 Welcome to the Valley Advocate Podcast, featuring interviews that take us deeper into the people and happenings on the local scene. For more podcasts and a closer look at what's going on in the valley, visit us at valleyadvocate.com. Hi, my name is Dave Eisenstetter. I'm the editor of the Valley Advocate. Welcome to the Valley Advocate Podcast, a collaboration with Amherst Media. I'm here with Arts and Culture Editor Gina Beavers. Yes, and we are here with Liz Ogilvy, who is the president of the Springfield Food Policy Council. Chair of the Steering Committee of the Springfield Food Policy Council. President of the world and the gardening in the community as well. I'm actually the president of the leaders of the free world. And you got that shirt to show them. This is a real organization, which I am not affiliated with, but I love it. Close enough. I was so close. And I also chair the board of Gardening the Community. Yes, which is a really amazing youth development, urban farming organization in Springfield. I know a little bit about this work and it's so awesome that this even exists in the world. Could you talk a little bit about working with the kids like you do, showing them gardening and stuff and how you got that developed so it was like a real... So I did not start Gardening the Community. The young woman who started this organization, her name is Ruby Maddox. This is our new project, but she started Gardening the Community like 20 years ago and she was a baby herself. With no major vision, just sort of as a reaction to the fact that she wanted kids to learn how to grow food. And I live in Mason Square. I've talked about this. People who know me have heard me say there are 10 McDonald's, they've heard me say this within a mile and three-quarter of my house, and very little access to fresh produce. And Gardening the Community was really the front end of urban agriculture in Springfield, which is not a new thing. Anybody of a particular age can talk about their grandmothers having gardens. But now there's a lot of intentionality attached to it because we can't get access to food in the way that folks up here in the upper valley, the upper happy valley have access to. So at Gardening the Community we develop young people to do everything from soil testing to amending and working the soil to planting the seeds, growing the food, harvesting the food. We sell it through a couple of different mediums. We have a CSA, a community share of agriculture, and so we have families who make a commitment and they're across the sliding scale. Most of them are lower income folks who use their SNAP benefits to buy a fresh share of organic produce. I mean, that's really important because we have so little sources for it in Springfield. And for us it's not really, I don't want to diminish people who live up here because I have a number of friends in the upper valley, but it's not an intellectual pursuit. We have kids who have been diagnosed with all sorts of the DDDs and the ADDs and they're curling between pesticides and the pesticides that are being used to even bring the food to harvest, like Roundup. Farmers are spraying their wheat with Roundup and we wonder why kids are sick. And so we sell to our CSA, we sell through, GTC has their own farm stands and we recently purchased some land so we will have a permanent farm stand that's sort of a mini Atkins farm that I'm incredibly proud of. That's new, that's brand new. The farm stand will open this spring on this land. Oh, that's so cool. Is there a date certain? There is not a date certain. It is construction. We will be there and it may not be in its completely finished state because we're still raising money. We have about $52,000 we need to raise, but we intend to open. The community has been waiting for a very long time. There's a lot of physical development happening in Springfield, not so much happening in our neighborhoods. And when it is happening it's dollar stores. And so people have really glopped onto this. And folks who live in other neighborhoods in Springfield who drive through Mason Square, I get text messages. When is it opening? I'm tired of driving up the hill for my food. It's a pretty amazing thing that we've built. And these young people are growing up, the young people that recruited me to Gardening the Community. I was just a mom with a new baby sitting in my house wondering if coming back to Springfield is the right move. And because I had this baby and I had visions of making my own baby food and I couldn't buy an apple in my neighborhood. Never mind anything else that was fresh. And they were just taking a survey. This was eight years ago asking me where did I buy my food and what did I think about the fact that we didn't have access to food. I was an organizer and I'd come here from Chicago. Springfield is my home and all of a sudden I thought there is stuff happening here. You know, all these many years later, you know, I'm chair of the board and we own land and GTC has been this doorway that I've walked into the food system world. Urban Ag is just one small piece of it. Actually, it's one grand piece of it. But when you think about the whole food system, its production, its school food, its grocery stores and Springfield had real deficits in all of those areas so I've been chewing on them if you will for the last several years and we are making progress in some areas. So what's one of the greatest accomplishments I know? School food I'm really excited about. And it's not my greatest accomplishment. This has really been an amazing thing that our city has done together from parents, school nurses, the Sodexo who was sort of the empire. You know, one of those empires amongst food service has shown up. And that's the school lunch provider? That's the school lunch provider and Springfield public schools have made incredible investment and an incredible commitment to our kids. For low income families school food is core food for them. You know, it's two meals a day. And when I talk about Hampton County has the lowest county health rankings in the entire state. So in Massachusetts the top 50% are doing really well. The other half of us are not doing so well. Springfield has the highest obesity, the highest childhood obesity rates, the highest hypertension rates. These are things that kill people and they're preventable because they're food related. And you know, I think when we met and talked about the grocery store, Dave, I talked about the fact that I grew up thinking that I was predestined to have high blood pressure and cardiac disease because it was black. Because you hear that. You hear that? But it's not because I'm black, it's because of the condition of the neighborhood I live in. And so for people of color, African Americans, Latinos, and you know, I'm remiss, I generally will not talk about food without talking about race. And you can't talk about food without talking about land. So I need to acknowledge that we're like sitting on land that was another people's land. And no disrespect intended, but you know, North Hampton was not always North Hampton. There were people, the Nanatuck people were here for thousands of years before the pioneers, if you will. And then, you know, I'm a descendant of stolen people. And so the conditions that we're experiencing in Springfield are the result of being born out of a broken system. You know, human agriculture, I mean, well, it's not human agriculture, but agriculture is based on the idea of free labor and cheap labor. And we still have that kind of production system. There are people living in Springfield who work on these organic farms up in the valley and they can't afford to buy the food. To buy the food that their kids. And that leads to all the disease stuff I was talking about. So GTC, as it's grown over the years, you know, initially it was teach kids about the soil, teach them about growing, and you can begin to talk to them about healthy food. And now it's the heart of the urban ag movement in Springfield. For me, coming in through that door, I didn't for years grow anything when I worked at GTC, and I was starting to feel pretty inauthentic about it. I did a lot of hard work, but I wasn't touching the soil, because black folks have a very ambivalent relationship, you know. But I've come to understand that my trauma happened on the soil, not in the soil. And in the soil there can be great healing. But the journey to that, I started volunteering in the school garden because it was a great way to learn how to grow without adding myself to the GTC kids who were teenagers who had been knowing me for years and assumed I knew everything about growing. And that broke me wide open because little kids, you know, I met little kids who had never had a cherry tomato. And I have an eight-year-old. And I was spending a lot of time in schools looking at the food, and it was deplorable. So I started to try to figure out why, and I started working with Sodexo and Springfield Public Schools, and they were responsive. And so three or four years later, we have a salad bar in every single school after the point of sale, which means every kid gets to eat as much salad as they want. Kids get a fresh produce snack, fruit and or vegetables twice a week. Our biggest accomplishment has been breakfast in the classroom after the bell, which means every single kid has breakfast in the morning. You can't be too late for that. And our city fell under community eligibility provision, which, you know, was hard for the city to go after because it told the story of poverty at the same time that we were trying to sell a story of resurgence around the casino. But they understood that getting that kind of eligibility reduced barriers around free lunch and free breakfast, like the paperwork is daunting, like every other piece of paperwork that poor people have to go through to get access to things that everybody should have, like every kid should have breakfast in the morning. There's no way you can expect them to have a good day at school and perform well if they're hungry. And Sodexo now gets it and Springfield Public Schools gets it. When we have snow days, I have talked to the food service director after we had those crazy weeks of cold. Then we had that snow and we had a snow day on a Thursday and I was talking to him on Thursday morning and he said, these kids aren't going to eat today. And then we had, and I knew that because we had had days and days of cold and we have a lot of old houses in Springfield. People have oil furnaces and you run out of oil and you have to make a choice. Do I buy food or do I keep them warm? And you can lose your kids if you lose your heat. DCF comes to your house and you don't have heat, they don't help you pay your bill, they take your children. So families make those kinds of decisions and, you know, the food service director is saying, how to get food kids, food to kids on snow days because we had another snow day on that Friday, which meant there might be kids who hadn't had a meal until they came back to school on Monday. The only reason I agreed to do this podcast is because I want people in the upper valley to think about that when they put their kids to bed at night. I want them to imagine what it would be like to make a decision, do I buy rice because it's filling, even though my kid is asking me for a clementine or asking me for a salad because I've taught them in the school gardens that that's what they should eat and that's what's good for them. But if you've got a stretch and it's winter and heating costs have been higher this season and not everybody gets fuel assistance and when you get it, it's not enough. So families are forced to compromise and make these choices. And I mean, I didn't grow up with anything, so I knew that. But my husband's a teacher. I have a little bit more privilege than most of my neighbors. And as I started to cobble all this together, I began to see that GTC is magnificent as it is. It's just a drop in the bucket. So we've got to work on all this other food system stuff. So the school food has been, it keeps me warm at night knowing that during the week they're getting better food. I want better and I want more and the school district has made an increasing investment, the school district and the city and they're building a culinary nutrition center which will allow them to bake their own muffins. Not only will they continue to get breakfast as long as God forbid we don't have huge snap cuts out of the farm bill. Do you have a vision for your neighborhood, for the Mason Square neighborhood, for right now it's, you said, 10 McDonald's. I have a vision for Springfield. Because it's not just my neighborhood. I have a vision that the default will be fresh food. It won't be McDonald's. You know, I have the benefit of having worked at the Public Health Institute of Western Mass, formerly known as Partners for a Healthier Community. And I learned about health disparities there. I learned about how we can change long-term health outcomes and that really fired me up about school food. Because it was a place I could have, we could have immediate impact. It takes a long time to build a grocery store. It takes a long time to grow enough food to feed an entire city. But my vision is that we won't be two cities. We won't be downtown and then the rest is Springfield. My vision is that we will have department heads and our city government that live in our communities and so we're making planning decisions and someone is coming and saying, I want to develop this piece of property in Mason Square or the South End or the North End. The default isn't a family dollar. The default is a fresh produce stand. That was just an issue, right? With Mayor Sarno talking about, you know, I don't give a damn about skin color or something and how I think it was less than 20... He said I don't give a damn about race. The city council sent him a letter saying, why are all the... We're a majority people of color city. And it's hard to give numbers. I think the city council said 70%. My response to that is I think it's greater than that. Either that means the white people we have are all old and they're not... Or they're white people who are not sending their kids to public school. Because if you look at the school data, we look much more like we're 85% people of color. And yet with the exception of Health and Human Services, all of the department heads are white. And so this is not about, like, kick them out, but there have been some recent hires. So it's so layered, like I'm dug in on food but I also understand that if you don't see someone who looks like yourself in a job, you can't imagine yourself in that job. People in my family were not college educated. But when I was a little girl and we lived here, my mother would drive me up to Smith and Mount Holyoke and I'm going to cry because she was a young single mother at the time and point for the few... So this is the 60s, late 60s, early 70s and she would point out brown students on campus and say that could be you. So I got that fire in me. But, you know... And at that time we had a few teachers of color. We had a librarian in the Mason Square Library who was a black woman who also reinforced that and she would give me amazing books to read. But we're in a different place now. There are schools in Springfield that are, you know, 95% kids of color and their teachers are all white and some, like at my son's schools, are amazing teachers who drive from Cunnington and Conway because they want to teach in a diverse district. They know it's good for them. It's good for kids. And they live in Conway or Cunnington because they want to have chickens, not because they don't want to live next door to black people or Latinos. We unfortunately have people who are saying I care about the city and I want to be the chief of police. But they don't live here. And the message is how can you want to protect me? How can you want to keep me safe? But you don't want to be my neighbor. So if I get that as an adult, what does that say to children? Getting up, you know, whatever the department head is because some of them are very fine people so I don't want to pick on departments. And I don't want them to get fired so other people can get jobs. But when there are openings, be proactive because there are brilliant young people of Latino descent and Asian descent and African American, black, Caribbean, however we identify yourself who bring a richness to the work and because if you've grown up in the neighborhood, you're thinking about development in the neighborhood quite differently than when you drive by. When I started talking about fresh produce and oftentimes even with GTC people will say oh well Puerto Ricans don't eat salad or I had a white garden teacher ask me once how are we going to get the kids to eat collards. And I said do you mean collard greens? And she said yes. And she said my kids won't eat collards and I said if you're saying like that they probably don't know what you're talking about. And I said I'm not going to eat collards. Like they came from the south. Black people have eaten collard greens their whole lives. Maybe we need to present them in a way that is familiar, maybe slightly healthier than the three days of cooking that some people in my family put them through with lots of salt pork but still in a way that tastes good. I'm just being real. But the idea that we don't want produce when like who do people think taught people how to grow all of this stuff. We talk about you know some of us do not everybody but the fact that our economy was built on slavery the trade of people and agriculture. And people will say it's built on the labor of black people and built on the blacks of black people but it wasn't just that my married name is Ogilvy my maiden name was Will's. Those were plantations. My husband's father is Jamaican and my dad's people came off of a plantation owned by an English person. Do you really think they knew how to grow stuff in the heat? So the Africans who were stolen and brought here you know it was our brain trust it wasn't just our sheer labor so of course we I'm rich in the idea of vegetables when I was in college my grandmother in Alabama my father's mother would send me canned stuff and I'd be like Nana because you have 52 dollars to send me these green beans I appreciate it but she wanted me to eat well so we have so many things we need to talk about and help people to understand and there are amazing people across the valley many of them who are white who are saying these same things and working with us but it's also important for folks to understand people in Springfield regardless of race are not waiting to be saved we're doing it and we're not going to like the black women in Alabama we're not just saving ourselves those black women saved that state and saved all the rest of us from our friend Roy friend Roy Moore yes and we're all very grateful but you know it didn't surprise me black women have been holding up the world forever Gina and I were talking about Black Panther opening and you know it really is well of course not an opening night I mean it's a visually amazing right we don't get to see ourselves depicted as people running something depicted as people with wealth depicted as people with love for each other and love for their land and love you know even for other people's lands and so my husband is a huge comic book fan he was a comic book kid right but it's clearly so much more than that I've been listening to the interviews and you know it's a great opportunity for teachers and parents to talk to their kids about media representation of people of color because we don't get to see ourselves in that way and but I was talking to someone about taking some kids and this person said oh well we have superheroes in this work all the time and I know I am I'm one like and there are many in my community everyday people the people who choose to take a risk and make an investment poor people decide I'm going to spend this by produce because it's good for me but I also believe in gardening the community or when Liz says go with me to the state house so we can advocate for breakfast in the classroom you know English might not be my first language but I'm going because I want my kids and I want every other kid in this school to have access to good food and so I could go on for like two days I mean thank you so much for your work so if people want to make a difference if we want to be superheroes you can start in a couple of places so we have to build muscle for this work right I talk about yoga when I'm talking to people in big settings about how talking about race is difficult and we have to build our muscles for it but everybody up here does yoga and yoga is you know like I'm often times talking to mostly white women because I don't know why it's harder for men to come and dig in in these places because it's painful and men have to build the muscle a little longer no not you you're very present but um so we've got to build a muscle for talking about it but we've got to think about our purchases when you're going into river valley and I shop there sometimes I can't buy very much I always come out with very small bags but don't buy driscoll strawberries berries are picked by hand and a corporation is intent upon getting the most berries to market so you have berry farms in California my eight year old knows we should not be eating berries right now because they're coming on a truck from far away and probably the conditions of the people who picked those berries are not good. I've seen videos of berry farms in California where I lived so I know what the wildfires are like you can see the smoke in the background and the farm workers have bandanas tied on their faces to prevent smoke inhalation and they're still picking berries anybody seeing this a berry in the day before got some berries in their fridge you know you spent money on them don't buy anymore get used to buying strawberries from farmers here who need to sell every berry they have and pay what they're worth and know even when you're paying what those berries cost that difference is not getting to the farm worker so that's a small thing and then when you want to take a bigger leap look at the people who are picking who are growing the food here and be aware that they're probably not eating the food that they're growing and if you have been silent on the DACA conversation or the Dreamer conversation get unsilent I went to school in Boston for grad school I worked as a nanny most of my friends were Irish nannies most of them had come on visitors visas and they just never left and a few I'm still in touch with and their husbands are fire chiefs or they own construction companies and they were nice young Irish boys who also came on visitors visas and nobody is asking them if they're legal and documented so I am challenging every person of European descent to ask a question about how you came to be here and if it was pre the 20s when immigration law was put in place by men with white skin ask yourself if it's fair that we're now having this conversation and having it in an unjust and inhumane way that's way at one end in the middle you can support the work of people I don't get paid you know our staff at Gardening the Community does but not enough people need to be paid a living wage to do really hard work so support organizations like Gardening the Community support farms like Next Barn Over that supports Gardening the Community pay attention to the farms that are listed at River Valley or whatever find out about their practices find out if they're paying living wages to their employees support the Springfield Food Policy Council come to events be thoughtful about where you write your checks to at the end of the year or the middle of the year or the beginning of the year when you're making donations or go volunteer start asking questions at your kids school when they coming home and talking about a history segment and find out are you teaching kids about who used to be here do we even know and the other thing is are indigenous people living here right now are they identified do they get asked to children get asked if they have so there's lots of places that people can dig in and and anybody can call me up I'm easy to find yeah I will have that I'll call you guys don't get my number out but anything is you know so I'm like one person but there are lots of us all over Springfield all over Holyoke all over the Valley and it's not just people of color who are hungry my friends up in the hill towns it was mind-boggling to me that little white kids who live in rural towns they don't have access to grocery store anymore than we do and they don't have a bus to get there so I've got friends in Orange and Athol who there's a woman Deb Habib and the name of her organization is escaping me but I don't care where you live in the Valley you can find a place where people do not have equal access to food and you can do something about it thank you so much for coming really appreciate it thanks for listening and don't forget to visit us at valleyadvocate.com