Saturdays at the market: A service learning reflection by Mark Nowicki

Mark Nowicki (left) and friend, Andrew, serve as market crowd monitors.

Over the past two months I have conducted service learning at my local Farmers Market, called the Fulton Street Farmers Market. Founded in 1922 and located in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, they have been connecting farmers, food creators and artists to the West Michigan community for 98 years. They are fueled by their customers’ passion and commitment to their health and local economy, and their dedicated vendors who grow and produce the food that nourishes them.

Service learning integrates the practice of volunteerism with educational objectives. I knew I wanted to pursue service learning because I had the ability, with the pandemic, to affect real change within my community while learning something beneficial in the process. I chose to volunteer with the market because of their mission to provide a diverse, inclusive, vital and vibrant community marketplace that offers convenient access to high quality, locally grown, sustainable products. The year-round marketplace provides farmers with direct sales opportunities enhanced with consumer education about food and nutrition.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the market has taken extra precautions to ensure the safety of their customers and vendors. For my service learning project, I was to responsibly monitor the customer capacity within the market at a given time. Alongside that, I was to assist with setting up barriers, counting customers, and monitoring entrances and exits to ensure proper social distancing of customers. 

Although I learned several things about myself and the community I live in throughout my time spent with Fulton Street Farmers Market, I think it would be interesting to talk about one thing that I learned from a business management perspective and one I learned from interactions with a fellow volunteer. First, was giving constructive feedback to my supervisor on ways we can improve the process of crowd management. Automatically, you might think that as a business student you should already be familiar with giving feedback on a regular basis. But this instance was different because I was to give feedback on how to mitigate customer number irregularities and reduce the number of social distancing violations in a matter of seconds. 

Without much time to think and truly assess my suggestion, I told my supervisor I thought it would be beneficial to rethink how we keep track of the number of customers in the confines of the market at any given time. This led me to suggesting that we implement an app to easily monitor the number of customers entering and exiting the market. That way, we could know the exact amount of people in the market (168 people was the capacity) in real time. Prior to this suggestion, we were counting every five customers who left and communicating that amount via radio to the volunteers who were letting customers enter.

I like to look at this learning opportunity as one that makes an impact on the safety and wellbeing of the people visiting the market. I could’ve just trusted the process that was handed to me and not worried about how to improve it. Instead, I thought to myself, I am going to improve this system and give these customers an even more secure environment to shop in. That’s what I did, and it was awesome to see this tracker be. To tie this back to my business education and service learning, I believe I learned how to think critically in high pressure situations, specifically in situations where my suggestions will affect the safety of others. 

Second, the experience inspired me to use knowledge from my studies to affect change in my community and the world. I learned this from a fellow volunteer named Dan. I only got a couple of minutes to talk with Dan because we were working in different areas that day, but while we were tearing down barricades he asked me how I got involved with the market and why I was volunteering. I told him that I used to come to the market when I was younger and that I was volunteering because of class and explained to him the idea of service learning. He thought that was really nice and then I asked him how he became involved with the organization. He told me that he works full-time at a local greenhouse and will sometimes work as a vendor selling produce to customers at the farmers market. He saw the need for volunteers for crowd management, so he decided to sign up. 

The part that was really interesting is why he started working at the greenhouse in the first place— to help solve the problem of food insecurity for low-income individuals in our community. He said that this was the selling point of the greenhouse that he worked for. They donate about 35% of their yield to food programs around West Michigan with the mission to put an end to food insecurity. His story brought a lot of clarity to my life and showed me that there are people all around who are trying to make a difference by selflessly giving their time to organizations like the greenhouse that Dan works for. Now, I am eager to figure out what will bring me happiness, along with making a difference in the world and trying to map a realistic long-term plan for my career based on this principle.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Fulton Street Farmers Market and I am thankful to have volunteered my time throughout this semester, especially with the pandemic going on. The volunteers and customers I interacted with brought joy to each of my Saturdays at the market. I hope to continue my service learning with the organization beyond the time I spent there for class.