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By
Julia Scott
Across
the Bay from San Francisco, under a freeway in a downtrodden area of
West Oakland, lies a delightful little vegetable garden. It's August
and everything seems to be ripe: the squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, basil,
assorted collards and black eyed peas. Walking among the rows of fresh
produce on this converted street corner, it's easy to forget about the
landscape of cement and ramshackle houses just across the fence.
The garden is being tended to by eight teens wearing matching orange
t-shirts with "People's Grocery" emblazoned on the front and "Food Justice"
on the back. They are students at McClymonds High School, where the
graduation rate is the worst in the state of California. They are the
pioneers of the Collards N' Commerce Youth Program, created by the young
founders of The
People's Grocery to teach kids life skills—like urban farming,
business management, nutrition and cooking, budgeting, and grassroots
organizingÑthat are sure to come in handy later on and are never taught
in school.
Malaika Edwards and Brahm Ahmadi are relative newcomers to the Bay Area.
When they each moved to West Oakland from different parts of California,
they noticed a couple of things: other than the High School drop out
rates, there was only one grocery market for the entire community, which
is predominantly black. Less than 50% of West Oakland residents own
their own homes, and a tiny percentage own their own small businesses.
Brahm grew up in East Los Angeles, where food access was similar to
Oakland's.
"Our family had to drive a lot to find a good, clean source of food,"
he recalls. It made sense to try to create a social justice organization
around food, since food was a universal need and a great tool for organizing.
Coming from activist backgrounds, says Brahm, he and Malaika were "getting
tired of just protesting all the time instead of attacking the problem."
Make no mistake—People's Grocery, which was founded in 2001 with
Brahm and Malaika working out of their homes, is ultimately out to create
community economic development: jobs and health and wealth.
"Our greater vision is building a local economy and bringing back a
sense of community development, self-sufficiency, ownership," says Malaika.
The Collards N' Commerce program was intended to hire 6 students for
a year at $7.00/hour who would get school credit as well. When the program,
which is run out of the local YMCA, got off the ground, it was so popular
that they took 8 instead of 6.
Since
joining the program, the youth workers have learned how to cook for
themselves; done yoga; given presentations on access to healthy food
in low-income communities and the health impacts of the fast-food industry;
gone river rafting; learned about the prison industrial complex from
local activists; and started selling their own produce out of the back
of a converted postal service (USPS) truck.
The truck, another project of Brahm and Malaika's, is painted orange-and-purple
and decked out with shelves for fresh fruits and vegetables. It's training
program participants in the nuts and bolts of small business while bringing
good, healthy food to harder-to-reach parts of the West Oakland community.
It blasts hip hop and runs on solar power and biodiesel (a cleaner-burning
diesel fuel made from renewable sources like vegetable oils), basically
waste from fast-food restaurants.
"It's really, really hard times for teenagers now to get jobs, and fast
food restaurants are the majority of them," says Malaika, who went to
Oberlin College and spent a year as Executive Director of Youth
for Environmental Sanity (YES!). "We're providing a direct alternative
to working at McDonald's. Not only is it a job where they're helping
to grow food, we're trying to give them the skills to be able to do
it again themselves, to start their own business."
Of all the things they've learned this year, lessons on nutrition seem
to have made a big impact.
"I don't eat none of that junk food no more," says Nakia Dillard. "I
tried to tell my mom about the program, but she don't want to hear about
it. That hurts, you know. And she's a diabetic too."
"I stopped eating fast food," agrees Demi Boswell. "My family eats soul
food, and it's heavy food. It tastes so good but it takes forty years
off your life."
Another long-term goal of The People's Grocery is to open a community-owned
grocery store in West Oakland, before the big supermarket chains start
coming in. Looking at how much they've accomplished in three years,
it doesn't seem like an impossible dream.
"They'll start with this mobile market [the truck] and then move on
to a cafŽ and then to a restaurant, or something else that they want
to do," says Malaika. "I love listening to them talk to other people,
because it's then that I get to hear what they've really taken in and
the way they're able to talk about what's important to them."
Interested
in learning more about urban farming, growing your own garden, or nutrition
and the food system?
Literacy
for Environmental Justice
A San Francisco Bay Area urban environmental education and youth empowerment
group. Check out the Youth Envision and Slough Youth programs.
Food
Project
This Boston-based org is the standard-bearer in youth urban farming,
and publishes manuals on youth gardening programs.
Books:
Urban
Wilds: gardeners' stories of struggle for land and justice is a
compelling and useful collection of stories by and about urban gardeners.
Fast
Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
You owe it to yourself to know just what goes into your hamburgers:
read this bestselling exposŽ of the fast-food industry.
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