Our blog is dedicated to sharing news about Gathering Ground’s activities, promoting sustainable agriculture and growing community on Washington Island!

Join Ground School for a summer internship of paid farm work and intensive education and experience in regenerative agriculture on Washington Island, WI.

Applications are open December 1 through February 28. 

Gathering Ground’s summer internship GROUND SCHOOL is for young adults 18 to 27 passionate about environmental stewardship. If you have with an interest in environmental studies, sustainable agriculture, food justice, conservation, and communal and ecological living, and seek to explore your curiosities alongside like-minded peers, teachers and practitioners, join us. The mission of the summer is to learn together how we can answer the question, “How on earth should we live?”

Our weekly schedule will include

• 1 full day of education-oriented hands-on experience in Gathering Ground’s vineyard, orchards, and gardens.
• 20-30 hours in a paid position with a local farm or land-based organization
• Farm dinners: cooking and sharing meals made from local, seasonal ingredients
• Seminars in current topics of food and environmental studies will alternate weekly
• Field trips to local land and water based organizations and farms.
• Team building, mentorship, community engagement. 
• Potential job sites include: honey farm, vegetable and flower farm, orchard and cidery, vineyard

Other important details

• Dates: The program is 10 weeks. June 1 through August 10.
• Credit: We will work with your university/college to help you get credit.
• Pay: Earn over $2,000 working at a local farm
• Cost: $350 for housing, field trips and one community meal each week. (Full and partial scholarships available for housing and weekly community meal.)

Learn more about what our internship is like by reading about experiences from our past interns:

Sophia writes about coming back to the Island, where she grew up, for a summer at Gathering Ground. “Having grown up on Washington Island, I’m always seeking opportunities to go home during the summer, so I was excited to learn about Gathering Ground and their educational internship opportunity. While at the time I didn’t know enough about agriculture to have much of an interest in the subject, I have every interest in the island and the well being of the local community.” [Read More]

Emma writes about the haunted landscape she discovered at Gathering Ground. She connected her experience on the Island with her ecocritical work in grad school. “As our internship supervisor, Russell, likes to say, the land we work on wants to be forest.  But, when you step onto the grass at Gathering Ground, what you find is a place that once was forest, long ago, but has been transformed to serve other purposes. The vineyard and the various orchards occupy the same spaces that wild trees once did. When you walk the land at Gathering Ground, you can see the haunting of the long-ago forest – in the uneven ground, the pockmarked earth beneath the grasses where trees once grew, and even in the oak seedlings that pop up from time to time beneath the grape trellises.” [Read More.]

Got comments, questions, or stories? We’d love to hear from you.  We are particularly looking for stories about farming on Washington Island. If you have any stories you’d like to share, please contact us!

You can email our director Alessandra or fill out this form.