Alessia Cutugno, 2019-2020 Fellowship Alumni

Alessia received her undergraduate degree from NYU and was searching for an opportunity to understand cooperative economics, land redistribution and affordable housing in the context of her own community in the Hudson Valley. After serving an Americorps term in Poughkeepsie and working with local nonprofits and an affordable housing coalition in the region, she was longing for a new kind of experience. Alessia came to Place Corps from a desire for something radically different, responding to Place Corps’ focus on cooperative governance and economics, social and ecological permaculture and values-driven work.

During Place Corps Alessia found herself captivated by the practice of co-governance used to navigate the communal living experience and steward an eight-person household, and the relationships that were growing and changing through the fellowship. In addition to exploring gardening, farming, cooking, and her own relationship to the land in the Hudson Valley, she began pursuing a deep interest in human relationships, the potential they hold and the work that they require. This interest has become a path. After Place Corps Alessia decided to pursue teaching.

I think the most valuable thing I have [from Place Corps] is that embodied knowledge and those practices to know that we can repair a relationship, we can work through conflict, we can work together from very different places.

Over the past few years Alessia has trained in and practiced childhood education, working in the lower school at Hawthorne Valley. In teaching she has found a calling which allows her to dedicate her time and energy to nurturing young people's relationships to one another and the world around them. 

It makes a lot of sense to me that this culture is the way that it is with the schooling system that we have. Because we learn from first grade, from kindergarten, that we're individuals in competition with each other, and that we have to completely compartmentalize our heads from our bodies.

She is currently developing her teaching practice through graduate studies and is pursuing a Masters of Education at Harvard University where she is taking classes in developmental psychology, ethnic studies, and literacy & storytelling. Her hope is to bring her belief in emotionally and socially grounded, culturally-rooted, community-oriented education into practice in a small learning environment in the Hudson Valley.  

That was the biggest thing [from Place Corps], to have an embodied experience of trust with other humans and to know what can happen when people are committed to working together and when that is the work itself. Now in my teaching practice, that’s what I care about most. I want my students to have the continuous reminder that the most important thing is that we take care of each other.