Tania Marines graduated Summa Cum Laude from UNM in May of 2019 with a BA in Anthropology and a minor in Sustainability Studies.

In August of 2019 she became a FoodCorps-AmeriCorps service member serving the state of New Mexico. Tania is working under the supervision of Cooking with Kids in Santa Fe and will be following their curriculum along with other carefully curated learning units based on hands on learning activities founded on healthy eating and attuning ourselves to the land and sense of place, or as is better understood in New Mexico, querencia. Tania strongly believes in food sovereignty and honoring the time tested heritage practices of our rural northern New Mexico communities and agricultural lands, as well as learning from our elders and ancestors, blending the best of the old and new. Tania produced an award winning sustainability studies capstone project that emphasized these traditional values, including organic and traditional agriculture, pollinators, acequias and cuentos or oral histories. These themes created the foundation for experiential and sensory learning style that Tania will implement in her work as a FoodCorps service member. Tania was awarded the Chartwells Food Systems award for her capstone project entitled, “Exploratory Trial in Sustainability Consciousness Building among the Youth at the Embudo Valley Library After-School Program”.

Tania also owns and operates a small organic vegetable and flower farm with her partner Ric Gaudet, in Dixon, NM. Their farm name is One Straw Farm and you can catch them at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, on Saturdays, at The Railyard. Tania hopes to use her experience as a farmer as well as her farm and various small garden sites she has planted to carry out many hands on learning activities with the school children she will be working with in Dixon and Velarde.

When Tania is not working as a FoodCorps service member she is busy making dried flower arrangements utilizing an array of wildcrafted plants and her farm grown flowers and products such as traditional NM food staples including maize, chile pequin, wheat and sorghum. You can check her work out online and on Facebook, her business Season’s Muse is also a staple art/farm-value added business of her community as she participates in the annual Dixon Studio tour, one of New Mexico’s oldest continuously run studio tours.

Stay tuned for a Green Fire Times article where she discusses her methodology for teaching sustainability to school age children, our future stewards of the land.

(Photo Credit, Gabriella Marks)