BSFI 2015
Field coordinators: Elizabeth Hensley Chaney, Kyle Haines and Camille Campion
In the second year of the BSFI Program fourteen students from UCSD participated in a two months paid internship spanning two watersheds in the San Diego–Tijuana bi-national region. The interns worked with one of two cohorts, each based at one of two distinct Community Stations: the Blum Cross-Border Community Station, in the Tijuana River Watershed, and the EarthLab Community Station, in the Chollas Creek Watershed.
The cohort based at the Cross-Border Community Station rotated between the two organizations that comprise the Community Station: Casa Familiar, in the community of San Ysidro; and Alter Terra in Terrazas de San Bernardo (located in the sub-watershed of Los Laureles in Tijuana, Baja California). The intern cohort based at the EarthLab collaborated with Groundwork San Diego to develop projects exploring the ecology of Chollas Creek Watershed, with specific focus on the Diamond District neighborhood of Southeast San Diego. The internship was structured to meet three day per week, over a span of ten weeks. The interns spent two days per week in the field, either in the Diamond District, in San Ysidro or in Los Laureles Canyon. One day per week was dedicated for meetings at UCSD.
At EarthLab, interns interfaced with Groundwork San Diego’s D.E.E.P. (Diamond Educational Excellence Partnership) Literacy Program to develop a range of individual project proposals, based on research of different urban agriculture projects in San Diego County. Interns of the Cross-Border cohort were based in the San Ysidro community for the first several weeks of the internship to help develop the “Senior Garden Project,” seeking to promote its temporary use as a site for educational programming and also as sede for a food distribution program in the community. In the following weeks, interns of the Cross-Border cohort shifted to the field site in Los Laureles Canyon, where they explored the geological history of the canyon to develop a series of proposals for projects and programming to potentially be enacted by the community partner, Alter Terra.
