BUILDING THE SHIP AS WE SAIL IT: WOMEN OF COLOR & COMMUNITY FOOD WORK
My capstone project focuses on women of color and their community food work. In the food justice space many nonprofits are operated by outsiders looking to serve “underserved” neighborhoods, but there is also a robust network of people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups working within their own communities – and much of this work is done by women. I wanted to highlight projects created by and for people within their own communities, and I especially wanted to highlight the often unseen and undervalued work of women within these spaces.
The community projects I study span a wide range, from an open-access community garden to advocating for a culturally appropriate farmers market to a national network of black-led food justice organizations. I sought to understand what we can be learned from the experiences of these women within their community projects, and how they navigate a food system that reflects our larger racist and patriarchal society. With the exception of two, most of the projects are located in NYC.
I chose seven different projects and interviewed women who are involved with them. In addition to analyzing my interview data, I created a visual map/guide to the women, their projects, and how they are connected.
The title “Building the ship as we sail it” comes from Karen Cherfils of the Community Chef Kitchen Cooperative. According to other women in the cooperative, it’s something she often says to both bolster them and to remind the group that they have the capacity to execute the vision for their work in the way that is best for them. There is no guidebook, no rulebook for creating change and providing for community self-determination. Each project represents an idiosyncratic effort to imagine a new and equitable future.
METHODS
Between December 2018 and March 2019, I conducted roughly hour-long interviews with nine women either by phone or in person, and asked any necessary follow-up questions via email. I asked about the history of the project, their own personal journey in food justice work, some of the challenges their projects face, and how they feel their race, ethnicity and gender impacts and influences their work.
I either knew my interviewees personally or learned of them through my own network, and at least one or two of the other interviewees was mentioned in my interview. The world of food justice activism, especially in POC and immigrant communities, is small and it often seems like everyone knows each other. This network highlights the formation of an informal community that supports each other’s work, collaborates on projects and who are all committed to the struggle for liberation.
I complemented the interviews with research on women and food, women of color in the food movement, and gender justice as a tenet of food sovereignty.
KEY THEMES & LESSONS LEARNED
COOPERATION IS KEY
The work of most of those interviewed is rooted in the cooperative economics movement. Consumer coops, worker-owned cooperatives, community gardens and CSAs are all considered a part of this ecosystem. But outside of the more formal movements in which these women work, one key takeaway I discovered is that no one is doing this work alone. The projects are rooted in the desire to strengthen communities around food. This doesn’t have just a relational benefit, but also an economic one. For example, the Community Chef Kitchen Cooperative has power in numbers and can demand higher rates for their community chef services than they would if they were all working as individual contractors. Community gardens are another model for this type of mutually beneficial environment. Q Gardens in Flatbush has an “open harvest” model, meaning that anyone can come in off the street and harvest whenever the garden is open, and they also have communal beds so that people can, as one woman stated, “feel responsibility and engagement with the growing process.”
UNLEARNING OPPRESSIVE SYSTEMS
Many spoke of the difficult but rewarding process of unlearning ways that we have of relating to ourselves and each other that are rooted in oppressive structures such as racism and capitalism. Especially in projects where cooperation, democratic decision-making processes and shared leadership were key components of the work, it has been an ongoing process to bring group participants around to this way of thinking. When asked why the National Black Food & Justice Alliance prioritizes shared leadership and democracy, co-founder Dara Cooper said that “[black people] need to be in the practice of self-governing.” These projects use food justice work as an avenue to reinvent participants’ relationship to other economic and relational systems as well.
RECONNECTING WITH ANCESTRAL & CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
Our current industrial food system is largely controlled by a handful of major corporations (University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, 2018). On top of that, America’s history of racism, genocide and slavery has often made it difficult for people of color to connect with the culinary and agricultural traditions of their ancestors (Penniman, 2018, pp. 1-10). Those interviewed made it a point to note that their work was about reconnecting with ancestral and cultural knowledge. In fact, it was not simply a part of the work or a pleasant end result; in many cases it is the whole point of the work. Merelis Ortiz named her project, a workshop series based in the Bronx’s Kelly Street Garden, “People y Alimentos” to highlight the bilingual nature of the program and to help Spanish-speaking participants know that they would be seen and heard within the space.
RECLAIMING POWER
Having been historically invisibilized and marginalized, it is important to these women that their community projects, and their food work more generally, acts as a means of reclaiming power for both themselves and their communities. Many mentioned the time and energy it takes to simply be heard in non-profit food justice spaces – spaces that are arguably working to alleviate the same pressures these communities are facing themselves. In the absence of adequate community programs created by outsiders, these projects are a way to ensure that marginalized people are able to envision a food system created for them, by them. They also spoke of the importance of having women (especially women of color) in recognized leadership positions, since they are so often doing behind-the-scenes work in this field – much of it voluntarily or underpaid.
The vital role of women as nurturers and caretakers, and how this role connects them to the land and to providing food as nourishment. “I’m a natural nurturer and I want to make sure people are being taken care of,” Iyeshima Harris of the Youth Food Justice Coalition and East New York Farms said about how she feels called to working with youth in particular.
MAINTAINING NON-WHITE SPACES
Community-based projects in general, and cooperatives more specifically, are based on principles of openness and accessibility to all. What happens when this culture of openness means that new white residents want to join the project? The difficulty of maintaining the community and culture that the project was meant to reflect came up numerous times in interviews. While I initially focused on the effects of gentrification on each interviewee’s neighborhood or region, by the end of the process I discovered that “gentrification” can mean more than simply neighborhood demographics changing on a larger scale; it can also mean small-scale acts of newcomers pushing into community spaces. Kirtrina Baxter of Soil Generation, a Philadelphia-based network of black and brown urban farmers, spoke of the group’s recent decision to move from a more broadly multiracial organization to a specifically Black and Latinx org.
FUNDRAISING CHALLENGES
The issue of money – where to get it, who to get it from, how to use it – repeatedly came up in our conversations. The only group who didn’t have a serious funding issue was the Community Chef Kitchen Cooperative, and that is because they are a for-profit business that began with the aid of a large grant. Otherwise, the projects are non-profits funded through grants, donations and fellowships. Many spoke of the competition amongst similar groups and the scarcity – real or imagined – of funding for food justice/food sovereignty projects. Many have devised creative ways of fundraising. For example, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance will soon require membership dues and the Youth Food Justice Network has plans to implement a sliding scale in order to keep programming accessible to youth.
CONCLUSION
Each of these community food projects represents an effort to change the food system, advance community self-determination and reconnect with an ancestral and cultural knowledge that had been underrepresented or missing entirely. Outside of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, they are local and neighborhood-based and meant to make change by impacting the immediate community. The women involved in these projects are passionate, resilient and smart. I see their commitment to food justice work as a way of ensuring that their communities will become healthier, more resilient, and more connected with each other and with the land. There is an ongoing education component to their work and the sense that the work is never finished, it just takes different forms. Their work also points to a more equitable future where marginalized people aren’t fighting for recognition – instead, there is space and respect for everyone regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic status.
SOURCES
- Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, 2018. “U.S. Food System Fact Sheet.” Pub. No. CSS01-06.
- Penniman, Leah. “Introduction: Black Land Matters.” In Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, 1-10. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018.