"We started by asking people in the community, 'What do you want to see?,'" she said. A food justice advocate with a certificate from Farm School NYC, she's also a "master composter" and a community garden educator and she does outreach work for Farming Concrete, a data collection project that measures, among other things, how much urban farms and gardens produce.ĭurrant's early work at the Sustainable Flatbush garden taught her the crucial first step in initiating any community project: Know your neighborhood's needs.
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Durrant is a leader in New York's flourishing urban farming movement, which includes more than 600 community gardens under the city's GreenThumb program, plus hundreds more run by other groups across the five boroughs. "I would plant flowers or melons and that sense of putting your hand in the soil and becoming a part of that green space flooded back to me," she explained.įast-forward to today. Volunteering in the Brooklyn garden reminded her of her roots. "But it didn't dawn on me that that was what I wanted to do," she said.
Growing up in Kingston, Durrant regularly helped her parents harvest homegrown fruits and vegetables. It wasn't exactly uncharted terrain for this farmer's daughter. Then, when the 2008 financial crisis hit, Durrant decided to leave her job and try something new: volunteering at a community garden in her Brooklyn neighborhood. She got her undergraduate degree in business from the City University of New York's Baruch College and spent the next 20 years in marketing. Sheryll Durrant certainly wasn't planning to when she left Jamaica for Manhattan in 1989. Most people don't move to New York City and become farmers.
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