Mount Saint Mary College student Caitlyn Garrigan of Staten Island (right) and Rob Wakeman, associate professor of English and Co-Coordinator of the Knight Summer Connections program, prune a peach tree at Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative.
The Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative (NUFFI) recently celebrated Mount Saint Mary College’s Rob Wakeman, associate professor of English and Co-Coordinator of the Knight Summer Connections program, for his unwavering dedication and support.
NUFFI is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to build a just and resilient food system that improves the environment and health of the community in the City of Newburgh.
The event, which took place on Pamela’s on the Hudson in Newburgh, also honored a pair of SUNY Orange employees, Likkia Moody and Monty Vacura, for their contributions.
“The leadership that Likkia, Monty, and Rob have demonstrated has helped propel our mission forward, and we are grateful for their ongoing support,” said Virginia Kasinki, executive director of NUFFI. “They have done so much to advance sustainable agriculture and food access initiatives in the Newburgh community.”
Wakeman has incorporated local and cultural food into his Mount classes for several years, building a tangible connection between classroom and real-world experiences. Besides volunteering countless hours on the farm, Wakeman and his students helped develop NUFFI’s 2024 informational planting calendar that the organization sells to support its programming and operations.
“Students today need to be able to make the connection with what they’re learning in the classroom to the issues that are happening in their community,” Wakeman said. “I want to take the liberal arts outside of the classroom and start to put into practice what we’re teaching. We read literature to help understand our place in the world and what other people are going through, to try to build the empathy muscle. But if we don’t ever put that muscle into practice by serving the community, we’re losing something important.”
In addition to his classes, Wakeman has also incorporated student service at the farm into two other Mount programs: Knight Summer Connections, which helps incoming freshmen to transition smoothly from high school to college through teambuilding exercises, classwork, and hands-on volunteer opportunities; and the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE), where students work alongside Mount professors as they explore a research topic of their choosing.
Wakeman teaches classes on Shakespeare, medieval and early modern literatures, food writing, and academic writing. His research explores a literary history of four meals that shaped the ecological, economic, and spiritual values of sixteenth-century England: the hunting banquet, the shepherd’s repast, takeaway from London cookshops, and the religious holiday feast.