Nestled away on a 54-acre parcel of land located at the end of a gravel road in Bartlett lies ARK Farms, an agrarian nonprofit that aims to grow the spirits of disenfranchised youths.

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Since 2013, ARK Farms has helped young people in the community build empowering skills through work with rescue animals, providing both emotional support and marketable skills the kids can use later in life.

“We work with kids who are quite often disempowered, disengaged and disconnected in their community,” founder and executive director Abby Mauwong said. “But that’s not the only kind of kid. We work with a full ecosystem, too. We have valedictorian kids and then we have kids who have severe learning disabilities. We have a little bit of everybody.”

The concept of an ecosystem is one of the main themes at ARK Farms, according to Mauwong, and at the center of that ecosystem is the farm’s rescue horses.

“(They are) very therapeutic for us, they are really, really powerful,” Mauwong said. “We work with a lot of kids who have different emotional issues, though we hate the term at-risk, because all teenagers now in this generation have anxiety and some form of depression or trauma. And if it wasn’t before, then it is now with COVID.”

But just like any ecosystem, the horses don’t exist in a vacuum.

“We wouldn’t be able to do it if it weren’t for the donkeys,” she said. “They are not just adorable little guys who want their ears scratched, they are also incredible predator killers. They will take out a coyote, a fox or a wild dog in no time.”

Even the smaller animals like the chickens serve their purpose by eating the fly eggs, and the ticks out of the manure around the barn, while the ducks eat the mosquito larvae off of the water sources.

“The horses really like coming up here because they get tended to and they don’t have a whole lot of fly problems because of the chickens,” she said.

Meanwhile, the manure gets composted and used in the garden, where they grow fruits and vegetables for families in need. The plants in turn also provide nectar and pollen for the bees. The bees produce honey, which is sold to help pay for animal feed and farm support.

And while this ecosystem serves an obvious practical purpose, it also operates as a functional metaphor for the kids on the farm.

“All of us are a part of the ecosystem,” Mauwong said. “We believe that the ecosystem is an overlay for community. You may more like a donkey than a horse or more like a chicken who wants to be in the background sifting through stuff, but you really matter and without you this whole thing will break down. So that is really what ARK Farms is all about, we’re animal rescue and youth empowerment, but we’re learning how to be a community.”

However, like a lot of communities around the world, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic are changing how people interact on the farm.

“Usually this place has anywhere from 50 to 150 kids running around with hatchets, axes and power tools,” Mauwong said. “COVID has made that not a possibility,”.

But despite the pandemic, the more than 150 rescue animals who call the farm home still need to be cared for. And that’s where a small but dedicated team of volunteers mostly consisting of kids who have been with program for several years comes into play.

“We’ve had up to 200 kids here before spread across the farm,” Anna Mauwong, Abby’s 15-year-old daughter, said. “It’s really weird to not see the kids that I know need it.”

But for the few remaining volunteers, it can still be a much-needed respite from their day-to-day lives.

“It’s really fun actually because you don’t see this day to day as a regular teen,” 17-year-old Amber Titus said. “In this kind of world, we’re all focused on technology, so getting to see these types of animals that I thought I would never get to see, especially in this day and age, is nice.”

Titus, who wishes to one day become a vet, is also the animal welfare coordinator at the farm.

“I got the experience to intern with a veterinarian,” she said. “It’s really cool because you don’t usually have that experience. Especially because I’m still in high school and she usually only takes college interns.”

Another staff member, 17-year-old Kevin Flannary has also used the farm as a springboard to by parlaying his experience working with the farm’s bee hives into a work study with the Bartlett Bee Whisperer, David Glover.

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“It’s not like the sterile environment of a classroom,” he said. “It’s an environment where learning is much more free. Where you can make mistakes and learn more thoroughly from that.”

Flannary hopes to study quantum physics when he gets to college, a field for which working with bees has been surprisingly beneficial. “It’s the problem-solving mentality,” he said. “it’s a matter of data collection and assessing situations and looking at a large number of factors and what they contribute to.”

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But for some kids, like 16-year-old Fiona Estes, it’s simply about being a part of something bigger than yourself.

“It’s nice to tell somebody that you have a bigger part somewhere else,” she said. “They need every single person on this farm. We all work together. It’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s also kind of therapeutic.”