Global lessons

The streets of Baltimore have a very different feel than the rough roads of Kenya. But for Elspeth Collard, ’23, the landscape holds the same potential for community action.

After two sessions aiding local bomas — Kenyan homesteads — with the installation of predator-deterrent lights funded by a Davis Project for Peace grant, Collard is turning her attention to domestic communities as a fellow of the Chesapeake Conservation and Climate Corps.

In August, Collard began a yearlong stint with the Sixth Branch, a nonprofit developing three high-yield urban farms to address food insecurity in Baltimore. “They’re incredibly community-centric,” Collard says. “It’s amazing how much of my day is being outside, plants, and people.”

Collard’s appreciation for this level of direct action emerged from the weeks she spent in the university’s Students Engaging and Enacting Dialogue — or SEEDS — program. Surrounded by people who shared her passion, Collard explored what it meant to pursue the conservation of specific areas while supporting the people who live there.

“That’s the interdisciplinary [focus] I learned at Richmond and love to see in the real world,” she says, thinking of her time in Kenya as well as the year she spent in Laos with Village Focus International, which works to end human trafficking and increase food security in the rural country.

Now, Collard is excited to bring all she’s learned back to the U.S. “I feel like I’ve experienced a lot of places like [the Sixth Branch] urban farm but have been the foreigner and the outsider,” she says. In her new role, she’ll cultivate environmental accessibility for marginalized communities, propelling her toward a future that she says could include graduate school or a return to international programming.

“Because of COVID, so many of our [university] experiences were in the classroom,” she says. “But I still want to treat the world as my classroom.”