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HerbalEGram: Volume 6, Number 3, March 2009
United Plant Savers Now Accepting Applications
for 2009 Internships
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United Plant Savers (UpS), a nonprofit organization that aims to preserve native medicinal plants, is now accepting applications for its 2009 spring and fall internships on a first-come basis.1
“Our admittance timelines did not fit our applicants’ needs, so we changed the process,” said Lynda LeMole, UpS Executive Director. “This year, we will review each applicant on a first come, first reviewed and accepted basis.”
For each session, 6 to 8 interns will live for 40 days on the UpS Botanical Sanctuary, a 378-acre native medicinal plant center in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio. As an important part of the UpS mission to raise public awareness of the plight of wild medicinal plants, the internship will provide interns with a hands-on educational experience. Their plant knowledge will be broadened when learning from UpS staff teachers about medicinal plant identification, sustainable wild harvesting principles and practices, and medicine making. Interns will help to design interpretive materials for the Talking Forest Medicine Trail project, a 10-mile series of trails that connect the UpS sanctuary with hundreds of adjoining acres of forests, prairies and habitats.2
While attending the spring session, interns will be a part of the Talking Forest Medicine Trail inauguration and celebration at the organization’s Goldenseal Sanctuary. This ceremony includes guided hikes among some of America’s largest remaining stands of American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), black cohosh (Actaea racemosa syn. Cimicifuga racemosa), and other medicinal plants; and classes on plant and land management.3 UpS co-founder and naturalist Paul Strauss spent years building this network of trails that features handcrafted signs describing hundreds of healing plant species and the history of the forest.
As another facet of the internship program, interns will also spend 30 hours a week doing a variety of work projects, including building medicine trails, planting and maintaining a vegetable garden, working with at-risk or endangered plant species, doing farm and landscape maintenance, and working in the greenhouse.1 Additional to the projects, interns will also gain a communal living experience, which includes sharing bedrooms, food purchasing, menu planning, and housekeeping responsibilities.
Each internship costs $600, in addition to interns’ responsibility for all other expenses such as food and transportation. The spring session runs from April 27, 2009 until June 5, 2009 and the application deadline is April 1, 2009. The fall session runs from August 31, 2009 until October 9, 2009 and the application deadline is August 3, 2009. All applicants must provide a resume, 2 letters of recommendation, and responses to 10 questions, which can be found on the UpS internship Web page. For additional information, contact Betzy Bancroft at 802-476-6467, plantsaversmail@earthlink.net, and Lynda LeMole at 707-824-0731, lynda@unitedplantsavers.org.
—Lindsay Stafford
References
1. Internships & Job Opportunities. United Plant Savers Web site. Available at: http://www.unitedplantsavers.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=197&cntnt01returnid=64. Accessed February 25, 2009.
2. Saxton K. Internships for United Plant Savers. HerbalEGram. July 2008;5(7). Accessed March 2, 2009.
3. United Plant Savers inaugurates “Talking Forest Medicine Trail” [press release]. East Barre, VT: Natural Newswire; February 17, 2009.
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