A native New Yorker, Gaby Immerman oversaw field operations for NYC’s community gardening program, GreenThumb, and accumulated a range of professional experience in both horticulture and agriculture all over the U.S. before settling down in Northampton in 1999. Gaby has been a tireless champion of Grow Food Northampton since 2011, our first season on the land. She served on the GFN Board from 2012-2021 and has supported the organization in many other capacities, including chairing the original “FOG Steering Committee’ that launched the community garden, providing orientation trainings to many early cohorts of gardeners, and founding the original “PASA” Committee (Program and Site Advisors).
Gaby’s work with Grow Food Northampton ties together with other land justice projects she’s involved with both in Western Mass and more broadly in the Northeast. She serves on the Board of Hilltown Land Trust, which stewards over 5,000 acres in 13 towns west of Northampton in Hampshire and Franklin Counties, and chairs the Mill River Greenway initiative, community stewards for the Mill River, which aims to build resilience in Mill River towns, uplift and preserve the river’s history and ecology, and advance the vision of a shared-use path following the course of the Mill River from Northampton to Williamsburg, which will someday cross the GFN Community Farm. Gaby has been teaching the core Horticulture and Botany courses at Smith College for 25 years. Her courses cover many relevant subjects relating to land, food growing, plant literacy, green infrastructure, the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, and reciprocity.
