Today is a Saturday. An overcast Saturday in Brooklyn. I was supposed to work this morning in one of our gardens, Jane Bailey Memorial Garden in Fort Greene. Every Saturday from 11 to noon, there is a program called ClubFit yoga in two of our 52 community gardens. The yoga classes are just another way that NYRP strives to cultivate community in New York City, not to mention these classes are free! Unfortunately-but a little more fortunate for me because I woke up with a pressure headache-the class was canceled due to the rain. “If not yoga with a diverse spectrum of people, what will I spend my Saturday morning doing?” I caught myself thinking. Tumblr, that’s what. I want to talk about my job. I want to process what I have been doing so that I can share it with other people who might wonder. So on a day to day basis, nothing that I do is exactly the same. Some days are spent in the office, where I do a bunch of mundane paperwork and emailing that- MOSTLY-I could do without. Sitting on my ass all day in front of a computer makes me feel unproductive, lazy and drastically more tired, mentally. That isn’t the case for everyone. In fact, some people love doing office work and really can function well in this setting. If an office was where I spent 40 to 50 or more hours of my week, there is potential for me being driven to insanity.

So, the work that I do outside of the office is more active and engaging. Some of my time is spent in the tip top of Manhattan, working alongside the education team in the children’s garden. Our work is to plant, transplant, harvest, water and essentially maintain the garden so that we can educate elementary aged students about growing.

Another part of my job is to be the facilitator for volunteer days. Some of our volunteer days are with the local area community members and some are in cooperation with our corporate sponsor groups (McGraw Hill, Goldman Sachs etc.) These days are fun for me because A) I get to be out of the office B) I have the opportunity to enjoy the hidden gems of NYC and C) because I can see the results of hard effort come to fruition-ex.we communicate with these people, plan the day, they come to help out and finally, there is tangible evidence of a hard days work.

Being able to observe these days makes it so clear to me how much being active and involved can improve our quality of life. Even though it wasn’t where I necessarily saw myself going, volunteer coordination is something that I am good at and I really think that I could make a career for myself in a job in the volunteer or recreation related field.