She always said that “life got in the way” of her original plans, but everything ended up outstanding. Lynn Brooks, this year’s awardee for Outstanding Two-Year Student, graduated with her Certificate in Applied Agriculture in May 2021 after starting the program in the Fall of 1980.
After a full career and raising a family, Brooks returned to College Park to finish what she had started, but with a shift in focus from her original major of Greenhouse Management to Sustainable Agriculture. Her passion for plants and people is boundless, and her maturity and professionalism made her a stellar student.
Brooks is a natural leader inside and outside of the classroom. She represented the IAA and AGNR in the 2020 Ag Enterprise Challenge, where her team won second place. Even more notably, Brooks took on a remarkable internship experience at the Susan D. Mona Center Urban Farm. There, she built an urban farm from the ground up to serve the Temple Hills community – an area with high rates of food insecurity and racial health disparities in Prince George’s County.
Brooks led the Mona Center Urban Farm in all respects from 2019-2020, from construction to planting to harvesting to donations to volunteer leadership. Under her guidance, this brand new initiative grew almost 2,000 pounds of fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs that were donated to Catholic Charities’ KitchenWork – a food service job training program that prepares hot meals for free distribution in the community. She describes it as “an amazing, life-altering period for me,” and witnessing the crops go from seed to meal as “sheer magic” (read more here). This was not her first foray into fighting food insecurity – Brooks led the IAA's food drive for the UMD Campus Pantry in 2019.
Post-graduation, Brooks plans to continue supporting her family, including her granddaughter, while continuing to explore her passion for urban agriculture and the concept of "agrihoods" as retirement communities. While she'll be the first to tell you that her internship helped her realize that farm management is not a sustainable long term occupation for her at this stage in life, there is no doubt that she will continue to be involved in ongoing food production projects that support the underserved
