Volunteering or Internship Opportunities
Our greatest need is for Interns to join us. The Catholic Worker Farm would like to extend an invitation to all people interested in living in community. This internship is open to anyone over the age of 20 who would like to experience living and working within a rural, faith-based community. The responsibilities of volunteers would involve daily chores, taking care of our guests, general maintenance of grounds, round table discussions, prayer vigils and involvement in protests. Please do not hesitate to contact us via the details below - our door is always open! We feel we have the potential to do much more!
 |
 |
 |
Hospitality |
Resistance |
The Green Revolution |
 |
 |
|
|
People are happier, Dorothy Day believed, when they are good. The idea is a key part of her enduring appeal, especially to the young, many of whom, she knew, yearn to do something significant, even heroic, with their lives. Living and working at a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality is like taking a grad-level course in what Day called the mystery of poverty: "that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love." |
||
 |
 |
Downloads
If you would like to know what the day to day expectations for our interns are please click on the link below.
If you would like to read and answer our Intern Questionnaire with the prospect of working at the CW farm please click on the link below
Intern Questionnaire
You can mail the completed form to us at:
thecatholicworkerfarm@yahoo.co.uk
Contact US
Email us: if you are interested please let us know!
Make Friends with The Catholic Worker Farm Group on Facebook
The Intern Experience
An Intern would work and live here at the farm. But not as a farmer! We are located between Rickmansworth and Denham. The 724 bus goes to both locations and from there the Metropolitan line goes into London (3/4 hour and about £8.70 round trip). The C.W. Farm is located on 2.5 beautiful acres of land with lake-front and an orchard, which is a decent size for the U.K. We live in a very large house.
The person interested in living here would be involved in our work which is; The Gospel norm to "feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked..." and so we offer hospitality to destitute women; we have 7 living with us now. We offer food and accommodation, do advocacy work and accompany them. You would also participate in justice and peace work, Round Table discussions, organic gardening, household chores and fundraising. Underlying this would be prayer (or meditation if you don't pray) and study. If you are interested you can come and visit. This is an opportunity to radicalize your life and faith.
Patricia Guitti Polastri- Brazil
Imagine a place where a family opens their door’s house for those who need a shelter... This is true, and it happens in the Catholic Worker Farm. Maria and Scott are the reason for this beautiful dream comes true, a couple who have changed their lives to help other people. I am glad to have known these two special human beings, who believe the world is better when we transform our ideas into actions. One of the examples is the Farm, where peace is welcome!
Some time ago I was wondering about being a volunteer at the Catholic Worker Farm. I had no idea of how this experience could be, and no one in the house knew me face to face, our first contacts were by email or via skype. In my country there are no Catholic Worker houses, I discovered the movement by my sister, who produced a documentary¹ about Dorothy Day. Then I started thinking about the possibility of becoming a volunteer in the CW. And after many hours on internet searching for a house where I would fell my heart more interested in, I found a farm in England and I loved!
The idea of being out stress of big cities seemed amazing for me! Brazil is famous for our agrarian fields, but I had never lived or worked at farms. As a student, and have been finishing my degree in Sociology, I was expecting to have a special holiday, and it happened… I went to the Farm on Christmas, and I stayed until March. Three months of intense experiences, working with my hands, and giving my heart to learn with new discoveries.
Dorothy Day is always an inspiration for the Catholic Worker Farm. Life in community, for example, brings a spirit of sharing our lives with other people, instead of the usual preference of privacy.
What a wonderful opportunity is to live in a house with women from different countries and cultures! We may read the news and guess we understand about certain reality, but we just learn how intolerant the human being can be when we are in touch with real people who have been suffering injustices and prejudices.
We can choose to live with indifference, it's easier, but life is so rare, it does not stop to wait for our decisions! Being a volunteer in the CW Farm have opened my mind to different realities, to learn with the diversity… I fell there is no time to waste, and we might try to do our best in this world.
This message is for the ones I knew last months in the house, and for those who might be interested in the Catholic Worker Farm/and movement. It’s a little bit of an experience that absolutely has changed my life!
¹ The movie trailer is available in: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFhE_Q673u4
Mirjam Johansson from Sweden
Each holding a bunch of red heart shaped balloons Christian Hunt and Alex Randall are walking the streets trying to convince people to join their campaign Cheatneutral.com.
The basic idea is about offsetting infidelity and is described on their website as follows: “When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.” In other words you can either join as a project to get funding for being faithful or you can pay Cheatneutral.com to cheat on your partner and then Cheatneutral.com will pay someone else to be faithful for you. In this way the total level of broken hearts in the world doesn’t go up.
The whole idea is thoroughly bizarre and – although real is still a joke, a joke which highlights the fact that Carbon Offsetting is also a joke. It is not difficult to make the connection and see the same absurdity in paying for the right to carry on emitting carbon.
It took me a little longer however to come to think of something we do which might be called offsetting indifference. We send money to charities so that they can care for destitute people for us. Convenient, isn’t it? I don’t think it is bad, but I do think there is something better. Jesus said “You will always have the poor among you…” (John 12:8) but they are not among us. This is not God’s plan for a civil society. “There is no Holiness but social holiness” (John Wesley). They are dissociated from us both physically and mentally. To “buy away” the responsibility of loving my brothers and sisters is to make myself a disservice. I think that by letting the stories of their lives touch me a change in my heart can occur; which I desire.
Huddled up in my bed in the upstairs room of the Catholic Worker Farm house pondering about life I can hear St Teresa of Avila’s words echoing in my head “…to ascend to the mansion of your heart’s desire it is not so important to think a lot, as to love a lot.”
Sometimes going downstairs to see if any of our guests needs me requires a little bit of self sacrifice. However I have so far never regretted it when I’ve chosen to try to love instead of think. And I wonder if I, after all, may need them more than they need me. Tired of my own thoughts, I want to learn to love more. I don’t always find it easy, but as I am writing this I realise I cannot think of any better place to be in order to learn to love and strive to conform my will to the will of God.
Talking to one of our guests about her life all my problems and worries seem so silly and insignificant. When I share this with her I expect a response like “One should not compare like that, your problems may be important for you“, but instead she brutally tells me “No, you have no problems”. Sometimes understanding and compassion is not what I need to get a better understanding and to feel compassion.
I have always been taught that love is not a feeling, but when Jesus cured the man with leprosy (Mk. 1:41) he was “moved with compassion”, some texts say “moved with anger”. Curing the man was not something he did with indifference only because he knew it was right. In my experience, when I feel the love for another person swirling around in my body, it certainly helps me to see more clearly, to be more honest and to reach further. But lack of that feeling is no excuse for not acting in a loving way.
This community provides many opportunities of reflecting upon my own intentions. Sometimes I doubt whether I want to live with “the poor” because I love them or because I believe it is the right thing to do. But no matter what the answer is I guess I should continue for I don’t doubt that God loves them immensely more than I do and he would never even consider paying someone else to do it for him.
Herman van Veelen from Holland
In the beginning of December I went back to my home country for a week. I went there to celebrate the feast-day of St. Nicholas, which is very big in Holland, and to answer all sorts of difficult questions, like “What are you doi
ng living at some crazy Christian - hippy farm -commune?”, “What was wrong with going to university?” and “Why didn’t you write?”
Though all of those questions are very good article-material, I chose here to restrict myself to the first question: “What are you doing at the Catholic Worker Farm?”
After being home for a few days, and having had some practice at answering this question, I developed two standard answers to choose from. The first one goes a bit like this: “We take the social message of the gospel seriously, and try to become disciples of Jesus Christ by following the law of love and doing the works of mercy; we share our house and our meals with people that really need them. We lead a life filled with prayer, contemplation and pure physical labour.” The other answer is:” Hmm, mostly weeding, I guess”.
Maybe both of these answers are too simplified. The first one makes our life seem too hard; the second one makes it sound too easy. I think the reason it’s so difficult to explain what we do is because it’s so diverse: sometimes we are farmers, sometimes activists; sometimes we are beggars, and sometimes social workers. One theme that does seem to run through all that we do is FOOD. First of all we spend a lot of time in our garden, growing our own organic produce. Like Ecclesiastes teaches us: there’s a time for sowing, and there’s a time for harvesting, a time for weeding, and a time for picking stones, a time for building rabbit fences, a time finding out whether the disease that’s killing all the leeks this year will also affect onions if we plant them in the same bed next year, and too little time for everything.
Besides gardening we have other ways of getting food. About once a month we go and beg at a big vegetable market. We always leave with a full car. We also get a lot of food donated. We get free bread from a local bakery, and we have cupboards full of baked beans from a couple of harvest festivals. That’s it for the boring, getting-the-food-part. Now comes the more enjoyable eating-part. One of the good things about eating at the CW-Farm is that it’s so international. We have a very big table, filled with many people that have all left their home countries. Some of us left because we couldn’t find a community to eat with, some of us left because we couldn’t find food to eat, and some of us left for completely different reasons. Maybe that sounds a bit sad, but it certainly has some advantages. The most obvious one is that we have food from all around the world; in a normal week we might eat Tunisian, Ethiopian, Rwandan, Ugandan, and Eritrean meals, complemented by baked beans on the weekend, when we don’t have a cook.
Besides that, the ethnic diversity also adds a lot of value to our dinner conversation. We often have what I call: ‘In my country’-conversations. Let me explain: In a house like ours, most people find out pretty quickly that a lot of sentences that used to begin with ‘Everyone’, like: ‘Everyone knows the Beatles’, or ‘Everyone rinses the soap off their dishes after washing them’, suddenly have to be precluded by ‘In my country’. So an ‘In my country’-conversation is a conversation in which a lot of those sentences are used. In this way we all learn a lot about intercultural difference and we find out important facts of life. Did you know, for example, that most Afghan men shave their armpits? When our Afghan community-member found out that most western men don’t, she gave me a look as if she’d just seen me eat a live frog; a complicated mix of surprise, disappointment, and disgust.
Our table-fellowship, however, is not restricted to the people that live on the farm. We also often have guest: people that come over for a few days or weeks, to work with us, people that regularly come volunteer for a day, or people that just come to visit or to check out the farm. It’s always nice to welcome local people into our house of hospitality. Of course our life is not limited to the gathering and consuming of food.
We also pray for our daily bread every morning. We have a short morning prayer, in which we read from the Bible and pray from our hearts. After this it often happens that Scott, who is a certified theologian, explains about the readings a bit more. The only thing I can think of that doesn’t have anything to do with food is war. This is probably why we spend some time every week trying to stop it, by holding placards and handing out leaflets. We believe in a future where everyone is sitting under their own vine and fig tree, in peace and unafraid, with a stomach full of fruit.
Anna Blomgren From Sweden
Thoughts from a Citizenship Class
“...And when you’re a citizen in a European Union country, you have the right to travel and stay and work in any country throughout the union.” The women sitting in front of me are nodding in acceptation as I tell them this. They seem to be painfully aware of the fact. A mixture of anger and guilt rises in me; how can it be that our rights and opportunities are still so different depending on where we were born? Do I deserve to stay in England any more than these struggling asylum seekers who are with me in this room? I try to reassemble my mind and getting on with the teaching on Britain’s political governance, thinking “After all this is why I came here; anger about our unjust world and a desire both to struggle to amend the system and to care for its victims.”
This happened an evening in September a few weeks after I came here from Sweden and started my internship at the Catholic Worker Farm. We had our weekly Citizenship Class, and doing this workshop on how Britain works and how it is to live here is one of our tasks as interns. During the past months I have probably learnt more from these classes than any of the ladies. We always first read from the “Life in the UK” book and then prepare a teaching session from a certain passage. It is also a challenge to make a workshop with people with so different experiences and knowledge of the English language and society. Despite this we have had many joyful and interesting moments together discussing the ways things work in Britain and sharing our notions and frames of reference.
I do find it a bit ironic that both Mirjam and I are coming straight from Sweden to teach asylum seekers about Britain. But it usually works out very well and the fact that I am also an immigrant sometimes raises my sense of equality with the ladies here, despite the dramatic difference in our positions that sometimes becomes very clear. In fact, only the children in this house were born in the UK, the rest of us have come from different parts of the world. It gives me a special sense of community when everybody around the dinner table starts interrupting each other with “but in my country...”.
So, apart from all the gardening and anti-war campaigning and Bible studying that has also been very instructive and delightful, I must say that the most valuable part of my experience here has been the encounters and relationships with people. The stories of the women that come to stay here always touch my heart and sometimes what they’ve been forced to go through really makes me upset. Often I wish I was able to do much more to change things and to help them, when the only possibility is to show my love and care. But when I try to see it from the divine perspective, I feel that love is after all not such a small or unimportant thing.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. […] And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:1-3;13, NIV).
Whitney Roach from London School of Theology
My experience as an intern at the Catholic Worker Farm this summer has been nothing short of intense: emotionally, physically, relationally and of course spiritually. I have stepped into a community which is characterized by paradox: there is struggle and strife, yet peace and beauty; there is hopelessness in people’s situations, yet hopeful people; it is a refuge for the refugee, yet a home which is held captive to the extraordinary cost of living in England. I am not surrounded by people who look like me, who think like me, or even who have been raised like me. In fact, the majority of people around me were born into what the world considers wretched and poor circumstances. I have sat with individuals and have listened to their stories, I have looked into their eyes and heard them say “there is nothing for me.” I have cried with them in my arms, cried with my supervisor discussing their situations, and cried in my room alone, asking God “why?”
All of this is a part of the journey of following Christ. I haven’t got nearly anything right—I cannot boast of my eagerness to step into this situation, I can only boast in Christ. As Christians we go into situations thinking we are going to be doing all the helping. At the farm, I am the one who has been helped, because God is showing me just how big his family is, how much He loves, and how much He requires of us to give. We have been baptized into a family, a body of believers. Have we ever stopped to consider that this family includes an extraordinary large amount of hungry, hopeless, desperate people? With that in mind, we are called to love each other deeply. What does this mean for you and I today? How much are you willing to give up to follow Christ?
This community, this family, does not do everything right by any means. But the reason I love it is because the leaders of it love God so much that they took all of their wisdom and experience, evaluated, prayed, and decided to give up comfort, security, normalcy for the sake of how they discern Christ bidding them come and die. In the end of Joshua, he urges the people to “yield their hearts” to God and to thereby stop putting other things in front of God in importance. I am left wondering how long I will continue to live like everyone else in the world and if I will truly ever want to answer the question of what it means to die to yourself, take up my cross and follow Christ, because I am too afraid of the answer?
Martha Hennessy from Vermont, USA.
When searching for community we sometimes wonder in what direction this path will take us and whom we may meet along the way. I come to this Catholic Worker Farm from Weathersfield , Vermont as a supplicant, and a volunteer to help out for a few weeks. I find myself sharing a 12th century English farmhouse with a very dedicated couple who's family includes two sons and a diverse mix of faces, languages, and spirits. I awake in the morning with a sense of confusion over what has led me here, my own impulse, or the hand of God. Perhaps both. Then I feel a deep sense of gratitude. To my husband who understands my quest, to Scott and Maria for having me, to the beauty of this place where the corner room I stay in overlooks the lake and garden. I am especially grateful to the guests with whom we share this mystery of life.
We attended Mass at Saint Paul 's this morning and Father Stan spoke about kinds of prayer. He gave us a vision of standing in the water at dawn, waiting to catch a glimpse of the birds as they rouse to meet the new day. Or simply seeing a donkey standing and waiting. There are so many forms of prayer and we must work hard to both recognize and practice them daily.
And so this old, yet new farm requires much work. Volunteers arrive to help with the building of the “Hermitage”, (I think of the Russian Museum with its priceless and countless pieces of art), on the edge of the lake. The lake is a result of quarry mining and the construction of a channel from Birmingham to London to supply coal and iron ore for the city. Apparently the lake is quite deep and inhabited by huge carp that are caught repeatedly by paying fishermen looking for a pleasant country pastime. We are always seeking a return to nature in this modern world of noise, pollution, and loss of the natural habitat. The lake is refuge to many ducks, geese, swans, and herons; they can be seen gliding silently across the water in the morning mist. It is such a blessing to be staying near this body of living water.
Other farm projects include preparing the garden for the winter fallow, completing the poly tunnel (we call them hoop greenhouses in Vermont ), to extend the growing season. The greenhouse and very old farmhouse are in need of never ending repairs. Life is always full of tasks that must be done in order to support the community and guests. It is important to remember to pace oneself in this work, to be humble and always pray for strength and guidance.
I can't write about my journey coming here to participate in the Catholic Worker Farm community without considering the context of our current world situation. The global financial markets teeter on the brink of chaos, and the US presidential race nears Election Day. It feels as though those who are aware of what is happening are holding their collective breath while others toil on in pain and oblivion. I completed early voting before leaving the States but I am always left with a feeling of having blood on my hands, trying to be a “responsible” citizen in a so-called democracy. The recent American bailout of the corporate criminals is a theft from the people who need housing, healthcare, and education. The horrific war that has been visited on the Iraqi people has turned on its perpetrators. And now people of faith who mount nonviolent protest to these atrocities are being branded as “terrorists” by the domestic security apparatus. How to maintain faith, hope and love with such dark times ahead? Dorothy and Peter are our guides to help us live a Catholic life, pursuing social justice, sharing with the homeless, and attempting to be more self-sufficient on the land.
We devote ourselves to the practice of the Works of Mercy as our salvation in the face of economic collapse, racial tension, class war, and the loss of meaningful, sustaining work. We see both college graduates and immigrants struggling to find work. The community life has much to offer a diverse group of people.
When I return home I will be participating in the launching of the next action to shut down Guantanamo Bay Military Prison come January in Washington DC . We aim to hold the next administration accountable for closing the prison, ending torture at the hands of the US military and CIA, restoring habeas corpus, maintaining a physical presence at the White House, and educating Congress. This “First 100 Days” campaign will begin with a nine day fast starting January 11th, the seventh anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo as part of the so-called “war on terror”. We hope there are people in the European CW community along with others who can find the resources to come for part of this time. It should be quite eventful!
I recall a quote from William Miller who wrote Dorothy's biography. “Having researched the Catholic Worker phenomenon I might very well have concluded, on the basis of the evidence, that the movement was a well intentioned but ineffectual pietistic activism. On the basis of the same evidence I might have also concluded that is was a flight from reality and was thus madness. But I have come to view the Worker movement as expressing an idea that comes truly out of the midst of life and gives to the human spirit its highest due”.
In the face of unspeakable suffering experienced by the guests of our Catholic Worker communities, we will continue to pray for the grace to open our minds and act with faith in our efforts with the work of penance and resistance.
Shannon Hope Fisher from Kansas, USA.
Tipping, Skipping, Dumpster Diving...
I'd rather call it Gleaning
At the Catholic Worker Farm we have a weekly ritual; this is a story of my first time participating in it:
Last night was a very nice night. After we ate a delicious lasagna dinner I made myself a cup of tea and settled in with Scott, Maria and Tanya to watch Into the Wild on the projection screen. We laughed, we cried, and when it was over Scott told us it was time. Tanya made a tea flask and I grabbed a granola bar, because, as you know, you should never go to the grocery store on an empty stomach.
We proceeded into a near town's posh supermarket that Scott and Maria have previously had great luck at. Favorably, the gates were open. Quickly and quietly we jumped out of the car and opened the dumpsters (bins if you will) and were amazed. We found loads of fresh fruit and veggies, along with other random necessities. As the night went on, we stopped at two other shops finding potatoes, breads, fresh cut flowers, and cheeses, yogurts and other dairy products (the weather is cold enough for it not to spoil).
When we returned [this is the best part of the trip] the ladies were ready for us. Everything was put on the kitchen table to be sorted and inspected. Here we “oohed” and “awwwed” at our treasure. The regiment began with looking for holes—which required us to re-bin those goods. Anything passing the test was then put through bleach water, rinsed in fresh water, dried and put away. I kept a tally how much the goods were worth: over 140 pounds. This did not include the fresh fruits, veggies and (my favorite) three beers which were with out price tags.
Around 1am we set out for bed with visions of bleached plums, bananas, potatoes, and kiwis dancing in our heads.
The spirituality behind our work:
This ritual, which many might simply dismiss as mere tipping, is for us, a very spiritual occasion. When Scott, Tanya and I partake in this act we know full well that we have the capability of working hard to provide enough food for ourselves and our immediate families to survive. We each value the honesty in hard work. The work we do in the bins is not for the rush of finding our favorite foods still in good condition for free. We also do not do it for the joy of wading through leaked muscle relaxer and years old bin slime. The reason we engage in this sometimes elating sometimes degrading work to is feed those who cannot work to feed themselves.
The Hebrew Bible’s story of Ruth and Naomi provides much inspiration to us. Like Ruth, the seven guests at the farm are foreigners in this country. Boaz allows Ruth to glean from his fields according to the laws established and recorded in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This tradition demands that when you harvest a field you do not harvest the edges or anything that falls when harvesting from a vineyard for that is to be for the poor and the alien; this is called gleaning. It is Boaz’s kindness and adherence to the law that saves Ruth and her mother in law Naomi from starvation.
Here at the farm we feel that when we go to the bins we participate in this millennia old tradition of gleaning. While we first ask shops to donate their outdated food and help us in our God given responsibility to feed the poor, many choose not to. It is only at this time that we dig through the edges of their fields and under their vineyard branches to sustain those who do not have the ability or opportunity to do so for themselves.
Leviticus 23:22 "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God." Shannon Hope Fisher
Ceri Owen from Wales
I thought I knew how messed up Britain's asylum system is. I've been on protests about it, I've stood outside detention centres waving placards, I've signed petitions, I'd met a few asylum seekers at church and soup kitchens, I've done my bit for Stop The BNP. I thought I knew. But this is different.
You can't understand how dehumanising a system is until you fully understand the humanity of the people trapped in it. I thought I knew the situation for 'asylum seekers' was bad. When it's a housemate and friend who has to formally prove risk to her life in a language she doesn't speak, without being given even the necessities of life – that's another level of understanding, not just intellectual awareness of injustice but a gut-level fear for a friend's safety.
As a Christian I'm called to love my enemies, and through the places I've lived and worked I've heard quite a bit of racism and BNP sympathisers in the last few years. I've tried to understand their fear, that the places they feel rooted in are changing in ways they can't control, that the community they are a part of is becoming something different. Fear of the stranger is an understandable part of being human. But then I look at the guests at LCWF, and think – what if so much of the public discourse wasn't about 'asylum seekers', but about the toddler with the beautiful brown eyes, or the young woman I shared a silly film with last night? The media bogeyman of the 'asylum seeker' is easy to fear. It's only when you get to know people that they stop being just labels and stereotypes. It's easy to use words like 'asylum seeker' as a political tool, and whether that's to help or to demonise the people so labelled it's still using them as a means to an end.
I thought I cared about asylum seekers. Caring for a person who is far from home and needs somewhere safe to live, an individual with their own name and story and dreams, is different. Sharing a home with 'asylum seekers', working with people rather than for them, is changing the way I think. You can fight for a cause, you can believe in it and give your life to it, but you can't love a cause or an idea. You can only love other people, and you can only grow into that by learning about them and knowing them as a person.
Contact Details:
Phone: (44) (0)1923 777201 Mobile: (+44) 07983 477819
E-mail: thecatholicworkerfarm@yahoo.co.uk