Selling Directly with REKO Ring
Perennial Pastures
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BIPOC Farmer Listening Session Page 15 TM
Volume 30 | Number 2
Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service
March | April 2022
2022 Changemakers dismantle food insecurity through hands-on job training and urban farms By Clare Hintz
“The Urban Growers Collective At the turn of the millennium, urban farmworks to create solutions with Chicago ing was just becoming popular. Nonprofit communities to get folks what they organizations in Chicago realized that if someneed,” she continues. Produce from the thing happened to the highways flowing into farms is available at farmers’ markets, in the midwestern city, there was perhaps a day’s their Collective Supported Agriculture worth of food in the whole town. program, and through their Fresh Moves Laurell Sims, co-founder of the Urban Mobile Market. Job training efforts Growers Collective reflects that food security directly help tackle systemic instabilities is still a major issue in Chicago more than in the city. two decades later, made even worse by the The results are impressive. In 2021 pandemic. alone, the Collective employed 188 “Two days of food in the city is a terrifying teenagers, who together earned more prospect,” Laurell says, “With the pandemic, than eighty thousand dollars for their more people have started to lack food security, efforts. The organization grew, packed, and public consciousness around the issue has and distributed more than five thousand grown tremendously.” food security boxes and made 13,626 The Urban Growers Collective is this year’s hot meals for folks with limited means MOSES Changemaker of the Year. The purpose to cook. The organization underwrote of the MOSES Changemaker designation is $169,686 worth of vouchers for people to to recognize emerging leaders in the organic use at the Fresh Moves Mobile Market farming and food movement who creatively sites, providing even better access to the overcome systemic challenges in order to nurproduce grown locally. Despite the panture a thriving agricultural future for all. demic, Urban Growers Collective was The Urban Growers Collective provides Teen farmers selling their harvest. hands-on job training and career laddering at Photo submitted able to hold 38 workshops, with nearly four hundred attendees and thirteen eight urban farms for youth, beginner Black, thousand dollars given as scholarships. Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian farmers, and “For so long we siloed food insecurity, lack of housFourteen incubator farmers helped grow the produce men who are at high risk for gun violence. The impact ing or unstable housing, access to employment, lack that flowed through all of these efforts. Chicago’s city of this organization far outstrips its 11 acres, making of quality education, and economic development all motto is “city in a garden,” and the Collective is makit a natural MOSES Changemaker. Food insecurity as separate problems,” says Laurell. “But they are all ing that vision a reality for all residents. is just one dimension of the system that the Urban interconnected. Addressing them as one system also Growers Collective is trying to dismantle. helps tackle issues like gun violence.” 2022 Changemakers continues on 6
Ag Solidarity Network: connection and collective action, we have an app for that! By Lori Stern
PO Box 339, Spring Valley, WI 54767
So much of agricultural knowledge has been passed from person to person, with direct experience of hands in dirt, witnessing the cycle of life and death, standing in for any credentials or earned certificates. Making a living on a small or medium-sized farm, often with diversified production, also comes with challenges that are equally complicated. Because attending training and education off-farm can be costly, time consuming, and often not serendipitous to when problems arise, many farmers have turned to social media and electronic mailing lists to learn and connect with peers when they need it most.
The many production-focused Facebook groups, the multiple mailing lists, and the organizational job and classified boards demonstrated a desire to reach other Midwestern farmers who were farming in similar ways. In fall 2021, MOSES convened stakeholders across the Midwest, all working directly with farmers. We recognized that in addition to advice on agronomy, equipment, seeds, and breeds, human scale farmers are facing systemic challenges. Policies that proliferated during Sonny Perdue’s tenure to support the ‘go big or get out’ approach to the food and farming systems have gutted many rural communities. The conversations in small coffee shops or bodegas over post-chores breakfast, coffee, and house-made pie are rarer. Still, small and medium-scale farmers need a way to organize and share their stories. According to Regi Haslett Marroquin, the Vice President of MOSES, through education, mentorships and publications, MOSES “is fundamentally a movement builder, it is what people expect, that is why they come to the annual gathering.” To step further into this role, we are collaborating with partners to create a platform of knowledge exchange, advancement, and sharing of practices that work for farmers to succeed. The platform will facilitate those exchanges and ensure that they are captured and exponentially shared. Through this process, we can uplift knowledge and wisdom from communities. These form the foundation of the future of agriculture, validating indigenous knowledge, agrarian traditions, and ensuring that all of this is shared for both current and future farmers. With a portion of a foundation grant for technology, the communications team at MOSES started interviewing platform companies that host online communities. After talking to stakeholders, we
prioritized the following: • Space for multiple groups, each with their own identities and control of their data and information that could interact with the main site • Easy navigation that was familiar for social media users with all the ease and functionality that comes with Facebook and Instagram but did not feed the “Meta-Monster” • Ability to host multiple languages • Shared space for events, job boards, classifieds, and messages • Searchable content across the site • An app and/or single sign-on so there is no need for unique passwords or extra steps to get on the platform Because we wanted to build a platform that was collectively conceived and owned, the first two bullet points were most critical. The platform we chose offered the greatest flexibility for various groups. Farmer affinity groups or organizations are able to be administrators and even create custom looks for their pages. Several partner organizations indicated that they were exploring the costs associated with hosting a platform, but the price was often out of reach. By working together, committing to the site always being free for farmers, we chose the platform and the Ag Solidarity Network (ASN) became a reality. The Ag Solidarity Network is on its face a social networking platform. There will be an app available so that farmers can receive notifications, post questions, and pictures. It looks very similar to Facebook and Instagram, making it easy to navigate. However, we are hoping that it will become much more. Unlike Facebook groups that have no relationship to each Ag Solidarity Network continues on 8