Understanding Community Organizing Through Farming
By Maya Robnett
Earlier in the semester I organized a volunteer group from Penn to go help out at Urban Tree Connection in West Philadelphia. Urban Tree Connection is a non-profit that creates locally produced food made for and by the people of the Haddington neighborhood community.
This organization was created as a reaction to the growing number of vacant lots in Haddington. They decided to transform these lots into green spaces that are productive for the community. The food is distributed at farmers markets lead by community members to targets areas that don’t have access to fresh and healthy produce.
One of the many beautiful parts of this organization is that they provide educational opportunities. They have healthy cooking classes for adults, and they have a youth apprenticeship program. In the youth apprenticeship program they mentor high school students and teach them to sustainably grow food to give back to their community, along with giving the students a historical context for why current food inequalities exist. The goal of this program is to “cultivate youth’s sense of agency and leadership development towards addressing community needs.”
The efforts made by Urban Tree Connection are integrally tied to the community organizing strategies that we have discussed in this class. The success of Urban Tree Connection is based on the fact that they are making change that is driven from within. This creates a system of strength and interconnectedness within the community that allows these sustainable practices to be retained in Haddington.
Our experience at Urban Tree Connection began with us gathering a circle with the farm leaders and participating in a moment of silence. This helped me feel more present in the space and made me more mindful about the work I was going to be doing that day. The coordinators then gave us a run-down of what Urban Tree Connection was and how they operate. Before even getting started with our work I could already feel warm and welcoming energies from every person working on the farm. Finally, we split up into groups to help with different tasks across the farm. I helped with mulching, weeding, and moving supplies. All of us worked alongside and learned from middle and high school students who had been helping out with gardening on the farm for years. It was clear to me that every person on the farm deeply cared about giving back to the community.
One moment that was really memorable to me was when me and three other girls were assigned to relocating a pile of bags filled with soil. We were already sweating and tired, and at the beginning it felt like there was no way we would be able to move all of the soil. Working together with my group, we had figured out an assembly line set-up that made the work go a lot faster. As time went on other people came to help us, and before we knew it all of the bags of soil had been moved. This served as an important reminder of how much more work can get done when there’s more people involved. This concept of community solidarity in order to increase productivity is something that we have discussed in class when talking about community organizing in activism. Seeing how much work we were able to do together that day on the farm illustrated to me the importance of community building in creating a movement.
Urban Tree Connection is an incredible organization that invites you into the space as if you are apart of the family. This organization serves as a model for how a community can create sustainable practices from within. I am so grateful to have gotten the opportunity to contribute to their mission, and I encourage anyone reading this to follow the links below to hear more about their work.