The Black Feminist Project:
Where Radical Joy and Resistance Meet
When I started doing this work,
I was really, yes, thinking about food disparities
and public help and all that good stuff.
But really what I was thinking about was
how do we give low income and poor, black women
and their children what they need to have happy lives?
How do we pour back into Black women?
When we restore the balance to the lives
of Black women and children,
then everybody else benefits.
The Black Feminist Project is where joy
and radical resistance meet.
We use the unisections of food justice
and reproductive justice to create
economic and community development projects
for Black women and marginalized genders
and their children.
We have an urban farm called
The Black Joy Farm.
It is a 5400 square foot lot
where we grow amazing food.
When we talk about healthy food,
and we talk about empowering folks,
we have got to think about accessibility.
We make it easy for folks to have acccess
to the work that we are doing.
I think every community should be growing food.
I think we should all have food-growing green spaces.
Many communities in urban spaces lack adequate
amount of green space.
That is an inherent issue in all urbn communities
regardless of socio-economic status.
The Bronx is the poorest burough in the city.
It is the most densely populated.
Therefore, we have the least amount
of green space in proportion to the
population in this borough.
Food is litterally our lifeblood.
We are to heal our communities,
it starts with understanding that our food
system, in large part, must be local.
The Black Joy Farm really is indicitive of
what happens when you are determined
to thrive inspite of and because of the
things that have happened to you.
We grow amazing food here.
We have sunflowers.
We grow eggplant.
We have got onions.
We have chickens that we harvest for eggs.
Then we put those things in that box.
It does not get more farm to table than that.
[music]
We have a food box that we do every other Friday.
We give away food boxes to people in the community.
These are not just run-of-the-mill food pantry boxes.
I always like to say that we need to be
the Blue Apron of the Hood.
The food box is probably coming just as
popular as our urban farming program
because it does speak that 'getting great quality food'.
That is resonating with folks.
Now we really understand the importance
of public green spaces.
We are seeing folks of all races, all ethnicities,
all ages investing in our work.
We invite families to come here and learn
earth science and grow food,
then take that food home with them.
We ask people to come here and just sit.
There is no requirement that you have to
come here and give us sweat equity.
There is no requirement that you have to
come here and work.
You can come here for respite.
This is a place of magic.
It is the embodiment of Black girl magic
and Black women joy.
For a lot of people who see this farm
and have kept up with this farm,
I think that they think that this just
kind of happened overnight
or over the course of a year.
This was a lot of work.
This was like 6 years of organizing.
I started doing this work back in 2006,
looking for a space.
I was doing what we call guerilla farming,
not gorilla like the animal, "ooh ooh ahh ahh,"
guerilla like the warfare.
I was liberating lots.
Police called it trespassing,
breaking-and-entering, tomato, tomato.
The point was that I was going into spaces,
seed bombing, planting sunflowers,
with the help of the community.
What it did was start to create
a following of people who now had a very
similar demand as me.
That demand was we are entitled to
a space that we can have ownership
and investment in.
With the help of community members,
we were finally able to identify this lot,
and get a license.
This is now a guaranteed public green
space for this community.
I am deeply proud of us doing that work.
Not just of myself, but also of community
members who jumped in,
got in where they could fit in,
helped create the people power that we needed
to make this project successful.
We know that the work that we are doing
is impactful.
We know that the work that we are doing
is resonating with people.
We are hearing about it.
We are seeing it.
We are feeling it.
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The Black Feminist Project
Rob Greenfield Films
Learn more and support:
www.theblackfeministproject.org
with support from
Guerilla Foundation
Rob Greenflield Films