A Green Door
A Growing Concern
Urban Farms Are Sprouting up across the United States. Can They Translate Popularity into Profitability?
Sean Hagan shoves a digging fork into the soil and pries out a bunch of carrots. He ties the bunch together, then stops and looks across the crops to another farmer calling for his attention. She holds a gnarly root in her hand.
“Do we have something against large turnips around here?” asks Sonya Ciavola.
“I have something against turnips in general,” Hagan says. He’s not fond of their taste.
On a gloomy February morning, the blond, 29-year-old Hagan trudges through muddy row crops growing on six acres of agricultural land operated by Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project, a nonprofit farm in Sacramento, California. Soil Born has two other acres for pasture and plans to plant a three-acre fruit tree orchard this fall.
Anne HamerskyA neighbor tends strawberries at a City Slicker backyard garden in Oakland.
But this isn’t exactly the bucolic landscape typically associated with farming. The fields sit on the outskirts of a residential area. Down the street is a high school, as well as a shopping center with a Dollar Tree, grocery store, and gas station. A check-cashing business is nearby.
For all its uniqueness, Soil Born Farms illustrates a larger national urban agriculture movement. In recent years, urban farming has become all the rage. Farms and community gardens in city centers seem to have struck a chord with an American public increasingly hungry for fresh, local, organic produce. Urban food plots have become media darlings, profiled in The New York Times Magazine and O, the Oprah magazine. They are attracting big grants from major philanthropies and enjoy the support of chefs at upscale restaurants.
City farms are sprouting in all sorts of unlikely places: in empty lots next to apartment complexes, across from high schools, and in old industrial centers. Sizeable food-production plots have sprung up in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland, Milwaukee, Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco. The Food Project in Lincoln, Massachusetts involves more than 100 teenage farmers annually. Brooklyn boasts Added Value in the working class Redhook neighborhood. Phoenix has the aptly named Urban Farm.
Although part of the broader sustainable food phenomenon, many of the country’s urban farms seek to tackle issues that Whole Foods, with its relatively high prices and affluent customers, is not addressing. The urban farm movement aims to take control of food production away from large-scale industrial agriculture and root it within local food systems that attempt to ensure food access for the urban poor. Often located in low-income neighborhoods, many city farms operate off the basic premise that healthy, affordable food is a basic human right. “Food justice” is the mantra of most, if not all, of the organizations in the urban farming movement. That means serving the estimated 14 percent of Americans who experience food insecurity – 49 million people who are unsure where they’ll find their next meal.
Yet urban farming’s potential to address the challenges of our food system remains unclear. Although popularity and trendiness can be big boons to business, these urban farms haven’t yet found a way to thrive in the market economy. Most rely heavily on volunteer labor and grant funding. They may be at the forefront of ecological sustainability, but economic sustainability eludes them. And that’s a problem because they are unlikely to fulfill their aspirations and make a meaningful dent in the problem of food insecurity if they are forever running on the treadmill of foundation funding.
“The most fundamental question is about scale,” says Brahm Ahmadi, co-founder of People’s Grocery in Oakland.
By “scale” Ahmadi means the ability of urban farming projects to satisfy the demand for sustainable food that exists in a given community. According to Ahmadi, in many food-insecure neighborhoods 60 to 70 percent of food dollars are spent outside the community. Most urban farms are able to close only a fraction of that gap, about 10 percent.
“If we’re going to address food justice to make any significant effect on this massive issue, we’re going to have to scale different,” Ahmadi says.
Let Them Eat Kale
n this Friday morning, the workers at Soil Born Farms gather arugula – an item planted at the request of a local chef at a fancy restaurant. Arugula will also be added to the farm’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes, along with collards, chard, beets, carrots, mustard greens, and broccoli. A couple of teenagers help harvest vegetables. They earn $8 an hour to work about 20 hours a week as part of the organization’s Green Corps program to provide job training to local youth.
After harvesting, the group lines up boxes on a long table and unloads crates of produce. A cow moos. Soil Born Farms has seven sheep, 11 lambs, 80 chickens (that lay eggs to sell at the farm stand), four cows, and one pig that roams around aimlessly. A few yards away, Porter the dog runs through the fields. He keeps coyotes at bay. While the farm is adjacent to commercial and residential buildings on one side, the American River flows down the other side of the farm, offering a touch of wildness.
During winter, Soil Born harvests two days a week to fill 60 CSA boxes – 80 boxes in the summer. In a CSA, consumers pay for their weekly produce boxes in advance of the growing season, which gives farms a cushion from market forces and unpredictable weather, and provides consumers with food from a source they can trust.
This is Soil Born’s first attempt at a winter CSA program. The expansion is intended to raise funds and please customers who want local produce year-round. “We’ll make it,” Hagan says of the experiment. “But it’s going to be close.”
Soil Born Farms began as a small for-profit farm in 2000. In 2004, it transitioned into a nonprofit organization. “The plan was always to morph into an urban farm and education center that best addressed the diverse issues: food education, production, and improved access to healthy foods,” says Soil Born Farms co-founder Shawn Harrison. “Once we determined that we had the capacity and ability to grow food and be good farmers – [co-founder] Marco Franciosa and I did not grow up in farming – becoming a nonprofit was the natural choice.”
Harrison and Franciosa determined that in order to tap into community and foundation financial support, and more easily access public-land resources, becoming a nonprofit organization made the most sense.
In addition to the CSA, Soil Born runs a farm stand and sells food to restaurants. The farm also has an explicit social mission. It organizes a volunteer fruit-gleaning group, which donated nearly 20,000 pounds of produce to local food banks in 2009, and serves 1,500 children a year through its educational programs. Staff members also work closely with the city’s large Hmong community to increase market opportunities for Southeast Asian growers. Balancing farming responsibilities with time-consuming educational programs can be challenging.
“I think the urban farmer takes a certain kind of mold,” Hagan says as he ties bunches of carrots together. Most farmers only want to grow food, he says. Urban farmers, on the other hand, must also engage the public.
The organization is doing its best to sustain itself through sales, which isn’t easy. In 2009, the organization’s budget was $780,000; the 2010 budget is about $1 million. Nearly 60 percent of the organization’s revenue comes from private foundations and government grants. What Soil Born Farms could use, the managers acknowledge, is a big revenue-generating idea.
“We’ve yet to make the farm self-sufficient,” Hagan says. “I think we’re close.”
Gardening as Self Sufficiency
wo hours west, the San Francisco Bay Area boasts several urban farms. In Richmond – a city isolated by freeways and railroad tracks and best known as the home of a giant Chevron oil refinery – the Eco Villageoperates on five acres of land surrounded by blackberry vines as well as oak and walnut trees. Down in West Oakland is City Slicker Farms, which residents founded in 2001 in a predominantly African-American neighborhood that now includes a growing number of Latinos and Asians. The organization’s staff works out of a building next door to a barbed-wire fence. Across the street sits a boarded-up brick building.
Anne Hamersky, annehamersky.blogspot.comOakland’s City Slicker Farms runs a weekly produce stand in a neighborhood with
no large grocery stores.
On a Saturday morning in March, neighbors congregate for a weekly farm stand in front of one of City Slicker Farms’ seven garden sites. Customers try samples from a plate of honey while bagging up carrots and bok choy, self-determining what price they can afford. The organization uses sliding scale pricing so no one is turned away for lack of funds. The first level is for those out of work whose unemployment check maybe hasn’t yet arrived – City Slicker Farms asks for no explanation – and these people get carrots, lemons, collards, celery, and other items for free. The second level is intended for people living paycheck-to-paycheck who would otherwise search for deals at Safeway; they pay between 50 cents and $1.25 for a bunch of greens or a bag of carrots. The third level is for people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods but would rather support the farm stand and can afford to pay a little more. They pay between around $2 for a bag or bunch.
“Good to see you, it’s been awhile,” says City Slicker Farms Executive Director Barbara Finnin, hugging an elderly African-American woman named Edith. Finnin moved to West Oakland 11 years ago but has farmed her whole life, having grown up in a Mennonite agricultural community in Pennsylvania. The two chat and Edith comments on her backyard garden, built by City Slicker. “I love it,” she says.
City Slicker Farms hosts a backyard garden build every Saturday for low-income residents. It’s like a traditional barn-raising, with everyone and anyone in the neighborhood invited to chip in. Participants in the program help build their garden beds, with soil, plants, seeds, and a fruit tree donated by the organization. For two years, a garden mentor provides horticulture advice to participants. Since the program started in 2005, the organization has built 112 gardens; 99 of those families remain involved.
As morning turns into afternoon, Abeni Ramsey, the group’s market coordinator, walks through the garden behind the farm stand, the place where it all started in 2001. Now the site acts more as a demonstration garden, with a worm bin, an outdoor classroom, and growing tubes that sprout parsley, green onions, and celery. Every summer growing up, Ramsey traveled from Berkeley to Queens, New York, to help her grandfather prune tomatoes and harvest corn at his urban farm. About a decade ago, Ramsey recalls, the only grocery store in West Oakland closed down.
“I had a hard time getting access to healthy fruits and veggies,” Ramsey says. One day, she biked through the neighborhood and saw signs for City Slicker Farms. “I couldn’t believe someone was advertising fresh produce in West Oakland.”
Before long, the organization built two garden boxes in the shambles of a backyard behind her old Victorian house. Later, she acquired chickens and goats, recognizing that the once-empty space could provide food for her whole family.
“Just because [West Oakland] looks like a barren wasteland, it doesn’t have to be like that,” says Ramsey, who serves as one of City Slicker Farms’ eight staff members.
As Ramsey and Finnin visit with neighbors, two young men venture up to the farm stand, one holding a video camera and the other air-monitoring equipment. They’re part of a youth media group investigating the Bay Area’s “Toxic Triangle”: San Francisco’s naval shipyard, Richmond’s Chevron refinery, and the Port of Oakland.
The air pollution and lead in the soil in parts of many US cities compound another critical roadblock for food-access folks: the lack of land available for urban farming. City Slicker Farms doesn’t own any of the land upon which it grows. Neither does Soil Born Farms. Finnin wants the city of Oakland to allocate land specifically for agricultural use. She wants the city to repurpose parks and turn them into edible gardens.
The group’s long-term vision involves West Oakland growing 40 percent of its own fruits and vegetables. City Slicker staff estimate that meeting that goal would require 77 acres of land, or 3 percent of the community’s total area.
“We’re trying to build capacity for self-sufficiency,” Finnin says. “We want this to scale.”
City Slicker Farms’ food-justice mission is driven by the ideal of neighborhood empowerment: Teaching local residents how to garden and feed themselves.
But City Slicker Farms, like Soil Born, faces the classic challenge of nonprofit organizations – a dependence on grants. The question remains: How can City Slicker Farms get bigger? It’s the same problem faced by most urban farms and food-access organizations.
Take, for example, Milwaukee’s Growing Power, widely recognized as one of the most impressive urban farms in the country. Growing Power operates 14 greenhouses situated on two acres in a working-class neighborhood, near the city’s largest public-housing project. The farm produces a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food a year, which feeds 10,000 residents through an on-farm retail store, restaurants, schools, farmers’ markets, and low-cost CSA shares. Founder Will Allen, whose father was a sharecropper in South Carolina, started the organization in 1993. In 2009, he was honored with a MacArthur “genius” award. Allen uses millions of pounds of food waste as compost – some of which is sold – and plants seeds at quadruple density to maximize space. From a sustainable-agriculture standpoint, Growing Power is a success. But it’s not financially self-sufficient. In the past five years, Allen has received at least $1 million in grants.
Produce to the People
eople’s Grocery, another food justice organization based in West Oakland, believes it has a plan to be both economically self-sufficient and meet its core goal of increasing food access for low-income households: opening up its own neighborhood grocery store.
In 2003, the organization started distributing organic food in the area with its “mobile market” – a mediagenic biodiesel-powered, brightly painted converted postal van that cruised the neighborhood, stopping on corners to sell all the offerings one could find in a typical health food store. While the effort was a huge success in terms of public education, it was a financial drain. Sixty percent of the market’s revenue came from philanthropies, and the organization shuttered the van in 2006.
Since then, People’s Grocery has pivoted its focus to food production. The organization has two garden sites in Oakland and a 3.5-acre farm 35 miles away. Its CSA program – called GRUB – serves roughly 300 customers. Like City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery has a graduated pricing system. People on food stamps, or those suffering from chronic disease, pay a discounted rate, while more affluent customers can purchase a “sponsorship box” at a premium rate to subsidize the program’s costs. The GRUB boxes generate close to $50,000 a year in revenue, but People’s Grocery remains reliant on donations and grants.
“We realized we had to spin off and do the venture to demonstrate that an inner-city store can be successful, and that a local-food project can exist without a charitable structure and subsidies,” says co-founder Ahmadi.
Not a single large grocery store exists in West Oakland, a neighborhood of about 24,000 people covering five square miles. But some 50 corner stores operate there, which equates to about one store for every 500 residents, as opposed to the middle-class neighborhoods of Oakland where one corner store exists for every 7,000 people, according to Ahmadi. Additionally, he says, corner stores charge 30 to 100 percent more for the same items sold in grocery stores.
A 2008 study found that West Oakland residents spend about $54 million annually for food for at-home consumption. Sixty-eight percent of this annual expenditure is not met locally, which equates to almost $37 million lost from the local economy. Or, put another way, even in this relatively poor neighborhood there’s a $50 million food economy, which means there should be some way for the economics to pencil out for a sustainable food operation.
After that study came out, Ahmadi totaled the revenues and weight of food distributed by five West Oakland food-access organizations – including People’s Grocery and City Slicker Farms – and compared those to the identified food-spending power. Together, the organizations’ total activities met about 1 percent of the community’s demand.
“That was a very humbling experience, and a very important moment for me to realize how far we have to go,” Ahmadi says. “We have to scale, that’s the bottom line.”
To reach a scale that can meet demand, food access organizations have to offer a broad selection of products, large quantities of those products, accessible locations, and convenient operating hours – the same basics that customers at Whole Foods in the more upscale city of Berkeley expect – with the added bonus of affordable prices.
“Low-income residents want full selection across a broad array of categories, which is why they spend a lot of time, money, and effort traveling to outlying grocery stores that are large enough to offer a suitable selection,” Ahmadi says.
The group is about to start lease negotiations on a site that was once a popular shopping center. And Ahmadi believes he can leverage the nonprofit’s history of success to attract investors. The store, to be called People’s Community Market, is set to launch in early 2011.
Growing Profits
s even its ardent protagonists acknowledge, city farming’s potential is limited. The United States’ small-scale city farm projects are micro-enterprises with modest revenue and distribution. They provide an important entry point for city dwellers to learn about the need for sustainable food systems, but they will never feed the country.
Even in poorer West Oakland, there’s a $50 million food economy.
“Urban agriculture is just a piece of the food system, but it’s an important piece to educate the consumer and get food to underserved communities,” Soil Born’s Harrison says. “It provides an opportunity for people to touch the food, to feel it, for it to be more present in their daily lives.”
The best strategy for urban farm organizations might be to simply let the fruits and vegetables speak for themselves. At least, that’s the approach taken by Greensgrow, an urban farm started in 1998 in a low-income neighborhood of north Philadelphia, that has figured out how to both turn a profit and make local organic produce available to nearby residents. The organization has a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory. It sells vegetables, herbs, honey, and seedlings produced on-site, along with produce, breads, meats, and cheeses from local producers. Greensgrow also makes biodiesel from waste oil produced by the restaurants that buy its vegetables.
“We are extremely diversified,” says co-founder Mary Seton Corboy. She says this diversification partly explains why her organization is financially self-sufficient, while many other urban farms are not. In 2009, Greensgrow had an income of $825,000. That’s earned income from CSAs, farm stand sales, restaurant sales, and nursery sales. Their profit of $85,000 was then invested in community programs, including workshops, tour visits, and plant giveaways.
While diversification is important at Greensgrow, “we have a linear vision and stay on track,” Corboy says. “I think some groups try to do too many things at once. Sometimes you just have to grow the peach and sell the peach.”
Greensgrow is, technically, a nonprofit. The group recently started a community kitchen and received $20,000 in grants to cover initial costs. The farm is starting a low-income CSA later this year, and because there’s an educational component to the program, the organization is looking for outside funding. But with a social mission focused on incubating ecological entrepreneurship, Greensgrow has always operated as if it were a for-profit company.
“Greensgrow’s greatest success is that it has been around a decade or so and that co-founder Tom [Sereduk] and I never killed each other,” Corboy says. “That shit-hole piece of land is no longer a shit-hole piece of land but a place the community likes. We keep pushing the rock up the hill. I suppose Greensgrow will be a success when places like it are commonplace.”
Sena Christian is a freelance journalist and newspaper reporter based in Sacramento, California. She covers feminist, environmental and social-justice issues.
A Growing Concern
Urban Farms Are Sprouting up across the United States. Can They Translate Popularity into Profitability?
Sean Hagan shoves a digging fork into the soil and pries out a bunch of carrots. He ties the bunch together, then stops and looks across the crops to another farmer calling for his attention. She holds a gnarly root in her hand.
“Do we have something against large turnips around here?” asks Sonya Ciavola.
“I have something against turnips in general,” Hagan says. He’s not fond of their taste.
On a gloomy February morning, the blond, 29-year-old Hagan trudges through muddy row crops growing on six acres of agricultural land operated by Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project, a nonprofit farm in Sacramento, California. Soil Born has two other acres for pasture and plans to plant a three-acre fruit tree orchard this fall.
Anne HamerskyA neighbor tends strawberries at a City Slicker backyard garden in Oakland.
But this isn’t exactly the bucolic landscape typically associated with farming. The fields sit on the outskirts of a residential area. Down the street is a high school, as well as a shopping center with a Dollar Tree, grocery store, and gas station. A check-cashing business is nearby.
For all its uniqueness, Soil Born Farms illustrates a larger national urban agriculture movement. In recent years, urban farming has become all the rage. Farms and community gardens in city centers seem to have struck a chord with an American public increasingly hungry for fresh, local, organic produce. Urban food plots have become media darlings, profiled in The New York Times Magazine and O, the Oprah magazine. They are attracting big grants from major philanthropies and enjoy the support of chefs at upscale restaurants.
City farms are sprouting in all sorts of unlikely places: in empty lots next to apartment complexes, across from high schools, and in old industrial centers. Sizeable food-production plots have sprung up in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland, Milwaukee, Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco. The Food Project in Lincoln, Massachusetts involves more than 100 teenage farmers annually. Brooklyn boasts Added Value in the working class Redhook neighborhood. Phoenix has the aptly named Urban Farm.
Although part of the broader sustainable food phenomenon, many of the country’s urban farms seek to tackle issues that Whole Foods, with its relatively high prices and affluent customers, is not addressing. The urban farm movement aims to take control of food production away from large-scale industrial agriculture and root it within local food systems that attempt to ensure food access for the urban poor. Often located in low-income neighborhoods, many city farms operate off the basic premise that healthy, affordable food is a basic human right. “Food justice” is the mantra of most, if not all, of the organizations in the urban farming movement. That means serving the estimated 14 percent of Americans who experience food insecurity – 49 million people who are unsure where they’ll find their next meal.
Yet urban farming’s potential to address the challenges of our food system remains unclear. Although popularity and trendiness can be big boons to business, these urban farms haven’t yet found a way to thrive in the market economy. Most rely heavily on volunteer labor and grant funding. They may be at the forefront of ecological sustainability, but economic sustainability eludes them. And that’s a problem because they are unlikely to fulfill their aspirations and make a meaningful dent in the problem of food insecurity if they are forever running on the treadmill of foundation funding.
“The most fundamental question is about scale,” says Brahm Ahmadi, co-founder of People’s Grocery in Oakland.
By “scale” Ahmadi means the ability of urban farming projects to satisfy the demand for sustainable food that exists in a given community. According to Ahmadi, in many food-insecure neighborhoods 60 to 70 percent of food dollars are spent outside the community. Most urban farms are able to close only a fraction of that gap, about 10 percent.
“If we’re going to address food justice to make any significant effect on this massive issue, we’re going to have to scale different,” Ahmadi says.
Let Them Eat Kale
n this Friday morning, the workers at Soil Born Farms gather arugula – an item planted at the request of a local chef at a fancy restaurant. Arugula will also be added to the farm’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes, along with collards, chard, beets, carrots, mustard greens, and broccoli. A couple of teenagers help harvest vegetables. They earn $8 an hour to work about 20 hours a week as part of the organization’s Green Corps program to provide job training to local youth.
After harvesting, the group lines up boxes on a long table and unloads crates of produce. A cow moos. Soil Born Farms has seven sheep, 11 lambs, 80 chickens (that lay eggs to sell at the farm stand), four cows, and one pig that roams around aimlessly. A few yards away, Porter the dog runs through the fields. He keeps coyotes at bay. While the farm is adjacent to commercial and residential buildings on one side, the American River flows down the other side of the farm, offering a touch of wildness.
During winter, Soil Born harvests two days a week to fill 60 CSA boxes – 80 boxes in the summer. In a CSA, consumers pay for their weekly produce boxes in advance of the growing season, which gives farms a cushion from market forces and unpredictable weather, and provides consumers with food from a source they can trust.
This is Soil Born’s first attempt at a winter CSA program. The expansion is intended to raise funds and please customers who want local produce year-round. “We’ll make it,” Hagan says of the experiment. “But it’s going to be close.”
Soil Born Farms began as a small for-profit farm in 2000. In 2004, it transitioned into a nonprofit organization. “The plan was always to morph into an urban farm and education center that best addressed the diverse issues: food education, production, and improved access to healthy foods,” says Soil Born Farms co-founder Shawn Harrison. “Once we determined that we had the capacity and ability to grow food and be good farmers – [co-founder] Marco Franciosa and I did not grow up in farming – becoming a nonprofit was the natural choice.”
Harrison and Franciosa determined that in order to tap into community and foundation financial support, and more easily access public-land resources, becoming a nonprofit organization made the most sense.
In addition to the CSA, Soil Born runs a farm stand and sells food to restaurants. The farm also has an explicit social mission. It organizes a volunteer fruit-gleaning group, which donated nearly 20,000 pounds of produce to local food banks in 2009, and serves 1,500 children a year through its educational programs. Staff members also work closely with the city’s large Hmong community to increase market opportunities for Southeast Asian growers. Balancing farming responsibilities with time-consuming educational programs can be challenging.
“I think the urban farmer takes a certain kind of mold,” Hagan says as he ties bunches of carrots together. Most farmers only want to grow food, he says. Urban farmers, on the other hand, must also engage the public.
The organization is doing its best to sustain itself through sales, which isn’t easy. In 2009, the organization’s budget was $780,000; the 2010 budget is about $1 million. Nearly 60 percent of the organization’s revenue comes from private foundations and government grants. What Soil Born Farms could use, the managers acknowledge, is a big revenue-generating idea.
“We’ve yet to make the farm self-sufficient,” Hagan says. “I think we’re close.”
Gardening as Self Sufficiency
wo hours west, the San Francisco Bay Area boasts several urban farms. In Richmond – a city isolated by freeways and railroad tracks and best known as the home of a giant Chevron oil refinery – the Eco Villageoperates on five acres of land surrounded by blackberry vines as well as oak and walnut trees. Down in West Oakland is City Slicker Farms, which residents founded in 2001 in a predominantly African-American neighborhood that now includes a growing number of Latinos and Asians. The organization’s staff works out of a building next door to a barbed-wire fence. Across the street sits a boarded-up brick building.
Anne Hamersky, annehamersky.blogspot.comOakland’s City Slicker Farms runs a weekly produce stand in a neighborhood with
no large grocery stores.
On a Saturday morning in March, neighbors congregate for a weekly farm stand in front of one of City Slicker Farms’ seven garden sites. Customers try samples from a plate of honey while bagging up carrots and bok choy, self-determining what price they can afford. The organization uses sliding scale pricing so no one is turned away for lack of funds. The first level is for those out of work whose unemployment check maybe hasn’t yet arrived – City Slicker Farms asks for no explanation – and these people get carrots, lemons, collards, celery, and other items for free. The second level is intended for people living paycheck-to-paycheck who would otherwise search for deals at Safeway; they pay between 50 cents and $1.25 for a bunch of greens or a bag of carrots. The third level is for people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods but would rather support the farm stand and can afford to pay a little more. They pay between around $2 for a bag or bunch.
“Good to see you, it’s been awhile,” says City Slicker Farms Executive Director Barbara Finnin, hugging an elderly African-American woman named Edith. Finnin moved to West Oakland 11 years ago but has farmed her whole life, having grown up in a Mennonite agricultural community in Pennsylvania. The two chat and Edith comments on her backyard garden, built by City Slicker. “I love it,” she says.
City Slicker Farms hosts a backyard garden build every Saturday for low-income residents. It’s like a traditional barn-raising, with everyone and anyone in the neighborhood invited to chip in. Participants in the program help build their garden beds, with soil, plants, seeds, and a fruit tree donated by the organization. For two years, a garden mentor provides horticulture advice to participants. Since the program started in 2005, the organization has built 112 gardens; 99 of those families remain involved.
As morning turns into afternoon, Abeni Ramsey, the group’s market coordinator, walks through the garden behind the farm stand, the place where it all started in 2001. Now the site acts more as a demonstration garden, with a worm bin, an outdoor classroom, and growing tubes that sprout parsley, green onions, and celery. Every summer growing up, Ramsey traveled from Berkeley to Queens, New York, to help her grandfather prune tomatoes and harvest corn at his urban farm. About a decade ago, Ramsey recalls, the only grocery store in West Oakland closed down.
“I had a hard time getting access to healthy fruits and veggies,” Ramsey says. One day, she biked through the neighborhood and saw signs for City Slicker Farms. “I couldn’t believe someone was advertising fresh produce in West Oakland.”
Before long, the organization built two garden boxes in the shambles of a backyard behind her old Victorian house. Later, she acquired chickens and goats, recognizing that the once-empty space could provide food for her whole family.
“Just because [West Oakland] looks like a barren wasteland, it doesn’t have to be like that,” says Ramsey, who serves as one of City Slicker Farms’ eight staff members.
As Ramsey and Finnin visit with neighbors, two young men venture up to the farm stand, one holding a video camera and the other air-monitoring equipment. They’re part of a youth media group investigating the Bay Area’s “Toxic Triangle”: San Francisco’s naval shipyard, Richmond’s Chevron refinery, and the Port of Oakland.
The air pollution and lead in the soil in parts of many US cities compound another critical roadblock for food-access folks: the lack of land available for urban farming. City Slicker Farms doesn’t own any of the land upon which it grows. Neither does Soil Born Farms. Finnin wants the city of Oakland to allocate land specifically for agricultural use. She wants the city to repurpose parks and turn them into edible gardens.
The group’s long-term vision involves West Oakland growing 40 percent of its own fruits and vegetables. City Slicker staff estimate that meeting that goal would require 77 acres of land, or 3 percent of the community’s total area.
“We’re trying to build capacity for self-sufficiency,” Finnin says. “We want this to scale.”
City Slicker Farms’ food-justice mission is driven by the ideal of neighborhood empowerment: Teaching local residents how to garden and feed themselves.
But City Slicker Farms, like Soil Born, faces the classic challenge of nonprofit organizations – a dependence on grants. The question remains: How can City Slicker Farms get bigger? It’s the same problem faced by most urban farms and food-access organizations.
Take, for example, Milwaukee’s Growing Power, widely recognized as one of the most impressive urban farms in the country. Growing Power operates 14 greenhouses situated on two acres in a working-class neighborhood, near the city’s largest public-housing project. The farm produces a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food a year, which feeds 10,000 residents through an on-farm retail store, restaurants, schools, farmers’ markets, and low-cost CSA shares. Founder Will Allen, whose father was a sharecropper in South Carolina, started the organization in 1993. In 2009, he was honored with a MacArthur “genius” award. Allen uses millions of pounds of food waste as compost – some of which is sold – and plants seeds at quadruple density to maximize space. From a sustainable-agriculture standpoint, Growing Power is a success. But it’s not financially self-sufficient. In the past five years, Allen has received at least $1 million in grants.
Produce to the People
eople’s Grocery, another food justice organization based in West Oakland, believes it has a plan to be both economically self-sufficient and meet its core goal of increasing food access for low-income households: opening up its own neighborhood grocery store.
In 2003, the organization started distributing organic food in the area with its “mobile market” – a mediagenic biodiesel-powered, brightly painted converted postal van that cruised the neighborhood, stopping on corners to sell all the offerings one could find in a typical health food store. While the effort was a huge success in terms of public education, it was a financial drain. Sixty percent of the market’s revenue came from philanthropies, and the organization shuttered the van in 2006.
Since then, People’s Grocery has pivoted its focus to food production. The organization has two garden sites in Oakland and a 3.5-acre farm 35 miles away. Its CSA program – called GRUB – serves roughly 300 customers. Like City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery has a graduated pricing system. People on food stamps, or those suffering from chronic disease, pay a discounted rate, while more affluent customers can purchase a “sponsorship box” at a premium rate to subsidize the program’s costs. The GRUB boxes generate close to $50,000 a year in revenue, but People’s Grocery remains reliant on donations and grants.
“We realized we had to spin off and do the venture to demonstrate that an inner-city store can be successful, and that a local-food project can exist without a charitable structure and subsidies,” says co-founder Ahmadi.
Not a single large grocery store exists in West Oakland, a neighborhood of about 24,000 people covering five square miles. But some 50 corner stores operate there, which equates to about one store for every 500 residents, as opposed to the middle-class neighborhoods of Oakland where one corner store exists for every 7,000 people, according to Ahmadi. Additionally, he says, corner stores charge 30 to 100 percent more for the same items sold in grocery stores.
A 2008 study found that West Oakland residents spend about $54 million annually for food for at-home consumption. Sixty-eight percent of this annual expenditure is not met locally, which equates to almost $37 million lost from the local economy. Or, put another way, even in this relatively poor neighborhood there’s a $50 million food economy, which means there should be some way for the economics to pencil out for a sustainable food operation.
After that study came out, Ahmadi totaled the revenues and weight of food distributed by five West Oakland food-access organizations – including People’s Grocery and City Slicker Farms – and compared those to the identified food-spending power. Together, the organizations’ total activities met about 1 percent of the community’s demand.
“That was a very humbling experience, and a very important moment for me to realize how far we have to go,” Ahmadi says. “We have to scale, that’s the bottom line.”
To reach a scale that can meet demand, food access organizations have to offer a broad selection of products, large quantities of those products, accessible locations, and convenient operating hours – the same basics that customers at Whole Foods in the more upscale city of Berkeley expect – with the added bonus of affordable prices.
“Low-income residents want full selection across a broad array of categories, which is why they spend a lot of time, money, and effort traveling to outlying grocery stores that are large enough to offer a suitable selection,” Ahmadi says.
The group is about to start lease negotiations on a site that was once a popular shopping center. And Ahmadi believes he can leverage the nonprofit’s history of success to attract investors. The store, to be called People’s Community Market, is set to launch in early 2011.
Growing Profits
s even its ardent protagonists acknowledge, city farming’s potential is limited. The United States’ small-scale city farm projects are micro-enterprises with modest revenue and distribution. They provide an important entry point for city dwellers to learn about the need for sustainable food systems, but they will never feed the country.
Even in poorer West Oakland, there’s a $50 million food economy.
“Urban agriculture is just a piece of the food system, but it’s an important piece to educate the consumer and get food to underserved communities,” Soil Born’s Harrison says. “It provides an opportunity for people to touch the food, to feel it, for it to be more present in their daily lives.”
The best strategy for urban farm organizations might be to simply let the fruits and vegetables speak for themselves. At least, that’s the approach taken by Greensgrow, an urban farm started in 1998 in a low-income neighborhood of north Philadelphia, that has figured out how to both turn a profit and make local organic produce available to nearby residents. The organization has a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory. It sells vegetables, herbs, honey, and seedlings produced on-site, along with produce, breads, meats, and cheeses from local producers. Greensgrow also makes biodiesel from waste oil produced by the restaurants that buy its vegetables.
“We are extremely diversified,” says co-founder Mary Seton Corboy. She says this diversification partly explains why her organization is financially self-sufficient, while many other urban farms are not. In 2009, Greensgrow had an income of $825,000. That’s earned income from CSAs, farm stand sales, restaurant sales, and nursery sales. Their profit of $85,000 was then invested in community programs, including workshops, tour visits, and plant giveaways.
While diversification is important at Greensgrow, “we have a linear vision and stay on track,” Corboy says. “I think some groups try to do too many things at once. Sometimes you just have to grow the peach and sell the peach.”
Greensgrow is, technically, a nonprofit. The group recently started a community kitchen and received $20,000 in grants to cover initial costs. The farm is starting a low-income CSA later this year, and because there’s an educational component to the program, the organization is looking for outside funding. But with a social mission focused on incubating ecological entrepreneurship, Greensgrow has always operated as if it were a for-profit company.
“Greensgrow’s greatest success is that it has been around a decade or so and that co-founder Tom [Sereduk] and I never killed each other,” Corboy says. “That shit-hole piece of land is no longer a shit-hole piece of land but a place the community likes. We keep pushing the rock up the hill. I suppose Greensgrow will be a success when places like it are commonplace.”
Sena Christian is a freelance journalist and newspaper reporter based in Sacramento, California. She covers feminist, environmental and social-justice issues.
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Solar Poder
It’s the sort of project people dream of when they wax idealistic about carbon offsets: In northern Argentina – where sun is plentiful – solar-powered ovens could generate carbon offsets, and thus funds, for rural communities. The ovens are made locally with polished aluminum to better catch the sun’s rays, and are 100 percent solar powered, which means locals don’t need firewood or gas to cook. By reducing the use of wood and fossil fuels, the ovens reduce emissions. Now, the EcoAndina Foundation, which helped develop the ovens, is hoping to verify those reductions in order to get the locals carbon credits that they can sell photo courtesy ecoandinaIn northern Argentina, EcoAndina is giving villages solar powered ovens, heaters and water heaters. Now the villages hope to turn their emissions reduction into income by selling verified carbon offsets.
Since EcoAndina began working in the region 20 years ago, it has distributed solar-powered ovens, heaters, and hot water heaters to hundreds of residents and schools. In addition to reducing emissions, the units help stave off the desertification of the region by reducing the need for wood. According to Silvia Rojo, president of EcoAndina, the collection of local wood and shrubs for firewood has led to serious desertification, the loss of species, and damage to watersheds.
EcoAndina, working with the UN Development Programme’s Global Environment Facility, coined the term “solar village” for villages that have received training on the use and development of solar technologies and widely adopted solar options. “It is a category that gives the community a higher standing and fills it with pride, because the residents are recognized for using clean technologies,” Rojo says. The goal is to transform 30 villages into solar villages and, eventually, to install a solar generator to supply electricity to all of Jujuy province. If it works, it would be the first in Latin America, although similar projects are being pursued in Brazil and Chile.
—Inter Press Service, 12/13
Drafting Nature’s Constitution
Simply regulating pollution will never really stop it. Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund discusses why we need a fundamental change in the way we use law to protect nature.
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GREEN FOR ALL - The Dream Reborn Contest
STORY CONTEST
Win $1000 and other prizes
CONTEST OVERVIEW
The contest features three types of content:
- Video (short documentary or music video-5 minutes or less)
- Audio (without video – can be a song or spoken word)
- Original Artwork (painting, mural, photo etc.)
- FOR INFORMATION CLICK HERE
GREEN FOR ALL EXPANDS D.C. OFFICE WITH THE ADDITION OF JESSY TOLKAN AND TERENCE SAMUEL
Jan 15, 2010
[OAKLAND, CA] – Green For All announced today the expansion of its Washington, D.C., office with the addition of Jessy Tolkan and Terence Samuel. Tolkan, formerly of Energy Action Coalition, joins as Political Director. Samuel, previously with TheRoot.com, joins as Communications Director.
“As we work to build access and opportunity in and political will for a clean-energy economy, we are delighted to welcome Jessy and Terry to our team,” said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All. “Their unparalleled leadership and depth of experience will help strengthen Green For All’s efforts to develop and scale more equitable solutions to poverty and climate change.”
Tolkan will lead the national nonprofit’s efforts to deepen and advance its legislative agenda, including passing comprehensive federal climate and energy legislation, and a jobs bill that includes provisions to expand opportunities for the country’s most vulnerable communities. She will also be instrumental in growing and activating Green For All’s extensive network of supporters and strategic partnerships.
“We are standing in the midst of a historic opportunity to build a strong and inclusive green economy,” said Tolkan. “I am honored to join this exceptional team that has been leading this charge.”
Tolkan comes to Green For All after serving as executive director of Energy Action Coalition, a network of more than fifty youth organizations united in their fight for a clean-energy future.
Among her achievements, last year Tolkan organized the largest single lobby day on Capitol Hill focused on global warming. In 2004, she helped to register more than 130,000 young voters and produce one of the highest youth-turnout rates in the country. She also played a lead role in organizing POWER SHIFT 2009, the largest youth gathering on global warming. Tolkan has been featured in various publications such as The New York Times, TIME, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.
As Communications Director, Samuel will develop and direct the organization’s communications strategies to promote best practices and advance its policy initiatives to key stakeholders including media, Members of Congress, industry leaders, local electeds, and grassroots organizations. He will also oversee Green For All’s award-winning online efforts.
“No issue is more crucial to the short-term recovery of America than widespread and sustained job creation, and none more central to its long-term viability than the development and expansion of an energy economy that stops doing harm to the planet,” Samuel said. “Together, these two ideas pose some of the most important political and economic questions of our time. I can’t think of a better place to engage in that debate right now than at Green For All.”
Previously, Samuel served as deputy editor of TheRoot.com, the Washington Post Company’s web site aimed at a predominantly African-Americans audience. He was an integral part of the leadership team that developed and launched the publication, and oversaw its daily operations and long-term editorial strategy.
Samuel is a veteran reporter with over twenty-years of experience. For the past six years, he has written a weekly column for The American Prospect, one of which appears in the Best American Political Writing of 2009 (Public Affairs). Prior to TheRoot.com, Samuel was director of editorial programming at AOL Black Voices where he managed an editorial team of thirty writers and editors responsible for creating and promoting content for African-American users. He was the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report for five years before that and served as a national correspondent for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Planeterra – Why Voluntourism?
Why Voluntourism? As an important part of making tourism more sustainable, voluntourism provides travellers and communities a way to connect, to learn, to appreciate each other’s cultures, and work toward a better future. Voluntours provide opportunities for travellers to engage in community projects that are working on health, education, conservation and small business opportunities around the world. While volunteer vacations are longer term with an emphasis on volunteering, voluntours are shorter term adventure vacations that incorporate a volunteer component, spending time at a community project that is supported on a long term basis by Planeterra.
The evolution of Planeterra began with a founder’s dream, an employee’s desire to make a difference, and travellers who were yearning to give back to local people. Planeterra was founded in 2003 by Gap Adventures, the world’s largest independent adventure travel company. Planeterra has been growing and evolving ever since, into a non-profit organization that develops projects around the world in partnership with local communities for sustainable development through travel and voluntourism.
Voluntourism contributes to the local economy not only through the volunteer service provided, but because the mission of the tours is to do just that. Voluntours utilize local guides, incorporate homestays, visits to local markets, restaurants, and other locally-owned businesses, all of which are made possible by the small size of the trips – each with a sustainable and responsible aim at the core.
Planeterra’s projects range from developing community tourism in Ecuador and Kenya to primary schools in southern Africa, and homes for children at risk in India and Peru, among many others. These projects not only help local people achieve their development goals, they are enhancing the destination in the long term, for the wider industry. Travellers that are not volunteering visit the projects to gain a better understanding of the local culture and to take home valuable lessons about what communities are doing to improve their quality of life around the world.
Planeterra believes moving the global tourism industry toward sustainability requires the passion and enthusiasm of a movement. A movement is created by the gathering together of all levels of society who share one goal. The sustainable tourism movement is being motivated by several sectors of society: grassroots community groups, international charities and NGOs, global governmental organizations, academic institutions, private sector associations, and the travel industry itself.
Planeterra has partnered with several organizations within these sectors, joining the World Heritage Alliance for Sustainable Tourism and the Tourism Sustainability Council to participate in policy development and industry implementation of the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria.
Additionally, Planeterra has formed a partnership with The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) to foster traveller education about voluntourism. TIES works to engage travellers in responsible practices through its website and new Your Travel Choice blog. EcoDestinationsfeatures monthly auctions of member trips and highlights stellar ecotourism initiatives around the world. TIES and Planeterra are working together to bring hands-on voluntourism activities to the Eco and Sustainable Tourism Conference (ESTC) in Portland, Oregon in 2010.
The evolution of Planeterra has continued to change the role the organization plays in the industry. New industry partners are coming online in support of Planeterra’s worldwide community development projects. Gap Adventures, Planeterra’s founding partner, has supported the organization since its inception by covering administration costs and matching all individual donations. This has allowed projects to flourish and new ones to be developed every year.
STA Travel USA is now supporting Planeterra, focusing support on the Peru Streetkids Project. Employees of STA Travel USA were engaged by being given a choice of projects to support and given a chance to vote. This provided the company an opportunity to really engage their employees and get behind a project in order to go out and promote it to their travellers and drive more donations to it. With the support of thousands of travellers, Gap Adventures, and STA Travel, Planeterra was able to purchase a $150,000 home that will serve as a permanent location for children in Cuzco who live at risk and in poverty in some of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city. Other industry partners recently signing on to support Planeterra, including Air Canada Vacations and Discovery Adventures will be doing the same.
Industry support at a high level, coupled with global institutional partnerships, is allowing Planeterra to evolve into a true travellers’ foundation, helping to drive the industry toward sustainability and supporting community development through travel and voluntourism.
Kelly Galaski
Kelly Galaski is partnership coordinator at Planeterra and an advocate for integrating sustainability into all business including travel. She has worked for over 10 years in the tourism industry for hotels, restaurants, tour operators, and in community ecotourism development consulting.
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GREENING THE BLOCK – OAKLAND STYLE
Alli Chagi-Starr
Green For All
Senior Community Strategist
GREENING THE BLOCK – OAKLAND STYLE
Aissaade Negus
Garden Planting at the Green Youth Media Center – United We Serve/Green The Block – Day of Action, Oakland, CA
In commemoration of 9-11, and in honor of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “United We Serve” national day of service, Art in Action’s CommuniTree Project organized a garden planting day behind our new green youth media center on Telegraph Ave. in Oakland, CA. The action was coordinated with hundreds of others in concert with the launch of “Green The Block,” a new program of Green For All and the Hip Hop Caucus.
Green For All Fellow and CommuniTree Co-founder, Ashel Eldridge put out the call, and was joined by friends from Planting Justice (http://plantingjustice.org/), Grind for the Green (http://www.grindforthegreen.com/), Insight Garden Program (http://www.insightgardenprogram.org/), Kijiji Grows -Aquaponics Systems (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVt6FJFMQVE), acclaimed author and permaculture trainer Starhawk (http://www.starhawk.org/permaculture/permaculture.html), and many other friends and neighbors.
In one afternoon, we transformed this little corner of Oakland, by rolling up our sleeves, creating community and building the world we want to see — now. Youth and olders worked side-by-side to turn a garbage-filled concrete carport into a little slice of paradise. All day passers-by got involved, and by day’s end, dozens of people had contributed. Throughout the process, we passed around a video camera to document the before and after. (Video coming soon.)
There are those that have profited from the old, pollution-based economy, who fear our green equity movement — but, there are just too many pockets of people rising up to celebrate the earth and each other to be thwarted. Art in Action’s new green youth media center is dedicated to greening both the block, as well as the mind. The new center is one of the first green recording studios and art centers for disenfranchised young people in the nation.
We know that we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for, and we will never give up making the world a better place, especially for those who’ve seen the worst side of the old economy. The new green economy must include everyone, if we are to succeed. Thanks to the perseverance and creativity our our multi-talented community, we are on our way!
Let us know if you want to come by for a site visit or to to make a contribution to the cause. Think: solar panels!
Go Green The Block! Go Oakland! Go Planet!
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GREEN IN NEW YORK
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Navajo Nation Council Votes For Green Jobs
The first green jobs bill from America’s First Nations promises much needed, culturally appropriate jobs.
The Navajo Nation Council, responding to ongoing requests from a coalition of tribal members and other supporters, voted to create a Green Economy Commission designed to stimulate both traditional and modern forms of economic activity.
The Commission’s focus will be not only to create jobs in this depressed region, where the unemployment rate is 44 percent, but to do so in sustainable, culturally appropriate ways. Current proposals include wool mills and weavers’ co-ops, as well as traditional agriculture, green construction, home weatherization, renewable energy, and other projects to promote energy and water efficiency. It will also apply for federal money earmarked for green jobs and economic stimulus.
“A green economy is not a new concept to Navajo,” said Tony Skrelunas, a member of the coalition that proposed the bill. “There are many green business opportunities that fit perfectly with our culture. We must once again hearken to such processes to truly build our own economy that puts high value on our tradition – old and modern economic pursuits. In this way, we will build a vibrant economy for the future generations while honoring our great ancestors.”
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Capital Access Program
Green For All’s Capital Access Program (CAP) is designed to create, sustain, and scale green jobs in the U.S. CAP leverages the work of Green For All’s policy and field teams to build the capacity of stakeholders and mobilize capital so that our advocacy leads to real economic recovery and environmental restoration.
Please click below to learn more about Green For All’s Capital Access Program
Our goal is to build the capacity of key businesses and nonprofit organizations to support, create and scale green jobs in our local communities. We do this by providing tools, like research papers, reference guides and how-to toolkits. By addressing issues regarding employment, procurement and access to capital, we seek to empower our stakeholders — particularly those constituents coming from historically marginalized areas — to engage in policy decisions both locally and nationally.
- Other helpful resources (links with brief description of how each can help)
- SCORE: SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” is a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth and success of small business nationwide. It is America’s premier source of free and confidential small business advice for entrepreneurs.
- FedBizOpps: This site is the U.S. Government’s one-stop virtual marketplace. Through this single point-of-entry, commercial vendors and government buyers are invited to post, search, and retrieve opportunities solicited by the entire federal contracting community.
- Minority Business Development Agency: This is the only federal agency dedicated to advancing the establishment and growth of minority-owned firms in the United States. Through a network of minority business centers and strategic partners, MBDA works with minority entrepreneurs who wish to grow their businesses in size, scale and capacity.
- Environmental Protection Agency “Small Business Gateway”: This federal agency provides a gateway to environmental information and contacts for small businesses.
Small businesses provide more than 70 percent of America’s jobs. The Capital Access Program is committed to increasing the capacity of these emerging businesses and entrepreneurs — particularly those owned by women or people of color — to be leaders in the green economy. Through online and offline content, the Program seeks to improve the business skills, social capital and financial support of green business.
CAP initiated a pilot mentor – protégé network back in December, which linked budding entrepreneurs across the country with business leaders willing to help them get their business or nonprofit off the ground. We intend to scale this program later this year, so please click through to learn more about it.
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- Profile of one participating business: Tymel
- CAP intends to scale up its Small Business Incubator in the future. If you are interested in being a part of this program, as either a mentor or a protégé, please complete the appropriate application below. Proteges must meet the following criteria:
- For-Profits: 1-3 years operating experience; revenue positive; focused on providing green products, sustainable services, or renewable energy
- Nonprofits: work with underserved communities; focused on both employment and the environment; existing or planned social enterprise that aims to fulfill the organization’s overall mission
CAP is always looking for solid financial opportunities in for profit and nonprofit businesses. We have relationships with a variety of financing partners, and occasionally we will put together investment summaries of unique opportunities for circulation amongst this syndicate. Please review the criteria below to see if you are eligible. If so, please download and complete the application.
Criteria: We are looking for both for-profit and non-profit enterprises that fulfill the mission of building an inclusive green economy. In the case of for-profit businesses, we look for revenue-generating companies, with 1-3 years of operating experience, that are focused on providing green products, sustainable services, or renewable energy. Women and minority business owners are encouraged to apply. In the case of non-profits, we look for organizations that are working with underserved communities, attempting to provide pathways out of poverty. In all cases, preference will be given to entities located in the following cities: Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Miami, Boston, Newark, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.
