Choper and ELOC Board Member
None of this would have been possible without ELOC’s Board Member recommendation and Farm Director Adam Choper, who led every one of the six group tours with patience and enthusiasm. His willingness to guide students — many experiencing this kind of environment for the very first time — helped turn 6 weeks of classroom study into two weeks of real-world discovery.
Why It Matters — and What’s Next
Reaching our students across six communities in two weeks is meaningful on its own. But the real impact lies in what it represents: a model for how classroom instruction and real-world experience can work together — ecology lessons becoming a walk through living greenhouses, a discussion of food systems becoming a potato pulled from the earth by a student’s own hands.
For ELOC, that’s the point. Environmental education isn’t just about what happens in a classroom — it’s about giving young people, especially those from communities historically underrepresented in these spaces, the chance to stand on the land, touch the work, and understand it for themselves.
ELOC is exploring how to build on this momentum: expanding the number of farm visits, deepening the partnership with Hilltop Hanover, and developing a student guide to capture better what participants take away from these experiences and where the program can grow. Early conversations point toward this becoming an annual part of the ELOC calendar rather than a one-time visit.
None of it happens without support. If you’re interested in helping ELOC bring more students to experience environmental education firsthand — through funding, farm partnerships, or volunteering as a guide — we’d love to hear from you.
Hilltop Hanover Farm may have been unfamiliar to these students two weeks ago. Thanks to this partnership, it won’t be forgotten anytime soon — and we hope it’s just the beginning.