Growing a Greater Englewood

Where do you get food when the grocery stores aren't open, or when their shelves have gone bare?  Many Chicagoans asked themselves this question for the first time during the 2020 Covid pandemic, but for those living in the food deserts of the city's West and Southside's, the question wasn't a new one.  Join Change Agents producers Liz Murice Alexander, and Dylan Cohen as they take a look at the urban farming collective Grow Greater Englewood, who works in partnership with community stakeholders to develop local food economies and land sovereignty which empower residents to thrive.  

Transcript

Narrator: [00:00:00] Change Agents. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Where do we get food when grocery stores are closed? Many Chicagoans ask this question for the first time during the 2020 COVID pandemic, but for those of us living in West and South Side food deserts, this isn't a new issue. I'm Change Agents producer Liz Murice Alexander. Join me and my co producer Dylan Cohen as we explore the South Side based farming collective Grow Greater Englewood, highlighting their recent work fostering Black sovereignty over Englewood's food.

Grow Greater Englewood activates a social justice structure built around re remembered Black cultural history to imagine and build for a radically sustainable futuFor literally everyone on this planet, 2020 was a year like none other. 

News Clip: We must enact an immediate stay at home order for the state [00:01:00] of Illinois. Chicago's bright lights went dim in normally busy streets. On Sunday, May 31st, you saw 

Liz Murice Alexander: As the COVID pandemic brought the global economy to a standstill, and a summer of police brutality protests agitated American society, many in Chicago experienced collapsing social structures firsthand.

Taryn Randall: For When everything was happening with George Floyd and grocery stores were closed and also like just out of out of stock and there became this, this reality like yo, like we could really, you know, not have access to food. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Nowhere in the city was this more true than on the west and south sides home to thousands of black families like mine.

I'm Liz Murice Alexander, and I moved from the north side uptown neighborhood home to West Englewood in June 2020. The differences between the two spaces in that moment was stark 

News Clip: from the city's central business district, where nearly every pharmacy, grocery and convenience store remains closed to the south and west sides of [00:02:00] Chicago residents already hit hard by the State's stay at home order are now having a hard time meeting their most basic needs for those living in areas that are already food deserts, who have already had to fight to get chains like Walmart and Whole Foods to come in. The worry is, will these stores want to reop 

Liz Murice Alexander: A team of community stewards in Englewood is working to turn this problem into an opportunity 

Kadar Coleman: I think GGE is positioned to meet the needs of food access, food choice, housing justice, land justice, at a moment where these issues have reached a fever pitch.

Liz Murice Alexander: GGE, or Grow Greater Englewood, is a black led food justice collective based in the Southwest Side neighborhood. They spent 2020 working to rapidly build out programs answering to resident needs. 

Taryn Randall: Backyard Gardens is a program that provides free garden [00:03:00] installation maintenance support and you know kind of like shared knowledge and it's particularly for Englewood residents.

Liz Murice Alexander: Here's Taryn Randall, steward of the Backyard Garden program. 

Taryn Randall: I'm a farm liaison with Grow Greater Englewood. We started really strong in 2021, but Backyard Garden initially was sparked right at the beginning of the pandemic. 

Liz Murice Alexander: When social systems in Chicago began to buckle, GGE fed Englewood residents. Another example is Community Farm Sisters in the Village founded by GGE stewards, Mecca Bay and Bweza Itaji.

Mecca Bay: I am Mecca Bay and I am the lead Englewood Village Farms Director and Engagement Specialist. 

Boiza Itaji: My name's Bweza Itaji and I am the lead Sustainable Growth Steward at Grow Greater Englewood. 

Mecca Bay: This is in a village started in the heart of the pandemic, where we were able to grow thousands of pounds of food without even blinking for the community that we [00:04:00] serve.

Liz Murice Alexander: Grow Greater Englewood, which started in 2014, sees its mission to work with residents and developers to create sustainable food economies and green businesses that empower residents to create wellness and wealth. They do so through community engagement. Wealth building and economic and political advocacy.

Kadar Coleman: The work that we're doing in Englewood, it's about the right of black folks to control their own land, their own food systems.

Liz Murice Alexander: That's Kadar Coleman Senior steward for the Englewood community Land Trust and community engagement at GGE. As he explained to me in our interview, working toward black food sovereignty means responding to a wide range of social issues.

Kadar Coleman: There's a wealth building component as well. So it's also breaking down the barriers that prevent us from taking advantage of economic opportunities tied to food production and distribution. 

Liz Murice Alexander: This mission outlines black food sovereignty in a nutshell. Sustaining food sovereignty means being able to eat well without depending on mainstream food networks.[00:05:00] 

Because as we learned during summer 2020, Those networks might not always work. 

Taryn Randall: What infrastructures do we have in place? Nothing is permanent, but these structures at least build a base for healthy food to be grown moving forward.

Liz Murice Alexander: These programs are urgently needed now. But black community foodways were at risk of collapse long before summer 2020. 

News Clip: Census figures show that 21 percent of households in Calumet Park don't have access to a vehicle and live more than a half mile from a supermarket. Some now say this community is a food desert.

A resounding cry from a few dozen rallying against the grocery store chain for the many who called Garfield Park home. 

Community Organizer: So leaving in the dark of night is just a reflection of their attitude towards the community in the first [00:06:00] place. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Rather than just fighting the government for more south side corporate grocery stores, greater Englewood took matters into its own hands.

Boiza Itaji: There's a lot of Englewood within G. G. E. approach to that was to w of these vacant pieces of that land to grow food wi and that's something that on the north side just be the city pours most of it the north side. 

Liz Murice Alexander: G. G. E. and teaches us how to fea Without depending on grocery stores. Here's Mecca again.

Mecca Bay: What we hear is when y'all comin?, we started this last spring and summer with our community, you pick garden where we planted a variety of vegetables and said, Hey, y'all come over here. Learn a little bit about what we growing, but go ahead and pick your own food. This is the most positive thing that we can do for [00:07:00] any community.

Liz Murice Alexander: GGE is out here greening vacant lots and building you pick farms, but the south side still isn't filled with sustenance gardens. As it turns out, a central issue is actually getting land into the hands of residents. 

Mecca Bay: The only pushback is from the powers that be with getting land and being able to grow the food.

Liz Murice Alexander: How do we start to develop land if we can't acquire it?

Kadar Coleman: From my experience, the city, they don't often give excuses, but what they will do is drag out processes like for years and years. And oftentimes the issues that we're bringing to them, I mean, the issues are immediate, but then there's also the issue of, is this city staffed to really help engage with communities around these issues?

Do they have. enough people? And are the right people? And oftentimes the answer to those questions is no. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Assuming after a long and difficult process that a resident can get [00:08:00] land. Next comes the question of land remediation. A long, difficult, and expensive process. 

Mecca Bay: If it's contaminated, then we're eating contaminated food because of course the nutrients from the soil goes into what we're growing.

So the remediation process is just a process of getting that land. A lot of the areas that we're activating were industrial areas, so yes, we do have to have environmental testing to confirm if it does need to be remediated or not.

Liz Murice Alexander: History and stereotype can still raise some doubts. As Taryn points out, a history of enslavement and sharecropping means we have not always had an easy connection to the land. 

Taryn Randall: Black people have a very layered and removed relationship to agriculture and landscaping work and what that kind of communicates on a status level.

That has [00:09:00] been like the challenge, right? It's not just slavery. that had us, um, and our ancestors doing this kind of work and being connected to the land. And it's hard to have those conversations because it takes time.

Liz Murice Alexander: However, part of the work is reconnecting Black communities to the powerful, healing, and grounding elements of our agricultural history. 

Boiza Itaji: Of course, we understand the part that was not by choice, but the act of growing food to nourish and feed ourselves, is a shared experience. 

Taryn Randall: For example, on Morgan, the first year we started the garden, so many people will walk by and be like, what y'all doing?

Like puttin' in the garden in. They're like, okay. And then year two, those same people like come in and then year three, they might be a little bit more down to do some stuff. 

Boiza Itaji: Whenever we start new farms throughout Englewood or plant gardens in people's homes. That storytelling is part of it. Hearing how people say these collard greens [00:10:00] remind me of when I was a child and my grandmother would show me and she'd make these recipes.

And that's the most important piece of it in my mind is just reminding each other, reminding ourselves that this is who we are. It's woven into our DNA and it's so powerful. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Connecting people by sharing knowledge is at the heart of GGE's work. This is the stewardship model, which GGE uses to divide programs and tasks.

Instead of a traditional hierarchy, stewards are laterally organized and everyone is equally engaged in facilitating their program area. 

Taryn Randall: Stewardship is collaboration with those that are around you including the animals and the insects that are in conversation with what you're doing as well as like the humans and all of the infrastructures that make it so all of us are able to continue to live and coexist.

Liz Murice Alexander: Working this way allows them to rapidly build a wider network of programs and interventions. 

Kadar Coleman: I think that that's one of the things that drew me to Grow Greater Englewood. [00:11:00] They're going about creating sort of an adaptive people centered organizational culture and framework and movement framework that sort of minimizes the challenges and those constraints of trying to execute this type of work, black led transformative work within the typical non profit organizational structure and beyond structures.

that are tied to municipal timelines and processes. 

Liz Murice Alexander: GGE' s Stewardship model allows it to meet communities where they are and start building from there.

Taryn Randall: Essentially what Backyard Garden is doing is setting up a network of homeowners that are invested and interested in learning how to grow food or continuing to grow food or sharing the knowledge that they have. It's been really beautiful just to experience Everyone's passion and commitment. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Their goal is not to show up, do [00:12:00] one event, and leave, but to iteratively work to sustain their network year after year.

Taryn Randall: We installed 33 sites in 2021 and are hoping to kind of double that. Like we're adding on some extra folks. We have an internship with young people and it connects into this larger developing worker cooperative, Earthseed, which does this work outside of Englewood for a fee. 

Liz Murice Alexander: Because, as they argue, all we need is to build and consolidate networks to get the work done.

We already possess the knowledge and skills we need to feed and heal ourselves. 

Kadar Coleman: A lot of the work that we're doing, I mean, we're standing on the shoulders of others. There is a strong history of activism and self sufficiency in Englewood and in other Black communities in Chicago and across the country [00:13:00] for that matter.

Liz Murice Alexander: Black folks know how to survive and thrive. For example, we have organic and cost effective ways to reclaim land. 

Mecca Bay: We have farmers who are well versed in soil education. Mushrooms can actually remediate the soil. 

Boiza Itaji: Like sunflowers.

Mecca Bay: Yes, yes. 

Boiza Itaji: They just pull up all the toxins. That's the thing though, is nature finds a way to clean and heal itself.

Mecca Bay: Again, this is an ancestral practice. 

Taryn Randall: It's a generational relationship that's being re remembered that I feel has been lost in translation and the hustle and everybody's just trying to make it.

Liz Murice Alexander: This is rememory. Working to ground Black communities and ourselves. Our history and the knowledge we already embody 

Mecca Bay: while you're eating that food and growing that food, you're telling stories.

So we have to keep that regenerative process. And we also believe in the Sankofa concept of reaching back. So [00:14:00] that we know where we're going. 

Liz Murice Alexander: GGE tells Englewood's ancestral stories to strengthen us in the present. This enables us to imagine how we might better sustain ourselves in the future.

GGE tells Englewood's ancestral stories to strengthen us in the present. As Taryn pointed out in our interview, this enables us to imagine how we might better sustain ourselves in the future. 

Taryn Randall: This pandemic and being in a position of really being able to connect more with folks that are trying to figure out, okay, like if we cannot get any food from anywhere else, like what would we do?

We're starting to find each other. 

Marcia Alexander: It's nice interacting with the other growers. 'cause I'm considering myself a grower. 

Liz Murice Alexander: That's Marcia Alexander, a GGE, backyard Gardener. In 2021, she connected with a backyard garden program and now she's in the process of planning out a second [00:15:00] summer of gardening. 

Marcia Alexander: I'm looking forward to, um, my options are, are a little bit wider.

Since I've experienced it, I know what I'm doing. 

Liz Murice Alexander: With the continued help of Taryn and her team, she's planning to broaden the kinds of vegetables she grows. 

Marcia Alexander: But we want to add in a different kind of plants this year, especially for the container pots, because we have the above ground pots pretty much set.

Liz Murice Alexander: She also happens to be my mom. 

Marcia Alexander: The green type vegetables, but I think I can grow more of the pole type vegetables, more peppers, maybe even cucumbers. 

Liz Murice Alexander: My grandparents moved from Alabama and Arizona to our house in Englewood in the 70s. Both of my grandparents farmed as children, and my mom has grown vegetables in our yard pretty much as long as I can remember.

Marcia Alexander: As we're looking at it now, things get more expensive. It's nice to have stuff that you can plant, harvest, maybe put up for the winter. If individuals did it, they probably would get some satisfaction out of it. 

Liz Murice Alexander: What's satisfying for you about it? 

Marcia Alexander: It's just satisfying to put [00:16:00] a seed in the ground and watch it grow. You know?

Liz Murice Alexander: Mm. 

Marcia Alexander: And you just put a seed in the ground, and you watch it grow, and it grows into something that you can eat. Or do something else with something that's sustain yourself.

Liz Murice Alexander: Through all of its programs GGE ties together individual family histories like mine into a community platform serving the broader collective.

Anton Seals: Big shout out to all of our great partners that have been with us on the way. Urban Growers Collective, Growing at Home, Teamwork Eaglewood, Rage, uh, Imagine Eaglewood If, Made in Eaglewood, uh, all the farmers that are in the community that I'm looking at. Grow more food locally, that hard work sisters in the village, that ain't going to back up.

Liz Murice Alexander: That was Anton Seals, lead steward of GGE, laying out the wider Southside grower community. Speaking of sisters in the [00:17:00] village, here's Boiza again. 

Boiza Itaji: I think a lot of people expect us to tell these sad stories, empowering a community that was powerless, but that's, that's not 

Liz Murice Alexander: the case at all. When we talk about the South Side of Chicago and violence, it's usually about residents and the harm that we do to each other.

We don't often talk about the violence of disinvestment leading to the collapse of critical community structures. So when we talk about Southside Chicago food sovereignty, we're not talking about relying on action from external corporate structures or local government. Black communities have never been able to rely on these systems.

But a moment of social instability has made this clear for everyone. 

Kadar Coleman: While people may not be familiar with the terminology of food sovereignty, folks know about backyard gardens. Folks know about getting together with other neighbors to fix up a vacant play lot. Our job is just to help connect those dots that Black folks have been at the center of this [00:18:00] work for a very long time, and we will continue to be at the center of this work going into the future.

Liz Murice Alexander: Grow Greater Englewood is a model of what it looks like to build for society's future while acting fast in the present to rapidly create social change where it is most needed and to do so in a way that is intentional, creative, just, and deeply black. 

Taryn Randall: Like what else would we be doing but working to try to secure a situation for our babies to be able to further secure our future babies no matter where they have to go, wherever they have to end up. 

Boiza Itaji: We're just trying to remind people This is the most important thing.

As we care for the land, as we grow our food. We're putting love into ourselves and in our community to make sure everyone has what they need.

Narrator: Thank you for joining Change Agents, produced by [00:19:00] Juneteenth Productions, with funding support from From the Chicago Community Trust and the Field Foundation. Please subscribe to our series on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts. Do you have a story to share? Join us in the ongoing conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and our website changeagentsthepodcast.com.