BTLT Welcomes New Agricultural Programs Coordinator to Manage the Saturday Farmers’ Market and Tom Settlemire Community Garden.
We are so excited to be welcoming Sarah Bostick to the BTLT team this spring as our new Agricultural Program’s Coordinator. This new position was restructured to combine the management of two of our important food-system programs traditionally hosted at Crystal Spring Farm – the Saturday Farmers Market and Tom Settlemire Community Garden. 
Sarah has a “deep and abiding love of community-focused agriculture,” she told us in her application, and her resume clearly reflects that love. She has spent the last twenty years farming, managing community gardens, teaching agricultural production and marketing to farmers, and developing food systems with a focus on food-access for low-income people. Many of those years were in Maine, where she did work including as the marketing coordinator for Cultivating Community’s New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, and several years in Brunswick bringing new life to an old farm. Sarah is moving back to Maine from the southeast to accept this position, which she says she has been wanting to do for the “sense of community and personal connections,” that she has been missing.
“I’m so excited to get to work supporting programs on one of my favorite places in the world: The 312-acre Crystal Spring Farm. It contains all the elements I think are most important for imbuing a community with a sense of place and purpose: a working farm, an outstanding farmers market that feeds both belly and soul, a shared place to grow food, public-access trails through beautiful fields and forest, and educational programming.”
Sarah brings experience farming, working as a vendor at markets, coordinating market membership for multiple farmers at multiple markets, many years of land management, community garden and volunteer management, and education as an agricultural extension agent. And she says she “genuinely enjoys the challenge of supporting people who are at different stages of learning to grow food.” Over the past year she developed a successful strategy for educating growers on a wide range of topics in a fully remote platform that allowed for continued engagement during the pandemic.
We are excited to welcome Sarah because of her solid background in growing, teaching, program management, and community building, but also because of her expressed dedication to conservation of natural and traditional landscapes and deep desire to support community. “I love working with an inspired team of people who believe that by working together, we are capable of so much more than the sum of our parts.”
We are so excited to add you to that sum, Sarah, and look forward to all that the future might bring with you as a part of the team!
