On April 21st, the WNCStong Youth Service Corps held its orientation program for the 2026 cohort. This year, 17 students from western North Carolina will participate in internships at six local host farms.
CEFS is grateful for the opportunity to partner with Dogwood Health Trust and expand our impact in Western North Carolina.
On November 8, 2025, we celebrated the amazing work and growth of our WNCStrong Youth Service Corps participants! We launched the WNCStrong Youth Service Corps to help western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene while preparing the next generation of leaders. High school students from Buncombe, Mitchell, and Yancey counties gained hands-on experience in [...]
On September 22, 2025, the North Carolina State University CALS News featured the WNCStrong Youth Service Corps in this article.
The backbone of the Service Corps is the internships that our 22 members are doing on nine farms across the three counties we serve. However, our Workdays are a meaningful and impactful component of the Corps experience. Corps members, their teachers, and the CEFS-based staff all dedicate one Saturday a month to work as [...]
In four short months we’ve gone from ideas sketched out in a grant proposal to twenty-two high schoolers receiving paychecks for internships they’ve been doing on nine farms across Buncombe, Mitchell and Yancey Counties. A full list of those farms is below. In addition to weeding, planting, fertilizing and mulching, our students have built [...]
