[I moved to Cranston] in 1984. I kind of bounced around, but I was coming from Lynn, Mass, and I grew up in upstate New York. … I worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and so I was involved in politics pretty much as soon as I came to Rhode Island through the union. Where I lived, in Edgewood, we had a really good state representative, Jerome Egan, and I helped him campaign and hand out leaflets and that kind of thing. ... When he was no longer in the legislature, then there was Nancy Hetherington; we helped her. There was another woman, Ellen O’Hara, who was on the City Council, [and I was] working on her campaign. ... I was part of the PTO at Rhodes School, and the parents whose kids were in class with my kids asked me to be on this Cranston Educational Advisory Board. … I said I would do that, and then I realized that the School Committee seat was going to be open because Paul Bucci, who was on the School Committee, decided to run for the City Council. I asked seven women to run, who I knew from school things, and none of them would do it, and by the time I gave the pitch for the seventh time, it’s like, I had convinced myself. So, I ran, and I lost … [but] I ran again ... and I won, and I served five terms and the Council seat opened up, and I really had had enough of the School Committee, so I ran for that, and I had a primary and won, and then ran every two years after that. [I served] for a total of ten years, and then I ran for mayor and lost the primary, and here we are.

I started the Pawtuxet Village Farmers Market, so I had a little bit of contact with farming [in Cranston], and one day I went to Whole Foods and one of the farmers at the Pawtuxet Village Farmers Market was looking for someone to work one night a week, helping her harvest vegetables for her CSA. My son was in high school, and I thought this would be perfect for him; he didn’t have a job, and at the time, gas prices were four dollars a gallon. He thought it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, and so I told her, “Okay, I’ll do it,” because I was unemployed, and I did it for a while, and then this job [at Westbay Farm] came open, and I applied for it and was shocked that they wanted to interview me. So, instead of volunteering once a week, I said, “can I come every day so that when I have the interview, I can at least say that I know something other than, yeah, I pick tomatoes every Monday?” So, they interviewed me, and they hired somebody else, which was probably a good decision, and then I kept volunteering, and I had another temporary job. When the next year rolled around, they asked me to apply, because the guy who had gotten the job didn’t want to do it again, and they hired me. I relied a lot on my friend who has Zephyr Farm in Cranston, Michele Kozloski, and would ask her, “what do I do now?” and then we had some volunteers who knew what they were doing, and gradually, I think I’ve gotten better at it.

So now we have about fifteen or twenty people who volunteer in some role; some people run the farmstand when we have it on Thursdays, three or four women run that, and others come primarily in the morning ... We produce about 20,000 pounds of vegetables a year, and we use organic methods, so we don’t use any pesticides – no herbicides, no junk on the food – and most of it goes to the food pantry at West Bay Community Action over by Jefferson Boulevard, and when we have extra stuff, there’s a West Warwick Assistance Center – they're open three days a week as a food pantry – and there’s an Interfaith Food Pantry run by five churches in Cranston. … It’s just open on Saturdays, so most weeks we give them some food, and we do a home delivery service too. We're part of a home delivery service to homebound people, so they get a pantry bag of canned goods, cereal, whatever, and then we add whatever we have for the week.

The thing that makes me optimistic [about the future of Cranston] is that there are a number of people who volunteer here from Cranston, and they’re growing the vegetables. I’m certainly not doing this by myself – that's good. And then, you show up on any Saturday morning at this Interfaith Food Pantry on Elmwood Avenue – it opens at 10 – so I usually go around 9:30 with whatever I have to donate, and there’s a line of twenty people. I think they said [they service] close to 100 people every week. So, that's all working because these people are volunteering, and they’re of different religious faiths, so I think that’s pretty neat, because it comes from the seed to the dinner plate, all with the volunteers.

The second season of this project has been made possible by the Rhode Island Department of Health and the efforts of the OneCranston Health Equity Zone of Comprehensive Community Action, Inc. in partnership with the Cranston Herald and Timothy McFate. The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Humans of Cranston participants do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the aforementioned parties. The presented stories are voluntarily provided, unpaid, and given verbatim except for correcting grammatical errors. 

Want to nominate a Cranston resident to be featured? Email JB at jfulbright@comcap.org.