As is often the case, especially with reporters, one story leads to another. You’re tuned in to a conversation with a farmer named Bill, a 40-year-old man who has lost his job as a land surveyor and decided to resurrect a dream he had harbored since his teenaged years: to become a farmer.

Then you notice a couple hundred yards in the distance a small horde of teenagers, a half dozen of them toiling over low-growing greens. They clutch garden implements and grab buckets and hoses. They look like typical adolescents, dressed in baggy T-shirts and jeans.

On subsequent visits I saw them and heard their laughter, their language often laced with swears, but they were not the slightest bit menacing. I have a teenaged son, and I used to teach in public schools, where I often coached this age group. A lot of people I know instantly recoil from teenagers, but I feel drawn to them. They can burst with energy or sink into sullenness.

Upon further questioning, I learned that these teenagers came from the city of Lowell. All of them were having a hard time of one sort or another – dropping out of school, homelessness, gang-related troubles.

And the sole adult leading the pack was a blonde-hair guy named Derek Mitchell, who has a booming voice and a quick smile. He’d gone to an Ivy League school, served in the Peace Corps in Central America and taken the job of guiding teenagers through the work of growing, weeding, fertilizing and picking all kinds of organic food and even flowers for a community supported farm.

When they'd break at the end of a Friday, Derek piles them all into a van and drives past the old dairy stand to a convenience stores and buys them something to drink. Their favorite is a pint can of Arizona Iced Tea. They stand there, jeans and shirts soiled and sweaty with great big grins on their faces.

The project goal is to effect changes in these kids by taking them out of their urban context and engaging them in agriculture.

So, what about you? Ever shifted your paradigm like these teenagers have done? Have you been plucked from the familiarities of your world and landed in a place totally different? From urban to rural? Or country to city? Or from one culture to another? What changes did you perceive in yourself or did others notice in you?

Listen to this story.

Watch Chris' slideshow depicting work in the Fresh Roots Organic Farm.