{"id":3474546,"date":"2018-11-28T11:45:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T11:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3474546"},"modified":"2020-07-17T15:25:35","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T15:25:35","slug":"doria-robinson-on-how-urban-agriculture-can-heal-a-communitys-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2018-11-28\/doria-robinson-on-how-urban-agriculture-can-heal-a-communitys-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"Doria Robinson on How Urban Agriculture can Heal a Community\u2019s Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Doria Robinson<\/strong>\u00a0is one of my heroes.\u00a0 She has lived her life in Richmond, California, a place which, as she puts it, \u201cis a huge part of my identity\u201d. She is the Executive Director of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbantilth.org\/\">Urban Tilth,<\/a>\u00a0which began as an urban agriculture organisation but has since become so much more. She is also a founder of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cooperationrichmond.wordpress.com\/\">Cooperation Richmond<\/a>, a worker-owned community developer, and she\u2019s on the steering committee of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/energydemocracy.centerforsocialinclusion.org\/our-power-richmond\/\">Our Power Richmond<\/a>.\u00a0 She is one of the finest do-ers of stuff that I know. I\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/transitionnetwork.org\/news-and-blog\/doria-robinson-on-scaling-up-community-resilience-in-the-shadow-of-chevron\/\">last spoke to her in 2014<\/a>\u00a0after we met when I visited to the US.\u00a0 I wanted to talk to her now to hear her take on some of the issues that have come up through this research on imagination.\u00a0 I started by asking her what\u2019s new in her world since we last spoke 4 years ago [sadly the audio of this interview wasn\u2019t good enough to make a podcast].<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFour years ago, wow!\u00a0 So we have our new urban farm.\u00a0 We\u2019re continuously building it out.\u00a0 But the biggest thing that\u2019s happened in that whole world is that we actually have a CSA where we\u2019re feeding 156 families every week from the food that we\u2019re growing.\u00a0 We\u2019ve created partner relationships with local farmers and have a way to continue to build out that offering.\u00a0 We\u2019re in the process of developing a cooperative grocery store that would be locally sourced.<\/p>\n<p>Basically we\u2019re creating relationships with local farmers to create a local farmer cooperative that can supply local grocery stores and corner markets with fresh produce and really try and figure out what we mean by shortening supply chains and actually creating the means to do that, by creating relationships between our urban centres that need food and the semi-rural farmers who are growing food but are locked out of larger markets.<\/p>\n<p>We launched the Cooperation Richmond, and now have our first and only worker-owned cooperative enterprise in Richmond, which is a bike shop, and are looking to do more conversions of a single owner business to a cooperatively owned business, and looking to do some more projects.\u00a0 We\u2019re doing a lot of work collaboratively with the Our Power coalition as well.\u00a0 Some interesting stuff around creating an Energy Commission and doing some micro-grid solar, like having pilot projects doing micro-grids in Richmond.<\/p>\n<p>I could probably talk a really long time about all the different things that are happening on policy, through the coalition, talking about land trusts.\u00a0 Land has been a real big thing right now.\u00a0 Just the explosion of, and the pressure on, housing in the San Francisco bay area is extreme.\u00a0 More and more people homeless, living out in tents, and in their cars.\u00a0 It feels like every highway overpass now has a tent city around it.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of intense, you know.\u00a0 So housing is way more in our minds and in our frame these days.\u00a0 Just wondering what other work we can do there, so we\u2019ve been thinking a lot at the coalition around land trusts.\u00a0 And, yeah, just continuing on with the work\u2026<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qO2qWPx9riA?feature=oembed\" width=\"1100\" height=\"619\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>One of the things that I\u2019ve been doing a lot of research about is about the link with stress and anxiety and the impact of poverty on the imagination, and how when people are in states of trauma and high levels of stress and loneliness and isolation, that the parts of our brain that fire the imagination sort of shrink down and contract, and we lose that ability to look at and think about the future in ways that are hopeful and positive, even be able to see the future, even have the space to think about the future.\u00a0 I wonder how in your community you see that in practice, in a\u00a0 community that has suffered a lot with poverty and racism and exclusion?\u00a0 How you see that impacts the way people have thought about the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For the most part, you just don\u2019t have room to think about the future.\u00a0 Most people here think so much day to day, hand to mouth.\u00a0 Like literally, \u201cHow am I going to get through next week, or tomorrow?\u201d\u00a0 If you asked a lot of young people here, a lot of them don\u2019t even have a conception of themselves getting old.\u00a0 You know.<\/p>\n<p>[slide-anything id=&#8217;3472166&#8242;]<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s like to have any space to dream up a future, any kind of future, is abstract.\u00a0 It\u2019s not even probably something that really probably crosses their minds.\u00a0 It actually makes it really difficult, right, to talk about things like climate change and extreme weather events and what not, because people are like, \u201cI\u2019m not quite sure I\u2019ll have a place to live tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0 Whether or not the temperature rises in some years is just not something that registers on the radar.\u00a0 It\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019m not thinking about that. \u00a0When that happens, I\u2019ll do that.\u00a0 I\u2019m about to be evicted today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a huge challenge, right, because what we know is that communities like this are going to be getting the brunt of climate, and are not going to be prepared.\u00a0 They\u2019re not going to have insurance plans or savings or a back-up plan if something happens. \u00a0They\u2019re not going to be able to rebound.\u00a0 They\u2019re going to get the brunt.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s an important conversation to have and it\u2019s important to do planning and to put things in place so it\u2019s not catastrophic, but it\u2019s really hard to do when people are under so much stress and pressure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How have you seen with people who have come into the Urban Tilth programme, and who have worked with you over some period of time, how have you seen that impact people in terms of shifting that, and that ability to maybe re-engage with the future or being more imaginative in that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Because we focused a lot on not just people from the outside coming in and giving services to those in need around food, and nutrition and what not, but rather people from the inside being trained and employed to do that kind of work.\u00a0 It actually creates space within the lives of people who are employed by our good selves to actually have room to dream, and have room to engage because they\u2019re not as worried about where their next meal is coming from, or where they\u2019re living because they have a consistent income and they have access to information, travel, exchanges with different people.<\/p>\n<p>We just had this big soul to soul convening here in the San Francisco bay area that Urban Tilth co-hosted, with a whole slew of groups around Jerry Brown\u2019s climate summit, the GCAS, just to say that grassroots food needs to be included in the discussion of solutions and that they have to be good for frontline communities, not just for corporations.\u00a0 And the crew at Urban Tilth, these young people, and sometimes older people, who normally engage in food justice and food sovereignty were on the forefront.<\/p>\n<p>They were actually really thinking deeply on not just how all these questions on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/food-system-lessons\/\">climate impact agriculture<\/a>, but just impact their lives in general.\u00a0 That\u2019s because Urban Tilth created the space in their lives to be able to contemplate these things.\u00a0 We actually invited in some people to do one-on-ones on building up to GCAS.\u00a0 Like, what is climate change?\u00a0 Let\u2019s make sure we all understand it.\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk about the impacts.\u00a0 What does it mean to be a frontline community?\u00a0 What are frontline communities across the world?\u00a0 What are the impacts going to look like?\u00a0 Let\u2019s spend some time actually on the clock thinking through this.<\/p>\n<p>We actually created space in our programme to have that so that these people who are out \u2013 you know, Urban Tilth folks are out in community gardens with community members five days a week, for hours and hours and hours.\u00a0 From youths in our school garden programmes to all different ages in our community gardens.\u00a0 And now they have this body of knowledge, so that when they\u2019re out, growing food, meeting, whatever, they can actually pick up a conversation about this with other people, and open up a wider conversation, right?\u00a0 And have people when they\u2019re in a space where they\u2019re relaxed and they are thinking about taking care of themselves, and taking care of the planet, to engage in a deeper conversation on climate.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like Urban Tilth has really created space in the lives of our staff.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been able to develop their consciousness and give them space to build their capacity to understand the whole of that phenomena, and then they can be these ambassadors out in the community opening up that conversation with other people, in a space where people aren\u2019t so stressed and impacted, right?\u00a0 That\u2019s been the plan, and it\u2019s kind of working.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Wonderful.\u00a0 In a context that\u2019s very urban, and where people don\u2019t get much time in nature, how have you seen that spending time in nature, connecting to plants, connecting to seasons and soil, how does that impact people?\u00a0 What does that do to people?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For the most part what we see, especially with the youth, but really with everybody, is that when folks first start engaging with Urban Tilth \u2013 so we teach a class at a local high school, \u2018Urban Agriculture and American Food Systems\u2019, where they\u2019re in the garden part of the time and the classroom part of the time learning about the history of agriculture \u2013 that when they first start, folks are just so disconnected from natural processes, you know?<\/p>\n<p>Nature is something that you get on a postcard.\u00a0 It\u2019s something that you go and you take a photograph of.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t have any direct impact on you and your life.\u00a0 Like they\u2019re separate spheres.\u00a0 That\u2019s another difficult thing for folks who are trying to get people to grapple with climate change, to deal with this, that people don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re affected by nature at all.\u00a0 They feel like technology will take care of everything, and I don\u2019t have to worry about it.<\/p>\n<p>Engaging people in a natural space within an urban context where you can start to see that, \u201cOh yeah, it does matter what\u2019s in the rain here that\u2019s feeding the plants that I\u2019m growing and I\u2019m going to eat.\u00a0 It does matter what\u2019s in the air if there\u2019s some kind of a fire and it\u2019s depositing ash from who knows what toxic materials on to the soil that I\u2019m going to put things in the ground and I\u2019m going to eat.\u201d\u00a0 People start putting things together that our actions are impacting our environment.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re not somehow magically in separate spheres where we\u2019re not impacted.\u00a0 People start to take it more seriously.\u00a0 The amount of time people spend on these machines, in social media space, on electronics, it\u2019s a really distracted existence, you know?\u00a0 People are really in this mind frame, especially young people, where they can hold notions about worldview, notions about how reality works, where things are actually separate.\u00a0 You know, they\u2019re not really connected, like it doesn\u2019t really matter what happens.\u00a0 It\u2019s not going to get me ever because somehow I\u2019m in my magical electronic box and nothing will get to me.<\/p>\n<p>Engaging people day to day and talking about the cycles and talking about water and air and how the nutrients get into food in the first place, it\u2019s all just rock, and other things, and all these complex processes, opens people up and actually makes them vulnerable, right?\u00a0 You feel vulnerable.\u00a0 You\u2019re like, \u201cOh, woah.\u00a0 We actually are dependent on interdependence. \u00a0That\u2019s how we keep going.\u00a0 That\u2019s how we have the nutrition that we need.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Then again it opens people up to, \u201cOh, well, we really should think about these larger questions.\u201d\u00a0 Like we don\u2019t actually live in abstract boxes where technology is going to take care of everything.<\/p>\n<p><strong>One of the things that I\u2019ve been looking at is about \u2018what if\u2019 questions.\u00a0 Like, asking a really good \u2018what if\u2019 question.\u00a0 I went to Liege in Belgium where they started this thing four years ago where they said, \u201cWhat if in a generation\u2019s time, the majority of food eaten in this city comes from the land closest to this city?\u201d\u00a0 And they invited academics and chefs and farmers and everybody who cared about food to come in to this question, and now they\u2019re just on fire, and starting loads of cooperatives, and starting a whole range of different things.\u00a0 It feels like creating those kind of \u2018what if\u2019 spaces a, and holding those \u2018what if\u2019 questions \u2013 really ambitious ones \u2013 is so important.\u00a0 In the black community in the US, I\u2019m always so inspired by things like the prison abolition \u2013 you know, \u201cWhat if there were no prisons?\u201d is the most phenomenal \u2018what if\u2019 question.\u00a0 What if there was no police, or a very, very different form of justice?\u00a0 I wonder if you have any thoughts or learnings from that experience of how to keep \u2018what if\u2019 questions alive and feeling possible.\u00a0 That\u2019s quite a rambly question!\u00a0 Does it make sense?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, one, I\u2019d say that I\u2019d agree. \u00a0I\u2019m also really inspired by abolitions new movement and honestly I feel like we need to ask more \u2018what if\u2019 questions and in more communities.\u00a0 Being asked now in very rarefied spaces, you know, extreme activist spaces where day to day normal people aren\u2019t really engaged.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that question has ever been posed to the youth that I work with at Richmond High!\u00a0 Any kind of \u2018what if\u2019 questions\u2026<\/p>\n<p>In fact there was a game that we play on one of our youth summer apprentice programmes, that\u2019s just a game where you have to ask questions without answering them.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little icebreaker game.\u00a0 Because people don\u2019t ask questions in general.\u00a0 They just take what comes and are out of practice of asking questions.<\/p>\n<p>As a side note, we need a civic space.\u00a0 A community space where we do that as an activity in political, civic social spaces more often.\u00a0 So we go to city council, and what people mostly do is deal with problems or just the day to day business.\u00a0 What contract is going to happen, what\u2019s not going to happen, what are they going to move forward with?\u00a0 Or complain about things that are not right.<\/p>\n<p>But very rarely is there a \u2018what if\u2019 question asked in that space, right?\u00a0 And that people get an opportunity to speak on it, dream on it, and then whatnot.\u00a0 I guess what I\u2019m saying is we could use a lot more people engaged in creative thinking and productive thinking.\u00a0 I was on a conference call yesterday of all these different thinkers from across the United States.\u00a0 It was called \u2018World Building\u2019 and it was around trying to create, or trying to figure out, what is it that we want to see in the world?<\/p>\n<p>I thought it was going to be a space like you\u2019re talking about, where you have an open ended question and people start thinking into that space, right?\u00a0 So that you can have real projects, on the ground, that come out of that thinking.\u00a0 But it turned into what we normally do, which is showcase this pilot, and that pilot, and talking really big generalities about what we need in terms of a relationships with each other and what not, but was lacking in concrete vision.<\/p>\n<p>It was like, \u201cWe need to be closer to each other\u2026 \u00a0We\u2019re feeling lonely\u2026\u00a0 We\u2019re abstract\u2026 We\u2019re this, we\u2019re that.\u201d\u00a0 And then how do we manifest the answer in the world that brings us closer together?\u00a0\u00a0 What does that look like?\u00a0 It was the complaints rather than, \u201cLet\u2019s have a city council session where it\u2019s all just on one question and everybody\u2019s going to bring in their ideas and we\u2019re going to hear it all out and write it all down and see what comes out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s change how we do business to be generative.\u00a0 Not necessarily that we\u2019re going to follow every lead.\u00a0 But we\u2019ve got a moment in time where we really need to think out of the box.\u00a0 We really need to pull in new ideas and if we keep going down the road where we\u2019re only dealing with what is, complaints, or what\u2019s not working, it\u2019s difficult.<\/p>\n<p><strong>If in November 2016 it had been you that been elected as the President of the US, and not the current awful incumbent, and you had run on a platform of \u2018Make America Imaginative Again\u2019 \u2013 so you had felt that actually at this time in history what was needed more than anything was a focusing on boosting imagination in education, in public life, in work, in everything, because that\u2019s where the solutions are going to come from to get us through \u2013 what would you do in your first 100 days in the Oval Office?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Honestly, because I feel there is such a moral human imperative to focus just all attention on climate and new energies and reduction of consumption, I\u2019d probably come on really heavy to say that, like the race we had around getting to the moon and the space programme, we need everyone in our country, everyone around, to focus their attention on reimagining every part of the way that we live on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>That we need to focus all of our departments, all of our efforts \u2013 from energy to agriculture \u2013 on reimagining and retooling dramatically everything to have a dramatically reduced impact on carbon emissions, on climate.\u00a0 And we need to do it with an eye towards justice and Just Transition thinking. \u00a0They have to come hand in hand, not one without the other.<\/p>\n<p>When I think about what we were talking about earlier, about having these more public, civic conversations around what things could look like, maybe that\u2019s what each community would need.\u00a0 Create some kind of system that would get each community within the United States to convene themselves to talk about what their impact is, review what their impact is, and then looking for ways to reduce it.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe there\u2019s exchanges between communities, maybe there\u2019s an open period of dreaming, asking open ended questions together, and sharing those ideas across the country, using the media talking about what the ideas are coming up in each community and just marshalling resources to follow through on these plans.\u00a0 Of course this is off the top of my head and I don\u2019t have a ten point plan prepared for this question but I would think that focusing on a pressing issue \u2013 inhabiting a collective national generative space and moment where people are asked to come together as communities and dream out what it is that they could do to make dramatic change, and how they could make it in a way that would be just to the people that would be affected, sharing those across communities, across regions, and then acting on them \u2013 I think would be really powerful and important.\u00a0 Just reimagining ourselves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I\u2019d vote for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I wish I had a month to think about that question so I could come up with a really great answer\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Well, if you wake up in the night with other ideas, do pass them on, I\u2019d love to hear them.\u00a0 You do work in schools?\u00a0 When we last spoke you\u2019d started 13 school gardens around Richmond.\u00a0 I wonder \u2013 so again, slightly with your President hat on \u2013 what could our schools become in terms of imagination and in terms of them being a driver for the kind of shift and the rethinking that we want to see?\u00a0 What would be the future of education?\u00a0 What qualities and skills would we be producing in young people that the gardens you\u2019ve started really are just a first step towards?\u00a0 Hello?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I would like our schools to be a place where kids come in and their energy and their natural imaginations are understood as their superpower, and the school is a place where they\u2019re trained to use their superpower, amplify their superpower, focus their superpower.\u00a0 Use it for good.\u00a0 Instead of control it and destroy it, really, and make it so they\u2019re really just following somebody else.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like there\u2019s so much room for the majority of our education to be focused on critical thinking, on practising just creating things.\u00a0 But then questioning.\u00a0 Thinking of creation as a superpower where you could choose to use it, you can choose not to use it.\u00a0 That you don\u2019t always have to create something.\u00a0 It can be a choice.\u00a0 Sometimes we create things that we really don\u2019t need, or that are too much.<\/p>\n<p>But if we could \u2013 I don\u2019t know \u2013 just restructure the way that we raise human beings to have a certain amount of awe for their own potential, their own human creative potential, and to have an ethic.\u00a0 A strong training throughout the school years around ethics, on when to use your power, when not to use your power, in the same way when to use your voice, when it\u2019s good to let other people\u2019s voices to be heard, when to step back, when to step forward.\u00a0 How to work cooperatively.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not just about your own singular unique voice but rather how are we living and doing these things together.\u00a0 I feel like you can run the risk when you\u2019re only focusing on creativity of that kind of \u2018nuclear power creative for creatives\u2019 sake, \u2018science for science\u2019 sake, where we create thing that then are destructive, just because we can.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I feel like we also need to be able to dream things out and some things maybe we need to have the power and the discipline and the ethics to say, \u201cThat\u2019s a great thing to dream, and it\u2019s a great thing to have a plan for, but some things shouldn\u2019t be brought into the world.\u00a0 And that\u2019s okay.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>So a school whose motto is, \u201cWith great power comes great responsibility\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Exactly.\u00a0 And to think of ourselves as powerful, right?\u00a0 Each human being is an immensely powerful agent of change.\u00a0 A potential agent of change.\u00a0 And we could have a positive impact, we have a negative impact.\u00a0 We have a very negative impact, like we\u2019re seeing now with climate.\u00a0 If we don\u2019t have a certain amount of awe and reverence for the amount of impact we can have on each other and on the planet, then it can go awry, like we underestimate our destructive power.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You can presumably remember Richmond before any of the gardens or the farms that you\u2019ve created existed, or very few of them. \u00a0I wonder how living in a place where you can see this stuff rolling out, and it happening, and the world around changing as a result of that, how that impacts on people\u2019s sense of what\u2019s possible?\u00a0 How does it change how you now think about the future of that place?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve heard it straight from youth in our programme and people who are in the city now.\u00a0 They have a distinctly different outlook than folks that were growing up when I was growing up.\u00a0 I feel like a lot of the people who grew up in my generation, we were just trying to get out.\u00a0 You don\u2019t want to die there.\u00a0 You\u2019re just going to die if you stay there, you know.\u00a0 To make it out, that was the goal.\u00a0 \u201cMake it out, make it out, make it out\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Now I hear a lot more people being like, \u201cI want to live here.\u00a0 I want to be able to afford to buy a house here and make my life here.\u201d \u00a0And they\u2019re dreaming out all kinds of other new things and feeling like it\u2019s totally within the realm of possibility.\u00a0 They can be their own community developers, they can start these different businesses.<\/p>\n<p>We have a big bike park in the middle of the city now next to one of the spaces \u2013 or not next to, it\u2019s about 10 blocks away, on the same trajectory of the gardens that we started \u2013 it\u2019s a major BMX bike park that a group of young people started.\u00a0 I feel like the realm of possibility is so much greater now.<\/p>\n<p>But back to that school question, now more than ever, people really need to understand how to take a generative idea, take a vision, and move it through the process of creation, right?\u00a0 Move it through the project management process.\u00a0 So that when they dream up something, they actually have the skill set to make it real, and understand what kind of commitment, and what kind of other associated skills you need to bring something into the world.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s something else that\u2019s not taught in a kind of education where you circle and cross out and you get tested on things.\u00a0 You\u2019re not taught to nurture a project along and rise to the occasion of whatever hurdle comes up.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the kind of education that\u2019s available in schools.<\/p>\n<p>The big challenge now in Richmond when it comes to what\u2019s possible and what\u2019s out there is I feel like people have definitely been turned on.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot more people getting involved in politics.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot more people with imaginative ideas. \u00a0They want to start things, like new non-profits and other things starting up.\u00a0 But the issue now is that people with all the resources look at Richmond as this very exciting place.\u00a0 They want to live here, and whatever, and so a lot of the people who have been here are just being pushed out, priced out.\u00a0 And that is a real challenge.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve made ourselves unfortunately really attractive to people with a lot more resources than us.\u00a0 We\u2019ve done all this work and other people are coming in and buying it up from underneath us and pushing the people who did the work to make it happen out, to places like Richmond was twenty years ago, so we have to start all over again.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hence your increasing amount of focus on housing, by the sounds of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Hence our increasing amount of focus on housing.\u00a0 And support for repeal of a law that made it impossible to do comprehensive rent control.\u00a0 It\u2019s on the ballot next Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3iGek5wMHJw?feature=oembed\" width=\"1100\" height=\"619\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>When we talked about \u2018what if\u2019 questions before, at the beginning of Urban Tilth, or if you could sum up Urban Tilth in a \u2018what if\u2019 question, what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat if we took all of the vacant lots and discarded spaces in Richmond, and used them as hubs of creativity where people could gather and heal and grow the healthy food that we needed in our food deserts, and actually sell that food so that we can employ people to do that work?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Beautiful.\u00a0 Very good.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It would be like, \u201cWhat if we took the places we discarded, or that have been discarded, and use those to create the things that we needed to thrive?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Beautiful.\u00a0 In these difficult dark days in the US, how do you keep your own imagination, your own ability to hold on to a positive vision of the future alive?\u00a0 How do you do that given what\u2019s happening on the political scale?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s definitely a challenge that I feel like I can\u2019t express enough.\u00a0 When I wake up and see that crazy man in the White House doing more crazy things, every morning, every day, it\u2019s such a relief to know that I can go to the farm.\u00a0 I can go there and there\u2019s this group of 28 completely turned on young people and older people who are holding this vision with me.\u00a0 And people come to the farm, and come to the gardens, and they\u2019re like, \u201cOh, I just need to touch base with you all because this is crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To know that we have created these spaces.\u00a0 And that they exist, and that they are a refuge for us, where we can circle up, and where we can use each other to remind ourselves that not everybody is crazy in the United States.\u00a0 It really can feel like that if you only listen to media, you know.\u00a0 And remind ourselves of who we are, and then engage directly in the work.\u00a0 Every single day.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m going to go shortly today out to the Greenway Gardens that I helped to create and engage in what are the next steps for this space.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to have a conversation later today on how to move the cooperative grocery store the next steps forward.\u00a0 Just focusing all of my waking hours on engaging with people who are basically holding this ember of a different vision for the United States.\u00a0 A different vision for our communities.<\/p>\n<p>And we\u2019re protecting these embers together and guarding their flames and helping them grow.\u00a0 I feel like because we\u2019ve had the 14 years before to create these really concrete places, where this kind of work can happen, we have a little bit of a refuge from the madness that is national politics these days.\u00a0 We\u2019re just keeping it alive and continuing to grow this movement even under these circumstances, with just these protected places we\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Wonderful.\u00a0 Well, awful, but, yes, you know what I mean.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, awful.\u00a0 I just don\u2019t understand how people can allow what\u2019s going on on the national stage to be.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even\u2026 It\u2019s hard for me to understand even for the people who call themselves Trump\u2019s supporters, how they can\u2019t see the road they\u2019re walking on.\u00a0 You know.\u00a0 They can\u2019t see themselves.<\/p>\n<p>My daughter was watching this late night TV thing where they gathered together some Trump supporters and they brought them into a room and they were doing this fake focus group.\u00a0 They were asking them this series of horrendous questions of what kinds of things they would support Trump doing to immigrants.\u00a0 Would they support them putting on neck shackles that shocked them if they left house arrest or whatever.\u00a0 Everybody was like, \u201cYes, yes we would support that, that\u2019s a great idea.\u00a0 They shouldn\u2019t come to this country anyway.\u201d\u00a0 It got more and more just evil and destructive and they just went\u2026<\/p>\n<p>This was normal people, these weren\u2019t actors.\u00a0 They thought they were in a real focus group and the things that were being proposed were Nazi style stuff.\u00a0 And they were like, \u201cYeah, sure, we\u2019re for it.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m just like, \u201cOh my god, people have lost their minds.\u201d\u00a0 So I really need to circle up with people who are not crazy.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Yes, absolutely.\u00a0 Well that\u2019s all my questions.\u00a0 Were there any other thoughts you had on that topic of imagination that I haven\u2019t asked you the right question for?\u00a0 If there was anything you were hoping, \u201cOh I hope I get to say that\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the things that we\u2019re doing with the US Food Sovereignty Alliance is actually very similar to what you said.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t thought of doing it in the form of a \u2018what if\u2019 question.\u00a0 I\u2019m one of the convenors of the western region of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance and we\u2019re convening meetings, community meetings, of people who grow food from farm workers to farmers, small farmers, family farmers, to urban gardeners in each sub-region of California, like the Central Valley, the Bay Area, Washington State, and various places, to basically ask that question.\u00a0 What does Just Transition in the realm of agriculture look like?<\/p>\n<p>It would be great to do that in the form of a \u2018what if\u2019 question.\u00a0 Because we\u2019re not just to talk about it. \u00a0The goal is to actually draw out some kind of a map.\u00a0 What are the physical infrastructural needs?\u00a0 How do things work together?\u00a0 How do we feed millions of people as opposed to \u2013 even if we\u2019re starting with small amounts of people in communities at a time \u2013 how does that add up to the millions that are out there that need to be fed?\u00a0 It\u2019s like this whole two year process of generative thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone says that they want to do this but no-one has spent time thinking about what it really looks like, and what are the pieces of the puzzles, and what role they could play.\u00a0 So I\u2019m actually really excited about that.\u00a0 I really love this idea of the \u2018what if\u2019 question.\u00a0 Using that as a launching point.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like just we thought a lot about how much they depend on the educational institutions that they created to have people who been primed and ready to be cooperative worker owner members of their cooperatives, and that they actually had to do that intentionally.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t going to happen by accident in existing cultural educational norms.<\/p>\n<p>Another thought is really going to our friends who are working in education and saying, \u201cWhat are we doing to make sure that that space is generative?\u00a0 To make sure that people are understanding this kind of human capacity to create is a really powerful magical thing and that we really need to nurture it.\u00a0 Build that muscle, hone it, and then also temper it with decision making, with ethics, and what not.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Teaser photo credit: Screenshot from Urban Tilth video.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The goal is to actually draw out some kind of a map.\u00a0 What are the physical infrastructural needs?\u00a0 How do things work together?\u00a0 How do we feed millions of people as opposed to \u2013 even if we\u2019re starting with small amounts of people in communities at a time \u2013 how does that add up to the millions that are out there that need to be fed?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3482278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,213526,79719,213531],"tags":[213849,93851],"class_list":["post-3474546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-act-inspiration-featured","category-foodwater","category-food-water-featured","tag-building-resilent-food-and-farming-systems","tag-urbanagriculture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3474546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3474546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3474546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3482278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3474546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3474546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3474546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}