Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. To start off season two, we gave the microphone to a group of youth leaders at the Food Project. The Food Project is a Boston area nonprofit that builds a sustainable food system by bringing together diverse youth and adults to work on farms in urban and suburban settings, growing food for the community and developing youth leadership skills. Participants gain hands-on experience in farming, food justice, and civic engagement. The organization also works to expand food access by donating produce to hunger relief organizations and building community connections. Their mission is to create a thoughtful and productive community of youth and adults from diverse backgrounds who work together to build a sustainable food system. You can learn more at their website, the foodproject.org.
Speaker 2 (01:06): Well, thank you for joining us today. This is the Food Project Dirt Crew. We got about half of our crew right now, but we're going to have a really great conversation in regards to what we do and what the Food Project means to us. I'll start with the introduction. My name's Lex. I'm the co- supervisor of Dirt Crew right now, and I've been with the Food Project for about three years.
Speaker 3 (01:33):My name is David. I'm a part of Dirt Crew. I've been part of the Food Project for almost a year now.
Speaker 4 (01:42): Hi, my name is Sarin. I'm also a member of Dirt Crew and just like David, I've been part of the Food Project for about a year now.
Speaker 5 (01:49): Hello, my name is Wesley. I'm part of Dirt Crew and just like Sarin and David, I've also been here for almost about a year.
Speaker 6 (02:00): My name is Danny. I'm also part of Dirt Crew and I've been a part of the Food project for about two years, but it's been off and on.
Speaker 2 (02:09): Thank you. Alright, we will get into the first question. Of course, take your time with it. Think about what it means to you personally and that will be: how can you describe the Food Project's mission as an organization?
Speaker 5 (02:24): The Food Project's mission is to create a thoughtful and productive community of youth and adults from diverse backgrounds across gender, race, and class.
Speaker 4 (02:35): Kind of adding onto his point, I think the mission is really to unite people using something like food that unites all humans to eat, and to kind of show that despite our differences we have a lot of similarities.
Speaker 3 (02:51):I think the Food Project uses food as a catalyst for social change and a way to bring youth and adults from diverse backgrounds work together and create a healthy work environment.
Speaker 6 (03:03): And I think that especially the youth program is very good for youth to get involved with all those issues and getting more interested in farming and farming as well.
Speaker 2 (03:14): Appreciate y'all speaking on that, especially food just being a big, it's an indicator of our diversity. We have a lot of differences going on, but I love how at the Food Project, at the end of the day of a big farming day, we'll have maybe some vegetables that we are harvesting that we could take home, and I love talking to y'all about what different foods can be made with the ingredients even though the ingredients are the same, we all go back to homes of different cultural backgrounds, or just different preferences of what we like to eat. So we all have very different products based on collective things that we share in terms of food. So the second question is can you describe for listeners how the Food Project is organized? How do youth get involved and what is their role?
Speaker 4 (04:05): The Food project has been around for 30 years now, so it's a little bit complicated, but kind of like at the top where you don't really see is a lot of people working together to organize with grants and really just trying to organize by getting the Food Project involved with the communities that the farmers are in. In terms of youth roles, youth play a lot of roles in community events where sometimes we lead community events. Sometimes our job is to participate and affiliate with the community members.
Speaker 6 (04:43): And a way that youth can get involved is through those people who are active and working on the farms and through word of mouth and people who have spent their time during the programs and are interested in working at the Food Project.
Speaker 3 (05:00): Adding on– I think having youth advocate for issues such as social justice and unsustainability is a really good way to bring a sense of urgency because if you have to get involved it makes it more concerning because they're not really supposed to be doing that.
Speaker 5 (05:25): We are the future.
Speaker 2 (05:27): Hmmm. Yeah, I appreciate y'all speaking about it in that sense. You talked about Suri, you spoke about the different levels of it. There's all this grant work that needs to be done. Obviously us being a nonprofit organization that we might not see that side of it, but we are involved in every part of that process in terms of how we are presenting ourselves to the public because we are a youth and adult co-organized organization and the work that we do to advocate for things related to our jobs such as SNAP and HIP, we've been given a lot of responsibility in terms of advocating for HIP in our own communities, talking to people about assigning petitions, we put up papers to keep people informed around the community. I'm sure y'all have come home to talk to family members or friends about SNAP and HIP. I know I have. So I really appreciate how ever since I was using the Food Project, I felt like I was really given the keys to discuss these things as if I have the power to be an agent of change. Because I think in a lot of other jobs, if you are a youth you feel like you have to take a step back and let adults do it, but I think the whole point of the Food Project is showing youth that without their input, adults can sort of make decisions that aren't benefiting everyone or telling the full story. So y'all do a really good job of bringing your own personal background and your own experience into it. That's really important. So, I want to ask, what does leadership look like for youth at the Food Project? What are some examples of how you've been given the keys? Like I said.
Speaker 5 (07:26): For youth, I say we're able to lead certain community events. We get to lead walking tours where we lead the community around, Serve and Grow as team captains, we can basically tell people what to do, the farm tasks and such.
Speaker 4 (07:47): Another example of leadership is also with this podcast where the youth were just kind of given the responsibility of figuring out what they wanted to say and our bosses, like Caina, they didn't tell us what to say or really give us a ton of structure is mostly just give us the questions. I think that's another example of leadership because it's kind of up to us to decide for ourselves what should be said.
Speaker 6 (08:15): Exactly and workshops and stuff. I feel like we're giving the opportunity to speak up whenever we have the chance. There's no one telling you to go first. I feel like there's a lot of open conversation and you kind of have to take the leadership to talk first or share your opinion first. I feel like that matters in a group conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:37): And as y'all spoke about activities like Serve and Grow and more like agriculturally intensive physical work where we work with the community to show them how to do certain tasks to where they can go home with new knowledge about how to plant, they can come to our seedling sale and actually transfer that into building a garden of their own. All of these skills in terms of building raised beds or learning how to weed carrots or how to plant eggplant like we are doing today, we get to as young people, show adults who are oftentimes professionals that come in or community members that come in to learn about things. We are not professional farmers. We don't have decades and years and years of farming experience and expertise, but we've just received clear instruction and also practice how to facilitate among each other and how to teach each other new skills and emphasize that we're all leading in things that we're not necessarily familiar with, but things that we're confident with because we are youth leaders and I really appreciate that because there's no expectation that we are experts on anything. It's just we are experts on how to facilitate ourselves and how to motivate ourselves to do new things. So y'all are really great at that. Can I ask, how has being part of the Food Project impacted you on a personal level or a professional level?
Speaker 3 (10:25): I think being a part of the Food Project has definitely made me more open-minded and social. I think that comes from working in diverse groups almost every day in the summer and almost every week and the academic year also feels like I'm a part of a community that truly supports me and values me for who I am and one that I can learn and connect from.
Speaker 4 (10:50): One aspect of my life that's definitely been impacted by the Food Project is how to work with other people to be really efficient when it comes to farm work and you have a huge task and you have 10 people to do it. If you don't, if I would've tried to do the whole task by myself. That would have failed miserably and it would be half as efficient as if all 10 of us were working together as one unit. So this Food Project has definitely forced me to really be open-minded to other people's ideas and really create space for other people to take on bigger roles and allow myself to sit in the backseat and just learn.
Speaker 6 (11:33): Yeah, I also agree the Food Project has impacted me to realize that if you reach out and look for programs like the Food Project, you'll see that the support that they have and resources that they have to different information is really important for your own personal knowledge and personal self growth by having these discussions and these important social discussions with everyone.
Speaker 5 (12:01): For me, the Food Project has really grown me as a person. I used to be pretty shy, not really outgoing, but now I feel a lot more outspoken, more confident in myself and that really has impacted me as I've just become a better version of myself.
Speaker 4 (12:19): To add onto what he's saying, I think that's a general feeling with the Food Project. I know a lot of the members that couldn't make it today also and myself also feel that the Food Project has allowed us to feel confident, but also we're kind of still ourselves, so maybe our personalities haven't changed, but we're still more confident with who we are and we're more able to express ourselves.
Speaker 2 (12:46): Yeah, I mean I definitely agree with that. Even talking about just confidence and interacting with people that we've never met before. Something that we practice in this job is just bringing our own stories, our own authentic experiences to the farm and people coming to the farm. We're all looking for, as visitors, there's people who come looking for skills or looking for resources in agriculture, but oftentimes we will have discussions that are very meaningful on high stakes issues like politics like today. Even we had among ourselves, we had a current events discussion where we talked about very difficult issues, but we talked about them through our own experience. We related to them to things we learned about in school, things we talk about with our friends and family. And I think one thing I really appreciate about the Food Project is that these conversations really just come out very naturally during farm work or during workshops because that's the culture of the Food Project.
We know that politics isn't something that you can just put down sometimes. Sometimes you could open it, but something that we are constantly walking in, we swim in it, we breathe it in every day. Politics affects us, it affects the job that we work in, so therefore we have a right to talk about it honestly and talk about it as something that we have the right to put our input in and be change makers in. So I think when I was younger I didn't always feel like I was able to talk about those things openly. I was very shy when I was coming into the Seed Crew, but through facilitation skills, through workshops, through different things that have trained me to just speak with more comfort and with more thinking and reflecting on my personal values, I think the Food Project has really my ability to come into a space and claim it as something that I can contribute to on a collective level and get other people involved in. Next question for y'all is what issues around the food system are most important to you? What gives you passion and excitement for doing this work?
Speaker 5 (15:13): Well, I guess one of the biggest issues in our current food system is just food inequality. There's food deserts where people aren't getting enough food even and other places people are getting tons of food and there's a lot of waste in that and that doesn't sit right with me that we make enough food, but not everyone gets enough food. And so here at the Food Project we are trying to increase food accessibility and get that food distributed to more people who can access these healthy foods who normally wouldn't. And so I'm very passionate in working for that.
Speaker 6 (15:53): I agree. And kind of going back to what W’s saying, how we get to better ourselves or better, the issue is through having seedling sales or having our farmer's markets and working at those farmer's markets and seeing the progress of people getting involved in buying these vegetables is very important to see how we can better those issues and these systems and working actively towards it.
Speaker 3 (16:25):I think just the unsustainability of the food system is posing a real threat to the environment and the community, whether it's in the livestock or the agriculture sector. I think it creates a lot of challenges for consumers because of the fear of not knowing where their food is coming from and the environment and how it's very destructive of how commercial agriculture is very destructive. I think being at the Food Project is really exciting and connecting with me because I'm able to teach the community how to farm sustainably and be able to make a difference in the environment.
Speaker 4 (17:37): I know we've talked about food deserts and why those are a problem, but if we kind of shift the lens a little bit and look at the lens through nutrition and why food deserts are really, people aren't getting the nutrition that they need to just do everyday things, and this is leading to a lot of health affects, diabetes, and it's also when kids don't get enough to eat or don't get the right nutrition, it really affects their learning. So I think very almost, it seems almost simple, a very simple solution where it's not a very simple solution but a very simple problem. It creates a very difficult problem down the road. And I think that a lot of the times, especially America and with the way it works, we tend to try to address problems with, we try to address the big problems instead of going to the roots and trying to address them at the roots. And so I think that the food systems and inequities in the food systems is a great example of how American healthcare is so built out, but we kind of forget, we kind of forget and don't look at the food systems that are kind of causing these problems.
Speaker 2 (18:51): Yeah, I think learning about food systems through a very direct way has been very impactful for me because just learning about the phrasing and the actual vocabulary behind these issues has led me to identify problems in my own life, in my own community, in my own upbringing, to where I could identify food insecurity as something that I faced when I was younger and think about how that was a product of systemic issues affecting me in different intersections of my life and my identity and also the people that were surrounding me and thinking about the economics behind it. I think something that we talk about a lot, which we'll get into for the next question, is learning about the history of food systems advocacy in this city and thinking about how things like the Diaz Sunnai Land Trust has fought against big corporations of fast food companies being in communities like Dudley Nubian, because oftentimes in the inner cities we'll have abundant fast food restaurants for the cheap that are both producing a lot of waste, but also causing a lot of health issues in our community since there will be oftentimes more available fast foods than any sort of nutritious foods.
And yeah, we'll get into that a little bit more, but can y'all speak to the intersections of social justice and food systems policies, maybe more so related to how that has manifested itself in this community that we work in.
Speaker 4 (20:47): And Dudley where we're right now. That's the obvious part right now. There's a really long history of people fighting together and social justice efforts in order to change the food systems and to be more equal. And essentially a lot of what they were fighting for is big corporations that were exploiting the people here and exploiting the land here. And so that's one example of how social justice and food systems have come out at the crossroads.
Speaker 2 (21:22): Yeah, I think reflecting on the history of food inequity in this particular neighborhood has shown us a lot about just intersections of different social movements and different economic downturns throughout history, how they're all related. We see a big pattern of things that we can observe from a plain perspective. Just walking down the street, you see a lot of places, yards in this neighborhood that are on raised ground or you see people growing out of raised beds and you can just walk by and maybe say, oh, that's interesting. But when you really learn about the history of it, you learn that that's the result of people burning down their houses during white flight during the seventies in order to maintain their money during the recession, to get out of renting in black neighborhoods. And then creating issues like lead contamination in the soil, which to speak to actually the learning that we get from the community as people who are resilient practitioners of urban agriculture and sustainable agriculture. We've learned from people like Anario how to farm from raised beds and not get lead contaminants in our food and further contributing to health issues in the community. We've learned about traditional indigenous practices like three sisters, agriculture, corn bean and squash, things like that. Could y'all tell me what advice you would give to other students and young people regarding how they make change in their communities?
Speaker 5 (23:17): Well, I guess I would say that just starting, getting involved, just getting out there, first of all to just maybe speaking to adults and to organize change, get an adult to lead in some clubs and stuff, I'd say.
Speaker 6 (23:45): Yeah, as well as being able to stay connected within all these social justice issues and reaching out to the food project, reaching out to other resources. I recommend using your voice, using the knowledge that you have and contributing it to your community and people around you as well as school or your work, your own personal work, being vocal about your opinion and being vocal about your own personal experiences. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:25): Yeah. I think just to reiterate what Danny said, biggest thing is use your voice, understand that what you have to say is important and there's definitely people out there that will listen and should be listening. So
Speaker 3 (24:39): Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:39): Really be using your voice and really be active.
Speaker 3 (24:42): Yeah, I also agree. I think using your voice is very powerful. I don't think enough youth recognize how powerful their voice is and just that's in general for everyone. But I also think what Danny said, sharing personal stories is really important and grouping up with other community members can be a very powerful tool for social change.
Speaker 6 (25:13): And something that the Food Project did recently was a community panel with people who are involved with the food project and having resources like that and being able to take those opportunities and ask questions and involve yourself with these people could be really important for your future and for other people's future as well.
Speaker 2 (25:37): Also, I think that the community of Dudley is very tight knit and I think that all of the history that we discussed both in the podcast, but all the history that pertains to the founding of the Food Project is very, very close to us. I think that historical textbook, so to speak, is wide open because those community members that began as just disgruntled residents who organized and created organizations like DSNI and then subsequently the Food Project are people who, they're everyday people, they're community members just like us who saw issues that they wanted to fix and then set off to do something about it. And so that really inspires us every day and it reminds us that the work that we do is not just part of a job, but part of a larger movement of youth, people of color, people coming from marginalized backgrounds economically who want to see better of their city and want better for their children.
So we are the children of those people and we are the youth of these communities as well as other communities who are coming together to learn more about how we can organize what it looks like to really put your voice up in a meaningful place by working with like-minded people and oftentimes people who have very different perspectives from you. But all of these things are sort of folded and integrated into our efforts so that we can have a tapestry of people who come together to create this change because that table should be always moving. It should always take different shapes. There should always be different chairs, different people meeting at this table. And the Food Project has really expanded our ideas of where that table can sit. Maybe we don't even need that table. We are talking in a circle right now. No table at all. So everybody's welcome. And then I would like to ask y'all, what advice would you pose to adults who want to help youth become leaders?
Speaker 4 (28:02): I think a really important part of letting youth be leaders is kind of letting them grow and make their own mistakes. So that means taking a step back if you're an adult and maybe even trying to learn something yourself from the youth, I think that's a really good way to let them be leaders and let them take over bigger roles.
Speaker 5 (28:22): I also like to say get to know your youth better. You want to build a personal connection with 'em to really understand 'em and 'em make mistakes, let us learn from our mistakes and just be there to support us and adults like that can really help foster youth.
Speaker 6 (28:46): Being a supporter to the youth to become leaders as well as being kind of a mentor for them is really important for their future and their personal selves as well as staying connected to what they're being involved in. For example, for example, the seedling sale that was happening recently, the food project was a part of, I was seeing a lot of people come in that had children be involved in the Food Project and Seed Crew when they were youths and seeing them continue to come visit the Food Project and purchasing their crops was something inspiring and something that other adults could do to support their children or people that are youth to continue becoming leaders and continue to do what they do.
Speaker 3 (29:45): Yeah, I think what many others said, adults should be very supportive of youth and at the Food project we have a guide to help youth lead certain events. It's like I do, you watch and I do. You try and you do. I watch. And it is just a framework for how adults can help youth in, or it's a framework for how adults can facilitate a process for youth and to ensure everyone understands.
Speaker 2 (30:36): I think my earliest memory at the Food Project was when I was in third grade at the Mason Elementary School in Dudley, and I came to visit the kitchen and the greenhouse and I learned about germination and then they were like, okay, cool. Now you see the steps. Just wet the napkin, put the seed in it. Now you can practice germination. And I saw how simple it was and I realized how simple it is to grow a plant. And I also learned how to cook with local, locally grown produce. And that was the first time I was ever allowed to cook by myself in the kitchen, or not by myself, but with guidance, but giving me the keys again to do that for myself. And that made me very open to hands-on learning. It made me feel like I was able to do something for my own, right, because when you have adults who are excited to allow youth to do things and lead things on their own after, of course getting the instructions, that's a really exciting thing for the youth.
Young people want to lead and they want to lead the charge and lead these conversations so long as people, adults are allowing them to shine that way. Something that we talk about, or an allegory that I like to talk about in leading from the back is being a trellis, which means providing structure for somebody to grow up with, not necessarily putting shade onto somebody to make sure that that's hindering their growth or a structure that's blocking the sun from the plants, but something that the plants can climb up. So I really appreciated both being that seed that grows up to trellis and then learning from the adults in my life to then become an adult who is allowing youth to grow from hands-on learning and agentive decision making, learning. Yeah. And then I wanted to ask y'all if there's anything else that you've learned or something that you've practiced through this job that you want to talk about that wasn't necessarily asked in the questions?
Speaker 4 (33:02): Something I just want to talk about– I feel like we've touched upon this, but I really want give it some space– The Food Project has been around for 30 years and just kind of, I should take a second to admire how wide the web of connections spreads. I'll give a few examples. One example is another member who was part of Dirt Crew, he was telling me about how his bus driver saw his TFP shirt, his Food Project straight and was like, “Oh my God, I was in that program all the way back in high school”, which is kind of a crazy coincidence, but it is an example of how far and how wide the Food Project stretches and just how successful its mission and integrating with the community and building up the community has been. I think that's something that I really admire about the Food Project and I've come to kind of love about Dudley in general is really that community feeling and that kind of, everyone's kind of trying to help everyone else out.
Speaker 6 (34:02): I completely agree. I've never really spent time in Dorchester or Dudley, apart from the Food Project and really getting to spend my time here, I've gotten to see how big of a community there is and how people are involved with each other every day. And even driving by the streets, you'll see people active outside, walking, interacting with each other, and it's really just a different set scene from someone else's everyday life.
Speaker 2 (34:34): Even today, we were just doing farm work, scooping compost into wheelbarrows, and we heard drumming from around the corner, and I got really curious because I really liked drumming, and we went over and we saw a group of community members performing. There was a performer, there was free food, so that just attracted a bunch of people, not only farmers in that gardening space to come through, but just anybody who heard the drumming or smelled the food and want to come by. And I love those opportunities because it attracts all sorts of people of different age groups and backgrounds, and there's a lot of opportunities for people to exchange knowledge. And I learned a lot about different people's experiences, and I made a lot of connections, which I think will definitely enrich the food projects experience during the summer when we're able to meet with those people and then do those learning exchanges. So I really just appreciate that open format because the Food Project is built from community, people getting together to solve the issue, and it has continued and really flowered and flourished because people are expanding our definitions of how we can attack those issues and how we can educate the youth more, educate the community more, and then also set up those youth as educators of the community and then see how we can learn from the community as well, because it is just an ongoing conversation.
And yeah. Any final thoughts for you? Are we feeling good?
Speaker 6 (36:26): Feeling good. I feel like this was a good podcast. I felt like I could open up and talk about the Food Project in a positive way.
Speaker 4 (36:33): Thank you to any listeners out there.
Speaker 2 (36:34): Agreed. Yeah. Thank y'all so much. We're going to give a final thank you and then we'll be out. Thank you!
This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to:
northeastfarmtoschool.org.