LILA RIMALOVSKI | 2020 ALUMNI
Lila received her undergraduate degree from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she concentrated on ecology, farming and food systems. During college Lila began exploring an interest in communal living and intentional communities with a focus on sustainability and agriculture, spending summers living and working on cooperative farms of this nature. She was searching for a way to continue pursuing these interests while transitioning into work and adulthood. Place Corps answered the call in more ways than one.
“I was living in Brooklyn and had been studying ecology, farming and food systems, and really wanted to [go more deeply] into that and work in communities in a rural place. I didn’t feel ready to get a job on a farm team, and so Place Corps was a beautiful transition for me. There were a lot of questions that I had as I was leaving college that I didn’t feel like my school was able to fully answer for me. I felt ready to continue learning, while also beginning working at the same time.”
During her fellowship, Lila focused her research on cooperative leadership design and social permaculture. She sought to understand how the ways in which resources are shared within natural systems such as forests or regenerative farms can be used as a model for cooperation and creation at a human level. Also during her fellowship, Lila began to investigate her own relationship to the places she has lived and her heritage as a part of the jewish diaspora and the shared journey across centuries, nations and continents.
“I began to turn to my own roots and that has since shaped a lot of my life since the fellowship. So many seeds were planted while I was [at Place Corps]....I feel a lot of love and connection and commitment to the northeast, contextualized within an expansive interrogation of my relationship to places that make me who I am. My relationship to place is now forever contextualized in the lens of diaspora which I think is more specific to my [jewish] lineage and my family story.”
In the years following Place Corps, Lila's intertwined interests have continued to guide her life; she worked in regenerative agriculture on farms in the Hudson Valley and beyond before making her way to California where her own early roots are. During her time in California she has explored communal living projects throughout the state, invested herself in the Jewish spiritual community in the region, and continues to explore regenerative farming and ecological practices while seeking communal living experiences.
“I always need work that is intellectual, social and manual. I need those three in order for my life to feel grounded. No matter where I am in my life I’m always weaving the three together.”
Her next step is graduate school where she intends to bring together the guiding threads of her adult life: spiritual ecology, creative practice, and advocacy for environmental justice. Meanwhile, the relationships she developed at Place Corps remain central to her life and she expects they will continue to give and grow in years to come and inform her way forward.
“Place Corps set the foundation for so much that is in active practice in my life right now. The relationships that I built during that time are still extremely important to me and active. The experience that I had at Place Corps will forever be something I will not be able to truly explain to anybody else because of how unique of an experience it was, but undoubtedly it [has] shaped so much of who I am now.”