Nancy Van Cott Jones '53 and Sarah Bellos '04
Senior Singalong
Nancy Van Cott Jones '53
Every Monday morning at 11:15, music fills the air in a lounge at the Kendal at Ithaca retirement community. Nancy Van Cott Jones has helped run Kendal's singalong program for twelve years, rarely missing a Monday in more than 600 weeks.
Founded by Jones and a fellow resident in 1998, the group is open to the entire Kendal community, which includes a number of lifelong musicians. Each week, a rotating roster of six leaders and six pianists attracts some four dozen eager singers.
Jones and her fellow leaders compile their own songbooks and make each week's selections. Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' " opens each event, followed by half an hour of show tunes, oldies, patriotic songs, and holiday favorites before closing with "When You're Smiling." When the Kendal daycare program stops by, music lovers young and old perform children's classics like "If You're Happy and You Know It" and "Old MacDonald."
A psychology major on the Hill, Jones sang and played piano growing up in Unadilla, New York. She and her late husband, Thomas Jones '51, BCE '52, raised three children, all Cornellians: Margelia Jones '78, BS Hotel '79, David Jones '80, and Carey Jones '88. One of Kendal's earliest residents—the community, which includes dozens of alumni and retired faculty, opened in 1996—she says that the singing group welcomes people with all levels of ability and experience. "It's a friendly atmosphere," Jones says. "At the end we're not clapping for a performance, we're clapping for each other."
— Marc Campasano '11
Green Acre (and a Half)
Sarah Bellos '04
When Sarah Bellos was growing up in Long Island's Suffolk County, she used to walk to a farm stand down the road from her house to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. But by the time she graduated from college, all the farms in her town had been lost to development.
Four years ago, Bellos took a step toward reversing this trend in another community by founding Nashville Urban Harvest, a nonprofit farm in Tennessee. "I wanted to help people who might not have a grocery store within a few miles of their home—even in a major city— gain access to healthier food," she says. Located on a one-and-a-half-acre lot, the farm grows tomatoes, garlic, carrots, lettuce, and other vegetables and sells shares of its harvest to community members. Last year more than two dozen families, 40 percent of them low-income, purchased shares. "We didn't want to just add another name to the list of community-supported farms in Nashville," Bellos says. "We wanted to spread the idea that all people deserve healthy food, regardless of income."
After interning on a farm in North Carolina the summer before her sophomore year, Bellos switched her major from engineering to natural resources. She spent a year managing Dilmun Hill, Cornell's student farm, where volunteers do the majority of the field work, and used its model to found Nashville Urban Harvest. Every year the nonprofit hosts more than 400 volunteer workers—some weekly, others just for a few hours. Volunteers range from lifelong gardeners to those who have never worked the soil. "Some volunteers support the notion of sustainable agriculture," she says. "Others are simply jealous of their friends' homegrown tomatoes."
— Mark Fischer '08