Growing up in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley without a backyard, Yesenia Casillas Rios would turn to local parks as a way to get outside, play, and explore her neighborhood. 

These communal open spaces “were very crucial to the way I grew up,” she says.

In her senior year of high school, Casillas Rios became more directly involved in her local public spaces when she started doing a volunteer youth program at Black Thumb Farm, a community farm a couple blocks from home. Her end-of-the-year project tracked the impacts of weather on plant growth.

“They taught me a lot about food justice, food sovereignty, and environmental justice in terms of where we lived and how our environment had a lot to do with how we experience our day-to-day lives as low-income, first-generation students,” she said. 

The experience set her down a path to UC Berkeley, where the landscape architecture major graduated this month from the Global Poverty & Practice minor, or GPP, which allowed her to stay involved with Black Thumb Farm during college. For the past three years, Casillas Rios has also served as a Fellow at the Blum Center, where she has provided essential administrative and event support for the Master of Development Engineering program. 

While looking at colleges in high school, Casillas Rios discovered a Berkeley program that spoke directly to her experiences and interests.

“I found out about landscape architecture and how, as a landscape architect, you could design parks or you can design green spaces,” she said. “That fascinated me.”

It’s an interdisciplinary field, and, once on campus, Casillas Rios looked for other opportunities to interact with people from different disciplines. Landscape architects “care about energy, they care about water, they care about communities,” she said. The Blum Center, she found, fit that description, too.

In her student associate role, she worked closely with then–Assistant Director of Student Affairs Valerie Moss, who introduced her to GPP. The minor had clear parallels with Casillas Rios’ passion for community development.

A lesson in soil and plant health at Black Thumb Farm (Photo by Yesenia Casillas Rios)

“I’ve always liked to learn as much as I can,” she said, “and GPP also has to do with students from all sorts of different interests and backgrounds who are also interested in change, are hopeful for change, and want to learn how we can create that change.”

Her first GPP class, “Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes,” doubled as one of her major requirements. “‘I’ll give it a shot,’” she remembers thinking. “And I fell in love with the class.” Prof. Sai Balakrishnan’s passion for understanding global poverty inspired her to officially pursue the minor.

Casillas Rios returned to Black Thumb Farm during school breaks to do her practice experience. And this time, she led the high schoolers. 

The farm had a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, and Casillas Rios led these youth in growing a variety of vegetables they would then sell to locals participating in the CSA. On weekends, she taught them what kind of flowers could grow in what conditions and how to arrange the flowers for selling. She also led workshops that the farm put on. 

The farm also asked their resident landscape architect to help design a new plot of land they had, two blocks from Casillas Rios’ childhood home. This included interpretive landscape maps to engage the city on the farm’s expansion plans.  

The full-circle nature of her journey isn’t lost on her.

“It’s such a beautiful thing,” she said, “I first came in just wanting to have a green space in my community, and now they’re bringing so much back to us — providing so many community workshops, community engagement.”

Earlier this month, Casillas Rios finished up her three years supporting the Blum Center’s programs and activities, and on May 19, she and 32 others from 18 different majors graduated from the GPP Minor.

She credited Moss and one of her GPP professors, Clare Talwalker, with encouraging her to reflect more on her interests, what she chose to do during college and why, and to be more open-minded about what she could pursue academically and professionally. 

“It was a pleasure having Yesenia in class!” Talwalker said. “She brought to discussions her investment in understanding how our access and uses of built spaces, including green spaces, intersect with poverty and inequality, and how the design and shaping of landscapes might be socially transformative. 

“Her contributions were unique, valuable, and inspiring.”

Over the years, Moss and Chetan Chowdhry, the Center’s Director of Student Programs, had also helped build a feeling of community at the Center by approaching Casillas Rios as more than just a student worker. 

“I’ve become so close to them after these three years. It helped me a lot in not feeling so alone in this journey as a first-generation student and going to college,” she said. “I’m not just doing it to do it, like many of us are, but I’m here to do it for a purpose. Feeling reminded of that purpose with those reflections that I was able to have with them was something I’m truly grateful for.”

This summer, Casillas Rios will finish up an internship at a landscape architecture firm and another energy-focused internship at a consulting group. Her plans beyond that aren’t settled, but she knows she wants to eventually attend graduate school and gain more hands-on experiences in and around the landscape architecture space.

She will also be heading back home soon to the San Fernando Valley, and to Black Thumb Farm.

“Every time I’ve gone back on breaks,” she said, “they’re like, ‘You’re going to come back once you graduate; you’re going to take charge of this.’”

Would she?

“Imagine,” she said with a laugh. “You never know. I really don’t know where I’m going to be. But I’ll for sure still be helping them out as well.”