- I started this work to literally save my life,
to save the life of my children.
The Black Joy Farm is a magical place.
We have a urban farm.
It is a 5,400 square foot lot where we grow amazing food
and host unpoliced events.
We call it our safe, radical green space.
We have a food box that we do every other Friday
where we give away food boxes to people in the community.
And 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.
These are boxes that lean into this concierge service
that are giving you recipes,
that are helping you do meal prep and planning.
We invite families to come here and learn earth science,
and grow food, and then take that food home with them.
I am the founder and executive director
of the Black Feminist Project.
I am the fierce mama bear of six amazing children.
And I'm also a hot mess.
I think every community should be growing food.
I think it is about tapping into
our ancestral legacy with the land.
Imperialism, colonialism, and enslavement has stolen that
from Black and Brown and Indigenous people.
Too often growing food has gotten mirrored
in the stereotype of peasant work, of slave work.
It's time for us to reclaim that.
Food is literally our lifeblood,
and if we are to heal our communities,
it starts with understanding that our food system,
in large part, must be local and must be ancestral.
We really emphasize accessibility, right?
Poor folks are not eating unhealthy food
because they like unhealthy food.
They're eating that because it's easily accessible.
And so when we talk about healthy food
and we talk about empowering folks,
we've gotta think about accessibility,
so we give away high quality fancy food
to people in our community
and we don't ask them to pay
a dime more than they can afford to pay.
And then what happens is
that we have people who believe so deeply in this work
that they will travel from outside of this community,
pay full price for a box
so that they can have access to this food
and also subsidize the cost of a box for somebody else.
So the Black Feminist Project, I think, is really unique.
We have our food program work,
we have our reproductive justice work,
and we have our empowerment work.
Although we are pegged as a food justice organization,
really what we're trying to get to
is empowering Black women and MaGes,
what we call marginalized genders,
to bring in their life this term
that we've coined called radical joy.
I think we only diminish
the importance of joy for a very specific type of folks.
And so when we talk about the importance of it,
the knee jerk reaction to be like,
"Oh, that's not important.
How many pounds of food did you grow
and how many families were fed?"
I mean, well, we got them stats, too.
We gave away 800 pounds of food
and we fed 231 people in 75 families.
I'm often asked why I started this organization,
started doing this work.
I think people look for some sort of altruistic answer
and that's not where the answer for me lies.
I started this work to literally save my life,
to save the life of my children.
I came to the Bronx by way of gentrified Harlem.
I was literally displaced from my hometown
and I figured I had some stuff
that my neighbors didn't have.
I did have a college degree.
I had social capital.
I decided to use those skills to create an organization
that would help benefit other women like myself
and their children.
I started doing this work back in 2006 looking for a space,
and I was doing what we call guerrilla farming.
With the help of Bronx Community Board, too,
we were finally able to identify this lot and got a license.
And we had created such a ruckus that,
without any prompting from me,
they turned our temporary license into a permanent license
and gave this piece of property to the Parks Department.
So even if the Black Joy Farm, for whatever reason,
doesn't exist anymore,
a green space for this community has to,
and so I'm deeply proud of us doing that work.
I think what happens sometimes
is that people in communities,
they become scared to like make their communities better,
particularly in New York city,
because we know that once we do that,
once we clean up our parks, once we clear out lots,
once we create community gardens,
speculators and real estate developers
then come in and use them as selling points
and roll out urban renewal legislation that displaces folks.
I am a product of that in Harlem.
Who would oppose healthy food in a community?
And who would oppose beautiful green space in a community?
Particularly a community that has a history
of divestment, gerrymandering, rezoning.
You know, Howard Cosell said the Bronx is burning.
But you know, in agriculture, there's this thing that we do,
where you go when you burn everything down
and then the ash actually enriches the soil.
Like then when you plant again,
everything else comes up so much more full,
so much more abundant.
I feel like that's what happened to the Bronx.
The Black Joy Farm really is indicative of what happens
when you are determined to thrive in spite of,
and because of, the things that have happened to you.
We grow amazing food here.
We have sunflowers, we grow eggplant, we've got onions,
we have chickens that we harvest for eggs,
we call them Bronx chicks.
It don't get more farm to table in that.
(inspirational upbeat music)