I began and facilitated these projects with a focus on Farm to School initiatives alongside Ms. Scott: teacher and garden club coordinator, Ms. Maria: school administrator, and Farmer Tito: community partner. I met with students on a weekly basis throughout the year, doing a mix of classroom activities and hands-on gardening. The goal was to provide students with the skills and vocabulary to expand their understanding of our food system, its history, the inequalities that exist within it, and their own positionalities.

So what did this look like? The program resulted in creating lessons on the history of food justice and why it exists. We had lessons and activities on Indigenous food systems, the agricultural  knowledge brought through the transatlantic slave trade, and the events that followed the abolition of slavery. Covering topics like the history of Black farmers, land loss, the great migration, and food apartheid. While it’s important to talk about the root causes of these issues, it’s also important to talk about the histories of resistance to them. It is those histories of resistance that are the foundation for our current models of urban/community farming and food justice.

It also looked like highlighting important activists and learning about how agriculture and food have been used as a tool for social and economic change–like Fannie Lou Hamer and The Freedom Farm Cooperative, and The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program.