Though Hill has been a successful Senior Lecturer beloved by students in UVM’s Plant Biology department since 2009, her passion for community learning began when she recognized a hard truth about her teaching: "Talking about global change, climate change, and biodiversity loss in the classroom is depressing, and it's really hard to stay hopeful when you have to engage with this really hard material day after day."

During her sabbatical in 2019-2020, she was developing a contemplative practices learning community in collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning.  As part of that research, she read, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. "The book talked about how hope in our culture tends to be passive. Such as, 'I hope it all works out' or 'I hope you get better.'  The authors' argument is that in order to cultivate hope, we have to be active participants in making the changes that we want to see in the world."

This insight offered her a new way to infuse hope into her classroom. She next took a service-learning course to develop ideas for how she could more actively engage her students in their coursework. "I was thinking about how to bring this out to our local community through community partnerships, and at that exact moment, the City of Burlington was developing a nature-based climate solutions document to go along with their open space plan. I realized this document existed, and then I took what they laid out and built a curriculum around it."

Hill now teaches a community learning course in both in the spring and in the summer semesters, focusing on nature-based climate solutions. "We're using the UVM greenhouse to propagate native, perennial plant species to incorporate into public spaces. We have a lot of community partners: the city parks, Burlington Wildways, the Intervale, and we're branching out. We're working to increase native plant biodiversity in the landscape."

As for the skills that her students acquire when doing community learning projects, Hill says the list is long: "leadership skills, organizational skills, they get to network, they get to realize what real-life projects entail, they're gaining communication skills, and an understanding what it means to be a professional.  I think that they can take all of those skills with them into their classrooms, and especially outside of the classroom, and use them to progress in their careers after they graduate."

In early May, Hill's students worked with their community partners to hold a plant giveaway of over 700 plugs of 15 different species of native plants that her students had grown. "The students' engagement with local community partners in these projects, their agency, and how they develop these goals with each other and with our community partners is fantastic. They're getting to know what's happening in the local community, and they're feeling like they're making a difference. That's the biggest part of it. Students really want to do something, especially these students. They want to make positive changes. They need mentorship and assistance in doing that, so that's why I teach the community engagement courses, and it's been an overwhelmingly fantastic experience.

"What excites me the most as a teacher is seeing students synthesize the information that they're gaining from the classroom into some experience. It could be a group project in the classroom, or it could be an undergraduate research project, or it could be a service-learning project, which is what I do. All these experiential opportunities help students to take all the knowledge that they're gaining, and put it together in a way that's new, that's theirs, that's creative. Then they work with campus partners, or they work with community partners, or they work with a principal investigator in a lab to develop something, or some new knowledge, or some new project, they accomplish something real that will outlast their time here. That's just part of what we do in plant biology and it's what gets me really excited about working with students at UVM."