Tracy Noel will help homeless make new start

Tracy Noel was on her way to Berkeley to take her Graduate Records Examination when she stopped in Corvallis to see some friends who owned a farm outside of town. That was 14 years ago.

Although Noel did end up taking her GREs, she opted to forgo graduate school for greener pastures — the pastures of her friend’s sheep farm, to be exact. She’s lived in Corvallis ever since. She accepted a job with the U.S. Forest Service as part of their Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management project, and commuted to Walla Walla, Wash., for the work, while spending the rest of her time working on the Corvallis farm.

For Noel, it was a dream realized. Growing up in urban Chicago, the only green she saw was her father’s 3-foot by 10-foot garden plot. But that didn’t deter Noel from bringing as much nature inside as possible.

“I was always bringing in earthworms to save them, and catching grasshoppers and making habitats for them as best as we could,” she said. “I remember burying dead birds that I found and bringing home all the neighborhood cats.”

Her parents indulged her passion for nature. They took the family camping in the summers, with a comfy tent and a cookstove. Roughing it wasn’t exactly the point.

“I don’t remember eating in the woods,” she said. But she does remember long hikes through the forest.

When the time came to attend a university, Noel chose Northland College, a small environmental liberal arts school in Wisconsin. She received a degree in biology with a minor in political science. Then, not sure what to do next, she decided to go to graduate school as a sort of default, allowing her to put off deciding exactly what to do with her life.

She chose stream biology as a focus area, and took a cross-country trip to visit the graduate schools offering such a program. That’s when she derailed at the sheep farm in Corvallis.

But her time with the Forest Service served as a graduate program of sorts, she said. When the project ended after three years, she stayed in Corvallis. On the farm, she and her friends worked at subsistence farming. This proved both easier and more difficult, given the area’s mild climate.

“It’s really an exciting challenge here,” she said. “You can do so much more year round here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. The potential and the challenge is exciting, but it really wears you out” because there’s never a break.

When her Columbia Basin project ended, Noel was recruited to lead a garden program at Lincoln School in south Corvallis. That project led her to her next challenge — helping to establish a community youth garden in Sunset Park.

In its early years, Noel worked closely with the Benton County Juvenile Department. Young people who were required as part of their sentencing to perform community service were put to work at the youth garden. They learned how to garden organically, and how to raise produce. Their work benefited both Community Outreach and the South Corvallis Food Bank.

“This idea gives them life skills while doing a real service for the community,” Noel said.

Eventually the youth garden became so popular that the juvenile department moved its gardening program off-site, and Noel focused on community education and art projects based on-site, making sure that the work continues to provide food to the South Corvallis Food Bank. Currently there’s even an academically rigorous summer program that gives kids practical skills as well as work experience and community service.

Through Noel’s work on the youth garden project, she became connected to the Corvallis Environmental Center, which oversees the project. In 2003 she became the program’s co-director, and eventually its sole director. She also is actively involved in the Ten Rivers Food Web, a community organization examining hunger, food security and healthy, local food production. All these roles are interconnected.

“I know that I’m a lot more than an environmentalist, the way most people define it. But I would hope that all of us are environmentalists. If we’re not, we’re kind of suicidal.”

In early April, Noel is saying good-bye to her friends here and moving back to Chicago, where she’ll be working at an Illinois nonprofit organization called Growing Home Inc. She’ll be training homeless people in Chicago to perform agricultural work on a small rural site about 75 miles from the city.

“Part of the dream has always been to build skills that I could take back there to do similar things back in the city,” she said. “It’s pretty hard to build those skills in that environment…There’s not a lot of models back there. It seemed like this was a friendlier place to build a lot of those skills.”

For more information on the Corvallis Environmental Center and the Youth Garden Project, see http://www.peak.org/~ecenter/