Liberated Roots

“Mention food and social justice now, and you’re in the in-crowd.” This is how Karen Washington, urban farmer and community activist, characterizes the school garden movement. “It’s the hip thing to do now,” she says.

The statistics support Washington’s view. The number of school garden programs in the United States doubled between 2007 and 2013, according to research by the Bridging the Gap program—and numerous school-aged youth have purportedly benefitted. In her article “Serving Up Food Justice At School,” school garden advocate Michele Israel traces a virtuous circle: “When students eat vegetables they’ve grown in a school garden and then share their experience at home by requesting certain vegetables at meal time, they nurture a healthy curiosity about nutrition and food politics that may increase their food sovereignty significantly.”

As the popularity of the school garden movement surges, however, some educators and community stakeholders have experienced pitfalls. Many short-term staff enter communities with which they are unfamiliar, fulfill their requirements to kick-start a school garden, and move away. Washington labels this phenomenon, common in many school intervention projects, as “parachuting.”

Programs not based in the communities they serve may also inadvertently trigger students of color—for example, when workers don’t take the time to investigate a potentially complicated relationship with agriculture. In Grace Bello’s article in The Atlantic, “Farm-to-Table in Communities of Color,” D.C. farmer and food activist Natasha Bowens reports that some immigrant youth say, “Why would I go back to the farm that my immigrant parents worked so hard to get us off of?” In this way, Bowens says, the movement can feel like a step backward.

For African-American youth in particular, agriculture may call to mind a troubled historical memory of enslavement and racialized oppression. At an Edible Schoolyard site, for instance, educator Claire Stanford overheard a student remark, “This is some slavery sh-t.” When Bowens spoke with young people of color about farming and food sovereignty, one youth responded, “Why would I want to go back to picking cotton?”

Without adequate equity training, school garden programs may be ineffective at best or, at worst, unintentionally reinforce structural inequity and systemic racism. But when educational gardens directly address (rather than sidestep) issues of race and class, they can become a platform for partnership, healing and meaningful action. The following three profiles feature culturally responsive school gardeners who model these strengths.

For Jess Bloomer, deputy director of Groundwork Somerville, listening is a core tenet of her anti-bias garden programming. Bloomer runs the program’s Green Team, a youth employment program focusing on urban agriculture, environmental justice, civic engagement and job skills. As a white-identified, middle-class woman, she cites the danger of falling into a “charity work” trap with her students. “To think that school garden programs are just about nutrition education is to fall into the ‘savior’ dynamic and miss a wealth of opportunities,” Bloomer says.

Bloomer warns white school gardeners to beware of the phenomenon that environmental sociology professor Julie Guthman labels “universalism”: the assumption that values held primarily by members of largely white communities are “normal” and widely shared. Bloomer steers clear of the false assumption that her racial and socioeconomic privilege afford her authority on any issue. Instead, she shifts the paradigm of her work toward one of partnership and cultural humility.

To enact this equity mindset, Bloomer suggests doing some research before planning even begins. She and her students conducted community surveys in four languages about which vegetables local families wanted to see at the Green Team’s mobile farmers’ markets. They then created their crop plan based on the community’s responses.

Bloomer also recommends finding the experts living in the community and partnering with them. After creating the crop plan, she and the Green Team identified three mentor farmers in Somerville: one from Bangladesh, one from Brazil and one from Haiti. These mentors taught workshops on how to grow specific vegetables like callaloo, the edible leafy greens from amaranth plants popular in Caribbean cuisine. The team also incorporated jiló, a type of eggplant popular in Brazil, into the crop plan. The three mentor farmers spoke with the youth about why these crops were valuable.

Bloomer thinks about food as a health benefit that goes beyond scientific nutrient value and fat content; it’s also a way people show they care about each other, tell stories, and find identity and connection. When she served as the program director and garden educator with Edible Schoolyard in New Orleans, for example, her team designated part of the garden space for the community to heal itself after Hurricane Katrina. Here, kids could engage therapeutically with nature, curiosity and beauty.

Following the success of Edible Schoolyard’s healing space, they decided to designate one of the gardens for holding restorative justice circles—structured mediations to address interpersonal conflict and build community. Bloomer says these gardens functioned as building blocks for discussing power and how our decisions impact all living beings—whether we know it or not. “Before talking about academic integration and nutrition, we asked, ‘How can this be a place for social emotional learning and support, for forging healthy community bonds?’” she explains.

Shorlette Ammons, equity in food systems associate with the Center for Environmental Farming Systems at North Carolina State University, gardens to heal and reclaim her agrarian African-American identity. “Young people of color, especially black youth, sometimes get stuck relating to the slave labor experience and they don’t want to go back to it,” she says. “I want to put a different lens on the experience. Agriculture is an innate part of who I am, and having the opportunity to do it differently is really important.”

Ammons recalls growing up working for a white farmer with her entire family. “It was a lineage thing,” she says. “It was me and my twin sister and my cousins and my aunts and uncles. We were committed to the family every summer, this white farm-working family that was only slightly better off than we were. The relationship to land and the agrarian spirit was muddy for us in a way that it may not have been for them, but it was a shared experience that was a part of both of our heritages.”

Alongside many other local organizations and volunteers, Ammons recasts that experience in the light of self-determination. “I found home in the garden again, and it was very freeing,” she remembers. “That is what sovereignty feels like.”

While working as a children’s librarian and garden coordinator, Ammons and a group of dedicated individuals built a garden to reflect every ethnicity represented in their county. After researching 33 different ethnicities in Wayne County, they interviewed community members about foods popular in their home cultures. They built gardens with “funky geometrical designs,” dedicating each bed to a particular racial or ethnic group’s food culture. “Its purpose wasn’t just about food,” Ammons recalls. “It was about using food as a tool to rebuild an inclusive narrative and reclaim public space.”

Additionally, Ammons sees gardening as a ritual for healing the relationship between people of color and the land. She cites the work of Ruby Sales, civil rights icon and spiritual activist, as influential to her agricultural philosophy. “Children aren’t born biased,” she asserts, referencing Sales’ work. “It’s rituals that indoctrinate them. We can offer different rituals that support their being anti-racist, their awareness of what an inclusive society looks like.”