Planting Justice
The Bay Area is experiencing an explosion of groups and coalitions dedicated to transforming our food system. The newest organization to make waves in the food justice scene is an Oakland-based organization called Planting Justice.
When I first saw Gavin Raders active in his role as co-founder of Planting Justice, he was fastening a wooden leg to what appeared to be a table but was in fact a potato tower under construction on his rooftop garden in Temescal. It was a volunteer work-party and Raders was making the rounds overseeing volunteers from West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered while they busily transferred amaranth and vegetable plants into larger containers.
In barely half a year, Planting Justice has accomplished a whole lot with little more than the vision, commitment, and experience of its founders, Gavin Raders and Haleh Zandi. Add to that a recently acquired bio-diesel truck, lots of seeds, and a heaping spoonful of dedicated volunteers and you have a local food revolution in the making.
Yet Planting Justice isn’t just another “start a school and community garden” type of organization--though they do that too. Their slogan is “Grow Food, Grow Jobs, Grow Community.” Planting Justice not only aims to make affordable, nutritious food more accessible by helping urban residents of all ages grow their own food in their backyards and on their roofs, but also aims to offer paid jobs next year as urban farmers, nursery specialists and community organizers. Planting Justice works with a variety of institutions—including East Bay schools, prisons, and Mandela Foods Cooperative in West Oakland—to address food access and economic disparities.
These accomplishments include transforming multiple lawns into edible gardens, installing school gardens, and working with the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin, which aims to rehabilitate prisoners through organic gardening, teaching the men practical skills like garden design, soil amendment, and plant propagation that they can one day use on the job. The raised-beds of the organic vegetable garden will be built this spring in the medium-security prison yard. The first harvest is expected in July and the men are now democratically discussing where to donate the food they grow. Raders also leads vegetable gardening skills and sustainable food systems workshops for men in the program.
This spring, in collaboration with volunteers from West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered, they transformed a two-acre lot at Explore Preparatory Middle School in East Oakland into what Raders and Zandi call a multi-layer “edible food forest.” They dug water-harvesting swales and planted over thirty apple, pear, plum, pluot, peach, persimmon, and nectarine trees. This fall they planted edible shrubs, herbs, ground cover, and root vegetables.
“Planting Justice is a unique but simple model: Plant seeds, train people, grow food, work with existing institutions like schools, churches, stores, and prisons,” says co-founder Haleh Zandi. “We want it to be a replicable model here in the Bay Area and in cities across the country.”
With one eye focused on food justice and the other on ecological soundness, they also see the need for good jobs. Raders and Zandi believe that the national discourse about green jobs lately has often left out the food production sector. “Too often, ‘green jobs’ are thought of as futuristic industrial technologies needing millions and millions of dollars in capital input, started mostly by major corporations that control access to these funds,” says Raders. “The dominant focus is on high-tech ‘clean energy’ jobs. We will provide a much different model for creating green jobs in our neighborhoods, one that can and should be replicated in any US city with comparatively little money. All you need are people, seeds, soil, sun, water, some space, and a little guidance and inspiration.”
Raders and Zandi have backgrounds in social justice organizing and anthropology. During their time canvassing together at Peace Action West, they brainstormed how the block-by-block community-organizing model could be used to address issues of social justice and community empowerment. They both later took some time off to study—Zandi earned a masters degree in cultural anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, while Raders practiced permaculture as an intern at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas. Upon Raders’ return to Oakland, they realized that by combining the tactics of community organizing with urban food projects, they could make edible landscaping affordable and accessible to those who lack healthy food. Thus Planting Justice was born.
The new year promises to be a productive one. In addition to installing the vegetable garden beds this spring in the H-Unit at San Quentin, they will be working with the Step to College Program and Mandela Academy (on the campus of Fremont High in East Oakland) to start a school garden and urban aquaculture project that will not only provide healthy food for students and their families, but also generate income for the participating students for college. The aquaculture system (inspired by Will Allen’s success with it as a source of both revenue and safe, healthy protein) will raise fish that will be sold at market-rate. The money raised will then be used for students’ college funds. Raders is also busy teaching an Introduction to Urban Permaculture class at the Berkeley Sustainability Institute. Planting Justice was also featured in a short documentary film produced by Project Survival Media and Oakland North, which was shown at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in early December.
Perhaps most significantly, Planting Justice will be scaling up its permaculture design and implementation services combined with its green jobs training program. The innovative model they have developed sets them apart from a number of other food justice organizations in three key ways: 1)it provides a unique service to East Bay residents who will hire the 3-person teams to implement permaculture gardens that not only maximize food production but also integrate urban animal systems, greywater recycling, composting, rainwater catchment, and other sustainable urban design elements; 2)it generates a diversified their revenue stream so they aren’t reliant solely on grants, and helps the organization achieve financial self-sufficiency. These funds allow Planting Justice to fully fund and implement one permaculture garden for a low-income family for every 2-3 gardens done for full-paying clients; 3)it provides those much touted green jobs with living wages ($15-25/hour) in the form of Planting Justice Urban Farmers, Permaculturists, and Edible Landscapers.
Their Temescal-area rooftop nursery serves as the main incubator, providing most of the vegetable starts and serving as a training site where volunteers learn how to produce food from seed. The next step for Planting Justice is to buy a vacant Oakland lot to serve as the group’s headquarters and an ecological training center. Not only will they be able to grow more food and provide more vegetable starts, they will have space to train more people for jobs. Raders and Zandi hope to plant larger, high-yielding gardens that will become “living classrooms”.
“We’re excited. There are many projects in the works for 2010, with just as many ideas and collaborations,” Raders says.
For more information: http://plantingjustice.org
See video featuring food access issues, Mandela Foods Cooperative, and Planting Justice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZJgUmI6prk
