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Amy Dell's VRG Intern Experience
Creating a Vegan World
My first weekend as a Vegetarian Resource Group intern, I worked at The VRG booth at
a farmers market. It was rewarding to help people on their path to a healthier diet,
especially children because I was 10 when I went vegan. Seeing the children get
excited about VRG's I Love Animals and Broccoli coloring book was
adorable, and made me want to work with kids.
That weekend I partnered with Hannah, another intern, to cook six vegan casseroles for Our Daily Bread, a charity in Baltimore. Through this project, we contributed to a greater cause: feeding hundreds of hungry people delicious vegan food. Cooking in quantity made it easy to prepare a large number of casseroles, because we chopped large amounts of the same ingredients instead of different things.
I wrote an article about a project at Christopher Place Employment Academy, a rehabilitation and education facility for previously homeless men in Baltimore. I specifically focused on Marcy Schveibinz, the teacher of a healthy cooking class at Christopher Place. This class educates the men in the program about basic cooking techniques, vegan eating, and health-related topics. This project showed me how dedicated individuals can make an impact in the lives of others.
Marcy accompanied Hannah and me as we presented about vegetarianism to a low-income culinary summer camp. We spent weeks preparing: brainstorming ideas, creating the lesson plan, practicing our discussion points, and making games. When the day arrived, it was worth it to see the kids enjoy our activities and listen to us speak.
Through my blog posts on the VRG Blog, I've been able to share my story with others and answer questions that other teens might have, questions that I would have wanted the answer to when I first became vegan. By reflecting on my early vegan years, I was reintroduced to the reasons why I chose this lifestyle and how strongly I still feel about them now. I went vegan because I wanted to help animals. Whenever I'm presented with people talking about killing animals, I always feel instinctive sadness. It makes me stronger knowing that this conscious decision helps animals.
I assisted a former VRG intern, Casey Brown, on a large-scale project creating vegan meal plans for people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). We worked to design simple-to-prepare, inexpensive meals from easily obtainable ingredients. This required knowledge about nutrient requirements, recipe creation, and product pricing.
The most influential project of my internship was when I worked with VRG's Nutrition Advisor, Reed Mangels, PhD, RD, on a piece for the Scientific Update column in Vegetarian Journal. I read and interpreted an article from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Reed assigned me an article on the greenhouse gas emissions of certain diets and worked with me as I wrote the summary.
I hope to work as a journalist in the future, analyzing bills and laws pertaining to the environment, and displaying the information in a way that you don't need a degree in biology to understand. My internship was amazing practice for that specific career goal.
