 Hi. Welcome. I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the African American Center here on the third floor of the main library. On behalf of the San Francisco Public Library and our partners at the Museum of the African Diaspora, we are excited to welcome Bryant Terry in conversation with Bay Area Black Owned Farms, the 280 Project Acta Nonverba and Dragonspunk to discuss their agricultural journey, community well-being and food justice in the Bay Area. We've admired Bryant Terry and the chef-in-residence program at Moad for years. So this is truly a treat to welcome you all to the library today. I have a few quick announcements and then we'll be on with our show. So we are broadcasting from the area now known as San Francisco, which is the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytushaloni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytushaloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working and learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytush community. We also have an ancestral acknowledgement adapted from the African American Reparations Advisory Committee. We also honor the gifts, resilience, and sacrifices of our Black ancestors who toiled the land, built the institutions that established this nation's wealth and freedom, and survived anti-Black racism despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. We acknowledge this exploitation of not only labor but of our humanity and through this process are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. Because of their work, we are here and will invest in the descendants of their legacy. So summer is here for many of us and here at the library that means summer stride, our annual All Ages Learning, Reading, and Exploration program at the library. Visit any of our locations to pick up a tracker or sign up online to log your 20 hours of activity and earn a free tote bag. There is so much going on during summer stride, including a free book giveaway for youth and a grand prize raffle drawing at all our locations at the end of the program. Visit sfpl.org to see our fantastic lineup of all our programs, reading lists, and much more. For those folks in person with us today, sign up today and explore the rest of the main library has to offer. Mr. Terry's books are on the fourth floor here and will also be on sale after the discussion today. And now, here to tell us more about the chef-in-residence program and introduce our featured guest is Nia McAllister, Senior Public Programs Manager at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Nia? Thank you so much, Shana, for that introduction and for grounding us in this space. Thank you all for being here. Moad is thrilled to be co-presenting this program along with the San Francisco Public Library. We have been honored to have Chef Bryant Terry as our chef-in-residence since 2015. Through this program, Bryant has created public programming that celebrates the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture, and the African Diaspora. Through this partnership, Bryant has raised awareness for issues surrounding health, food, and farming by engaging local communities through programs that include artists, curators, chefs, farmers, scholars, and writers. I want to thank Kaiser Permanente for generously supporting this program throughout the years. It is now my honor to officially introduce Bryant Terry. Bryant Terry is a James Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of four-color books, an imprint of Penguin Random House and Ten Speeds Press. For the 2022-2023 academic year, Terry will be an artist fellow slash visiting scholar at UC Berkeley as a member of the second cohort of the Abolition Democracy Fellows. Since 2015, he has been the chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. His latest book, Black Food, Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. Welcome, Bryant. Can you check, too? Can you hear me? Okay, cool. Thank you for the kind introduction, Nia. I loved the Bay Area when the initial introduction was being made. I was like, damn, people in other parts of the country, if they hear out there, there'd be chaos in the audience right now. People's hatred exploding, land acknowledgement, acknowledging anti-Black racism. So thank you. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting this event. And I have to say that I am always excited to be in libraries. I think that these are such important spaces that we need to continue to invest in. It's a damn shame that now, you know, the role that libraries have traditionally played in terms of giving people space to work and build community. And I just hate that people feel like they need to go and spend like $7 on a disgusting coffee drink in order to get the type of services that we have here. So we need to ensure that our elected officials are making policies that allow for the continued funding and support of these type of spaces. Y'all feeling me on that? And I want to tell you a quick story about the importance of libraries in my own journey specifically around food. And it goes back to the mid-90s when I was in high school. And it starts with this hip-hop song that I would argue was a catalyst to be becoming a food justice activist. And when I say becoming a food justice activist, I mean being the most self-righteous, dogmatic, judgmental, just complete asshole because I had this new world view and thoughts about like food systems. But it started with this song called Beef. And it goes a little something like this. Beef, what a relief. When will this poisonous product cease? This is another public service announcement. You can believe it or you can doubt it. Let us begin now with the cow. The way that it gets to your plate and how. The cow doesn't grow fast enough for man. So through his greed, he creates a faster plan. He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker. Through the stress, the cow gets sicker. 21 different drugs are pumped into the cow in one big lump. And just before it dies, it cries in a slaughterhouse full of germs and flies. And I'll stop because it gets a little more graphic. But I heard this song in high school. The name of the song is Beef by the Seminole hip hop crew Boogie Down Productions from the Bronx. And I always talk about the power of art and culture and music and just thinking about the multiple intelligences people have in the different ways and people learn. It's one of the reasons that one of the signatures of my work is having a suggested soundtrack with every recipe in my cookbooks. And I often make film suggestions and documentaries and texts to help further ground us in and educate us about these important issues of our day. And so anyway, I heard this song, told my dad about it. And he agreed to buy the tape of this album, edutainment, because we listened to tapes in the mid 90s. And for the young people up here, tapes are these plastic receptacles with this. So I told my dad about the song and he agreed to give me the tape. If I would first go to the library and check out this book, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which was a novel written in the early 20th century about the meatpacking industry in the Midwest. And when I went to the library to check the book out, I met this librarian and she was interested, you know, checking this out for a class. And I told her, no, I had recently, you know, I'm a vegan. I heard this song and it really awoken me to the realities of our industrialized food system. And I developed this really powerful relationship with this librarian because she had been a vegan, starting in like the 80s, because she read this book, Died for a Small Planet by Francis Moore LePay, which was written in the 1970s. And it was an important relationship because she really helped me move beyond my kind of reactive, just, you know, wanting to yell and scream at people for not being vegans and damn it in the hell, even though I just turned to a vegan like three days ago. And she helped me understand like the deeper economic and the environmental and all the reasons beyond just, you know, whatever kind of like zeal that I had because of my love of animals and, you know, really wanting to push us all to have a more ethical relationship with nonhuman animals. So thank you to librarians. Thank you to libraries. And I'm very excited about this panel. So I, we put this panel together because we're leading up into Juneteenth, which will be happening soon. And I think when I think about this idea of, you know, this historical emancipation of African Americans, people of African descent, and really thinking about, well, in this contemporary context where people might often argue that even though we have been, you know, kind of legally granted this freedom in a post antebellum period, what does that mean? And are we really free? And when I think about freedom for me, especially given that one of the things that my paternal grandfather would often hammer into my head every time we were working at his urban farm in his backyard, he would often say that when you rely on other people to feed you, if they decide that they don't want to, you'll starve. And so I think this whole idea of stewarding the land for me is really goes back to these, for many Black liberation movements, you know, people have seen land as a cornerstone of freedom for Black folks. And so in this historical moment where over the past two years we've seen the further widening of the wealth gap, we've seen further concentration of wealth at the top. We've seen people being pushed further into the margins. Food insecurity has been rising exponentially. I think we should all be troubled by the fact that up to 80% of those dealing with hunger and food insecurity globally are people working in our food systems. These are people in the fields harvesting, planting and harvesting our food. These are people working in the front and the back of house in restaurants. Many of them don't know where their next meal is coming from. And we, there's so many reasons that we can articulate about why our industrialized food system is broken. Many people would argue it's actually working the way it's supposed to work. And it's not in the benefit of everyday eaters like you and me. It's mostly in the benefit of the five multinational corporations who largely control our food system. But I think that I like to focus on solutions. I like to focus on homegrown, locally driven and locally owned solutions. I always argue that the cornerstone of food justice activism is that it moves beyond advocacy and direct service and calls for organized responses that are owned and driven by people who are living and working in communities, not snow cap organizations, not people who feel like they have the best understanding of how to fix these problems because of, you know, some advanced degrees or whatever accolades. It's about people living in communities are aware of the problems. There are a lot of solutions that have been taking place, you know, well before the people on the stage. We all are standing on the shoulders of ancestors and activists who've come before us. And I think it's important for us to continue to ensure that we're shifting power and resources into the hands of communities so that they can most effectively create long term and sustainable solutions to food apartheid. So I'm going to introduce our panelists. And what I'm going to do is start by simply, you know, introducing the organization for whom they are or project with whom they're working. And then I'm going to allow them to kind of tell you a little bit more about their bio and their arc around working with food, you know, in the food space. So first of all, we have Marissa Johnson of Acta Nonverba. And Acta Nonverba is one of, I mean, I've been a supporter of them for a while, good friends with Kelly Carlisle, the Founder and Executive Director. And so I'll tell you a little bit about the work that they're doing. Acta Nonverba Youth Urban Farm elevates inner city life by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban organic farming. By offering Bible services and education, child care, economic empowerment and access to green safe spaces and healthy food, Acta Nonverba inspires East Oakland youth and families to focus on wellness, education and improving quality of life in their community. Acta Nonverba runs three urban farms, educational camps for 200 plus local youth and a community supported agricultural program. We give a big round of applause to Marissa Johnson. Next up, we have Christopher Renfrow of the 280 Project. The 280 Project was founded by Christopher Renfrow. And I'm going to butcher this last name. To increase equity and diversity within the wine industry and access to spaces occupied by it. The work began in Alameda Farms, a public park in San Francisco, originally dedicated to giving inner city individuals the space to practice urban community gardening. The 280 Project is dedicated to building a sustainable food and wine community that nourishes every member of the local economy and ecosystem. Can we give a round of applause for Christopher Renfrow? And lastly, we have Isaiah Powell of Dragotspun Grow. Dragotspun Grow has a mission, duty and purpose to apply the methodologies of environmental rehabilitation to meet the challenges of food insecurity, urban blight, environmental injustice, soil depletion, carbon footprint reduction, community building and plant and animal habitat restoration. Pick up to Isaiah. So we can do this popcorn style. We don't necessarily need to go in order. But the first question I'd like to put out here, well, I want to ask if each of you could briefly introduce yourself. And if you could share one of your most powerful food memories, this could be from childhood or this could be a recent memory, but I'll let you guys jump into it. You want me to go? Go for it. Let's see. Christopher Renfrow, I am originally from all over, but I moved here from Louisville, Kentucky about 16 years ago. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah, I moved to San Francisco to become like a product designer. And instead of that happening, I ended up being in the food space. I ended up working at Rambo Grocery, a couple of other different places. I went to school for horticulture in 2010. And it all felt like kind of just falling into the right place. And because of that, yeah, I am where I am. But yeah, my food memory that I can think of would probably be growing up with my family in Louisiana. My grandmother gave me this shirt when I was like 13 years old. It's a New Orleans school of cooking. But that memory would probably be being a young child in New Orleans at my family's house, everybody together. And then being like, Christopher, do the moonwalk, do the moonwalk, do the moonwalk. And seeing crawfish laid out on a giant table coming out of a trash can and potatoes and sausage and corn and the smell of chitlins and pig feet and collard greens and pressure cookers. My mom used to cook with a pressure cooker. It was super scary and dangerous. And I remember putting my hand over the steam hole and like just those kind of things. Like, and I would say the memory now though is like my four year old daughter and 12 year old daughter, but the four year old especially can walk around a farm here in San Francisco and eat safely without me having to watch her. And she knows how to like do a lot of stuff in the garden already. But I can like let her be free and she knows how to feed herself. Hello, everyone. My name is Marissa. I grew up in the Central Valley Fresno area, a city called Madeira. So I grew up surrounded by like agriculture, but big industrial ag always, you know, drive in town and you see grapevines everywhere and pomegranate fields and almond fields everywhere. And I've always had like a deep, deep love for the environment and for like community and my blackness and black people. And as I grew up, I was, you know, searching for ways to kind of bridge those things and found myself like exploring environmental justice in different ways. And found my way to act to nonverbal through another organization called Communities for a Better Environment. And we were doing a tour of East Oakland and they take, you know, supporters and people working with CVE on toxic tours. And so we did a toxic tour of East Oakland and saw all the different, you know, industry in our community and the foundry, that's like one of the biggest polluters in the city of Oakland, right in the middle of like this residential area in the middle of, you know, where my farm that I now work at, where our farm is. And yeah, that was like all, you know, all this surrounding like mess. And then there's the farm. And that was the first time I was introduced to ANV the first time that I actually met Kelly, our founder. And it was just really beautiful to see this black run farm, black founded, black woman founded farm in East Oakland for the people of East Oakland. And that just like, I mean, you know, just makes me want to put my hands over my heart to see that. And, you know, thinking also about like the legacy of the legacy and history of Oakland and how that continues through the farm and through like our neighbors and community is what continues to like drive me and feel very grateful and thankful to be here and to be with this organization. Yes. As she was just talking, I was thinking that's beef, you know, I'm saying because whereas we're going, we're going to talk, I'm sure this will come up the recurring theme, these neighborhoods, you know, that was going on there. I had family over there, you know, that grew up, that lived there. See Alzheimer's, you know, a lot of different things. That's beef because we live in Bayview. And you know, Bayview, I'll just throw radiation, you know what I'm saying, lead heavy metals and not Metallica. That's a joke. But I love Metallica. So my name's Isaiah. Okay. Here's a meta memory for you. Check this out. I remember 2014. That's two years after I left Columbia University. And I'm walking through Manhattan, hungry, actually, with no money in my pocket. And I was trying to devise a way of how could I survive? So I went up in a church, and I had some corn flakes and stuff, you know what I'm saying. But that memory brings me to the memory for this right here. So a few months ago, at the Boys and Girls Club in Bayview, Willie May's clubhouse, right? This kid, Brian, this kid is elementary. And you know, the elementary school kids, especially I don't have any experience teaching them like that. It's hard to get their attention focused on something like gardening, you know, if they didn't grow up with that. So this kid grew microgreens. He grew a whole tray of beets, and they look better than the beets that I grow. I grow microgreens, guys. So Stone's Town Farmers Market every Sunday, nine to one. And this kid grew microgreens. Why is that a powerful, that's a powerful food memory because of the potential this young kid now has a skill set that he could expand upon because that's an industry that has 11% growth. I mean, a billion in 2019, 28, they look at a 2.2 billion. Boom, that's a kid. So that's powerful. Yeah, so yeah. Cool. Thank you all. So backstage in the green room, we were talking about this reality and Marissa was touching on this as well as Isaiah. And I think we all can say a lot about the reality that typically communities that are suffering food apartheid, lack of access to healthy, fresh, affordable and culturally appropriate food tends to be one indicator of material deprivation in these communities. And so for me, it's always been how can we help people who are working doing food systems work understand the need to address health food and farming issues while keeping one eye on the many issues that these communities often suffer, right? So as was mentioned, typically a lot of many communities that are suffering food apartheid are also dealing with environmental racism, where you have industries that are in the communities or adjacent to them poisoning the air, the water, the soil. These are the same communities that typically have horribly underfunded and segregated public schools. These are the same communities that are dealing with crumbling infrastructure. These are the same communities that often have very little access to healthy green space for people to be physically active. And so I'd love for you all to kind of touch on just the material reality of people living in communities and how like food is one part of it. But I think the other piece is that, you know, often talk about this thread of black lead, this unacknowledged often erased black lead food and health activism throughout the 20th century. And it's important for me to recognize that because, you know, one of the things I was frustrated with when I started doing this work was the way in which so often the stories that are being told that people are being highlighted were often like, you know, young white, you know, hipsters living in urban gentrified neighborhoods. And so these kind of practices of, you know, canning and pickling and preserving or urban agriculture. So often, you know, these stories would be highlighted, or these, you know, people of privilege who are doing these practices would be highlighted at the expense of the, you know, people who've been living in these communities, whether they're like folks who've migrated from the south, or people who've come from different parts of the globe, these strangers from different shores coming here and bringing their food practices and growing their traditional, you know, herbs and vegetables and fruits. And so I guess I would love to hear how you all imagine this practice of urban agriculture, the work that you do as a form of a larger practice of black liberation and empowering communities and just how you think about that. Should I go again? So the space that I grow grapes on primarily, Alamany Farms, it's in San Francisco. And if anybody knows where it is, it's off the 280 freeway. It's a small housing community with mainly African American people, but some Asian, some Latin, but the part that's really wild about it when I see the space is that it's a free public park. It's a SF public park that has a farm on it, open all day long, 365 days a year. And the community that lives right next to it doesn't use the farm for the most part. You know what I mean? There are some black people that come on the property and do get greens, but it's very problematic when I see it. It's like what you're talking about the environmental racism. It's right next to a freeway where cars go 70 miles per hour all day long. It's very scary. These are children outside playing. These are fumes coming into the area. You know what I mean? This is also just sound constantly. It's never quiet. But there's no grocery store nearby. There's no grocery store. You have to walk at least a mile down that freeway to go get food. That food is at a corner store where cigarettes and liquor and all these other things are sold. But if you go up from Alameda farm, there's another community called Bernal Heights. And in Bernal Heights, they have good life grocery. They have restaurants. They have all this stuff that is catered towards having a good life. And when I see Alameda, I'm like, this is strategically done. You put these black people in the worst place next to a farm and everybody's like, well, why don't they use it? It's like, do they know how to use it? Do they feel invited? Do they feel safe being there? Because there are people of other nationalities that eat there every single day that I see constantly. So that's my question is like, why? Why are the young black people, why are the older black people not eating the free food from the farm? Because what I see is like, if they came there every night, they could fill up their pot, their little pan, whatever, take those foods home and cook them, breakfast, whatever. But what I've been noticing is that there are these systems in place, like you were saying, the hipsters, the nonprofit stuff, all these things that are going on that don't make people feel comfortable. They don't feel welcome. They don't feel like there's actual access to come in. When I talk to the youth, they don't like the way that the camp counselors or the farm workers talk to them. When you really dive into the history of the farm, it goes back to where that space has been there for 50 some years. There are people that are old that have been there that entire time. And they tell me the real stories. Whereas the farm people try and tell me the other stories of their perspective, but the black people are like, they stole it from us. My grandma used to farm this land before it was ever a farm and they stole it from us. There's a woman there named Alice Crothers who literally told me about how a man stole the password to the website of Alamedi Farm literally in the middle of the night and took her access away from controlling this site from having the black narrative. These types of things. So when that goes back into the community and people are telling each other, don't trust them. Don't trust them. And I see this, if this was in Dolores or Golden Gate Park, every white person would be there eating for free. Every person would be eating for free, nonstop. So it's really sad to see this being there, but being unsafe. So it's, it's almost like a waste of space, even though it's not like I'm there because I feel like I'm able to help bridge that gap, whether it be just a black face or someone that people can actually talk to. And I'm seeing change. I'm seeing youth that trust me. I'm seeing elders that trust me because once a month, I also do a thing called Feed the People Collective where we do actual farm to table. And a lot of people, if you've worked in the restaurant industry, that word gets said a lot, farm to table that phrase. And it means that you're working in community with your farms and it goes directly to the guests and the workers and all that stuff and everybody's in community. And that's not true for the most part. So at Alamedi, when I arrived there, I saw a farm. I saw a kitchen outside on the farm. I saw the projects right there, right after it. So I was like, you know what? If I can challenge all the chefs in the city to give up one day of their time out of the month, we can make this like a program that people can show how much they care about people. Because when I go into these fine dining spaces, most restaurants, you don't see people that look like me there. You know, when I worked in fine dining, I didn't see people that looked like me there, unless there were celebrities, musicians, basketball players, all this kind of stuff. So creating this program, most of the chefs didn't show up. So it's been me and my homegirl, Haley, a Filipina woman. And we've been using our skills that we learned to serve privileged people to serve our own community. So we take food from the farm, we cook it on those grills, and I walk it into the neighborhood just like a food runner at a restaurant and I knock on every single door. And I feel like that's how you do it. From that, I've met every single person in that community. There's active gang banging. There's all kinds of stuff, but I don't feel like unsafe. If anything, you know, these dudes that carry guns, they say hi to me. They tell me they love me, they appreciate me. And I feel like that's what we're talking about. Thank you. That's beautiful. So real quick, just a follow-up, you talked about the kind of door-to-door outreach. You talked about simply just the presence of Black people in these spaces. Do you have further best practices, ideas that you can share so that people who are hoping to make these spaces that often feel alienating for people of African descent, how do you make them feel more open, culturally relevant, something that, you know, people feel some pull factor towards? Do you have any things you could share? Yeah, yeah. So on Alameda Farm property specifically, like with what's happened, you know, I've been brought on to like kind of the board thing, but I don't live directly next to the farm. What they should be doing is having members from that community be on the board. Those members should be working at that farm getting paid. But beyond that, you know what I mean? There've been people working this farm for 15 years since it's been Alameda. There could be pictures of people that agree to have Black faces shown farming. Because I've been asked by young Black youth, and this is very honest and serious, they're like, what are you doing on this property? And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, that's slave shit. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, and they're like, they're like, bro, you're getting like dirty. You're doing slave stuff. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. I'm like, that's actually like opposite. This is your privilege. You live next to the most privileged park in the city. This is your backyard. You have two parks, you have this park, and then you have St. Mary's above you. So I think it's like that, that actual explanation of how powerful the land is, and how much it really means and how your kids can go outside and just get lost in nature. But even as an adult, you can go do yoga in the morning, you can do whatever you want, you know what I mean? Like, you can meditate. Once you pick fruit for free and you eat it and you find yourself not being hungry, it changes your mind. There were young Black women that came to one of our Feed the Peoples. And they literally were like asking for fruit that we were cutting up. And I was like, all right, why don't you go find fruit and pick it. And they're like, we couldn't find any fruit. I was like, wait, literally you couldn't find any fruit. And they're apples hanging from trees. And I literally just pointed up. And I was like, go grab an apple. And they went and grabbed apples. And I swear to God, I saw that click where they were like, now every time at this part of the year, I can grab apples. That kind of stuff, like just spreading information, but doing it in a nice way. Thank you. Yeah, what comes to mind for me is, like I mentioned our, you know, in East Oakland, we're in deep East Oakland, surrounded by industry, surrounded by, you know, these big polluting just industries, foundry, the freeway, the bar, it's like surround, it's like, you know, an enclave of all this mess in our community. And for me, the farm really is representative of like, our community is deserving of, you know, beautiful spaces of beautiful places, safe spaces, or black people for brown people to be outside, and to have access to fresh food. Most of the food that we grow goes directly to the community, you know, when we're open, it's like open for residents to come in and pick what they like, pick what they need. We're also very, you know, open to like, growing what the community wants. So we grow a lot of cultural foods, collard greens, bava beans, things that the community will recognize. And then another thing, you know, we also do like a lot of youth programming, and our farm has been running since 2010. It was founded in 2010 by Kelly. And, you know, something that one of my coworkers brought up is like, the farm is almost like a norm for a lot of the kids in the neighborhood. So a lot of the kids, you know, who've grown up see the farm and they're very comfortable with it. And they know it as just like, this is what, you know, my neighborhood is like, we have this farm that I can go to that I can come after school and in the summertime and hang out and go to, you know, the after school program and our camps. And it feels like a space that, you know, is for them. Yeah. So like, along with that, like because so many of our youth view, the farm is something that like is such a normalized thing. I see that, you know, I'm learning all the time from them as well. And they are very much like, yeah, thank you. Yeah, kind of looking to the youth is also like, that legacy, like I said, Oakland has such a beautiful legacy in history of organizing around food justice around access around, you know, food, getting food to the community. And I really see that through like the kids that we work with, you know, it's normalized for them now and they're, you know, taking on that, that legacy that is so much a part of their, their city and their community. And sharing that and also, you know, again, kind of going back to like the farm is like a space for the community to gather as a space for, you know, us to collaborate with other organizations and other just people in the community who are also about getting food out to people. Marissa, just a quick follow up question. I know that, you know, they're the obvious kind of tangible takeaways that many of the young people have, like they're experientially learning about the seed to table cycle, they're getting these skills that they could take into their adult lives. Can you talk about some of the benefits that you've seen outside of that, you know, I don't know, like skills that you feel like they're gaining or, you know, some kind of inner strength or pride or those type of things that these types of programs offer to the communities as well, specifically with young people. Yeah, I know we recently had like a bunch of field trips and, you know, some schools come to the farm and one of the visits that we had, there was a student in there who had been with us and was just so excited to share like just the different, you know, oh yeah, I know what compost is, I can share about the bees, I can share about like what food that is. And we had another one of our kids who was taking one of the, like a visitor, just like a volunteer around the farm for like a tour and just felt so empowered to be like this, you know, this space is like, I feel very comfortable in this space, I feel like I can take ownership of this space in a sense, like take people around and talk about it and share with people that knowledge that they've been able to cultivate through just being, you know, around us and around each other. And yeah, just kind of fostering that like sense of pride and like their community and like this is their, this is their farm too. Another one of our middle school aged kids, I had met their teacher because they were doing a field trip and the teacher wanted to meet with us before and see the space and she was like, yeah, he's so excited, like he's been talking about it all week, like, you know, that's his neighborhood, that's like where he's from, that's, you know, he's very familiar with the farm and so he was so excited to share that with, like, you know, his classmates, which I think is so awesome. Yes, I really think we have to really get at this point, get to the youth as quick as you possibly can. That's our philosophy because, you know, listening to Chris and Marissa, you know, what's evident is like since the early 1900s, over 20 million acres has 20 million acres have been, you could say, disappropriated, disinvested, taken, swindled, but black people after reconstruction lost 20 million acres. So in that process of doing that, people are divorced from the land mentally and physically. So then now in 2020, try to get a kid to get into gardening or something like that. It's going to be a challenge too, you know what I mean? I think at this point, people, black, brown, poor, white, I think it's safe to say there's just so much we can expect from the government or municipal organizations, just historically looking at what's happened, what happens. So you got to get with the kids early. I think we should set up small. Like this is a perfect example. This guy, I know this guy, you know, he's doing grapes. He has grapes where we steward land. When we first started, he came, supported us. We developed a relationship. We'd speak of a garden to college pipeline. Get them now, get them early. You know what I mean? There's a lot of competition for their head right now. There's video games, there's this, there's that. There's the, you know, the swiping, the little social media websites they get into at this age. It's hard, man. It's going to get harder to get at their head. So get them early right now. A garden to college pipeline. Because, hey, guess what? We still live here in America. And because we live here, it's like a baseball game where there's certain rules we're going to have to play to navigate through this, but there's a way to do it. A very intelligent way. That's like Judo. Judo, you use the opponent's energy. All right? What I'm saying is check it out. All right. So let's get with the youth. A garden to college pipeline is something that let's say bipartisan support could be garnered from. Everyone is agreeing on that. Everyone loves kids. I don't care. Red state, blue state. Let's start thinking about that. Let's start thinking about strategies. But that's something you can get behind. Get them a garden to college pipeline in California. In this area specifically, I think would be a great thing. There's a lot of the big institutions here. You have the Berkeley, you have the Davis up there. You got, you know, Stanford down there. And they'll get behind it. You know, viticulture is big here because we can't, when we get with the youth, the youth are very wise to the BS and the platitudes. Platitudes ain't going to get them. They're going to sniff that out and they're going to reject that. They know we live in a free market. They know we live in a society. Let's talk about money too. That's my point. When we're talking about the children, and that's my strategy for what you're saying. The answer to the question, because we want to raise responsible stewards because there's only one black grocery store chain in the country. So when you think about black people in the country, we came here on some agriculture for not to be black farmers. That's crazy. I mean, I wanted you to hear the distortion because it should be that crazy to you. So when the urban kid says he doesn't know what Apple is, you should feel as though a war crime has been committed systemically like ongoing. So that's the kind of urgency we need. So, yo, yes, get the kids. He has the garden. He has the vines. Let's get the kids learning viticulture. That's a pathway to remediate, to rehabilitate, to repair some of the damage. Get them because we can get people behind that. We can get funding for stuff like that. Another thing we need to do as a human people is identify problems that we can help solve because that's how you're going to get money. It sounds crass to bring it back to money, but I have rent. I always have to pay. You know what I'm saying? I live in San Francisco now. It's quite expensive here. So you can't divorce that for money. So I always think about money. So you can get a lot of money to help the planet. And in doing so, thinking on interns, you have a new paradigm. It's not I get over because I cut your throat. It's like, I'm going to get over. You're going to get over. And now everybody's going to get over. We're all getting over and we're helping the planet because right now we're, you know, they say we're on a crash course to human extinction, whatever. But if that's the case, you know what I'm saying? There's a lot of problems. So there's a lot of opportunities for money. So quick answer. Let's get the kids early, garden to college pipeline. Let's link up with her farm in East Oakland. Our joint here in Onong Palu in Bayview. He's doing the grapes all over the world. He's doing grapes. Let's all connect. Now we're connecting. So now there's three, you know what I'm saying? There's three places to get food choices. We really concentrate on educating the kids. She's doing the growing and producing. You know, we educate the kids on how to grow the food. Let's combine. And then let's have a farmers market in Bayview. Okay. We start one in Dizzy Valley, the southern joint little south of Bayview. Let's start multiple until we have a grocery store again. Because why should blacks who did agriculture have one supermarket chain? That's enough to make you holler. So thank you, Isaiah. I want to kind of follow up and ask you, because I think you brought up a lot of good points. And I think one of the last points you made about the importance of local stakeholders, organizations who are doing this powerful working communities, transformative work, the importance of building power in community and sharing skills, sharing resources, and working towards this cohesive vision. You talked about the potential of working with other stakeholders, whether it be like, you know, local governments or universities or, you know, even companies and corporations in some cases. I do want to bring up this reality, which I think many of you are probably aware of. As of late, specifically over the past two and a half years, I think a lot of people, if they had any faith in these larger institutions, whether it's the government or whether it's capitalism, people's faith in these institutions have dropped precipitously, especially with the inept response of our government in the face of this public health crisis. It's an effective way of supporting citizens, specifically people living on the margins over the past two and a half years. People are losing faith, people have seen corporations become further enriched, the wealth is being further entrenched at the top. And so I think what I've seen and heard from people around the country is that a lot of people are just feeling like if we don't save ourselves, then nothing is going to save us. We can't depend on the government. We can't depend on capitalism. And so a lot of people are opting out and thinking about building these alternative systems that maybe don't rely on fiat currency, you know, these systems that are geared towards more communal ways of living, you know, thinking about cooperatives, thinking about kind of like collectively stewarding the land. So I guess a question I have for all of you is what kind of visions do you see of us working towards this kind of collective liberation in terms of the way, not only the way in which we feed ourselves, but the ways in which we're caring for our communities, you know, going back to what I would argue are some of the most powerful examples of self-determination and community care, the survival programs that the Black Panther Party of self-defense, the Black Panther Party for self-defense. And I always make it a point to fully use their name when they were founded. I know colloquially we talk about them at the Black Panthers, but it's important that people recognize that, you know, the organization, the impetus for them, Bobby C.L.A. and Hugh P. Newton founding that organization was police violence in our communities because in the late 60s you were seeing this in before, but their response came in the late 60s. You're seeing the same type of violation of civil rights, human rights, police coming into historically marginalized communities, Black communities specifically, and killing people. And so in addition to addressing police violence, they started a number of survival programs. In fact, they had about 60 of these programs that were aimed at meeting the basic needs of people in communities. So I think a lot of people are getting back to that point where they just recognize that we are all we have. And I'm just wondering if you all have any thoughts about how we can create these systems of care that are potentially outside of these systems that we've been used to operating in that many people feel are no longer serving us. Yeah, I think we need to utilize all forms of media at our disposal, you know, use your public access television, public access radio, podcast story San Francisco, use everything to connect like all of us should be on a website where we cross promote each other. If you do volunteers, you have your volunteer day. If you have a surplus of volunteers and we need volunteers, oh, I see, oh, yo, you know what, you know, if you guys want to volunteer, go over here because they need you over there. I think we can be doing that. Sharing, perhaps we start a bank, you know, I mean, and let's not reinvent the wheel, you know, let's look at Kujichagulia villages, let's look at, you know, research what happened in Tulsa. Or, you know, there was the Black Wall streets that after they burned it down the first time they came back, which was kind of crazy. So we should research stuff like that and see how we could be resilient amongst each other. And I would stress the thing of small is good. We can't save the whole nation or the world yet. Let's, let's, let's get baby right. East Oakland and small cells. That's how I think. Let's link up, we communicate and share resources small. Yeah, that's where my thought went to immediately to is like collectively working, you know, pulling from each other pulling from, you know, all the different organizations. We work with Mandela grocery co-op and just the different work happening in our cities. You know, before we came up here, we were kind of chatting about how for me in Oakland, like it feels so San Francisco feels so distant. And even within the East Bay, like, I feel like a lot of us operate, which, you know, it just has to do with like the system of individual, individualism, capitalism that we are having to operate under forces us to, you know, feel like, oh, we're in our own little cells in our own little, you know, pieces that were not connected, were not integrated, but really we are so integrated and just pulling from each other, finding space to like commune with each other and actually see each other face to face and talk with each other and build that is like the foundation of creating like the future that we want in the world that we really want to see. It's already here, like it's really just a matter of like really strengthening our relationships and strengthening those bonds so that it can be rooted and sustainable. Yep. All of that. Honestly, the way I see it is like Moad is a space that we should be using even more. It's not just a museum, but it's like the smallest museum. I think about that all the time, like I was at the smallest museum in the city, but this space I feel like could be one of the most powerful spaces that we collectively build. Seed Bank. We're going to have a Black Indigenous Seed Bank at this space that tells the culinary stories of the people that are gone and still existing to teach recipes, your knowledge, all of our knowledge, you know what I mean? This is a place where we could all gather and constantly meet and have a safe space that we can share more of these ideas. What are our plans? I think that's what it takes is organization. Like how do we become organized? Who are we going to get to help do that work? Because we need to be on the ground. We need to be actually working with the youth, but I think we need someone to help us build this infrastructure on how we can actually really dial this in and get this going just like what Alice Waters is doing and all these other things. You know what I mean? If we can build something bigger and better than that, I think we'll be saving lots of youth. I think once they see that we're organized and that we care about them, they will take it seriously. You know what I mean? I think then that literally does turn into a grocery store eventually. That does turn into food festivals. That turns into all types of things that we can actually create. And it's the research we need to show how we haven't given up on learning about who we are. We need to give the kids the actual history on what has happened on the Black Panther Party. You know what I mean? And why they existed and letting them know to be proud about fighting for your community, fighting for your health, fighting for yourself, and buying back places like the Bayview and East Oakland. How do we collectively put our money together and make sure that our neighborhoods are protected and safe so we can keep making these decisions? There's a space called Hunter's Point Youth Park in Hunter's Point. That's a giant space. We've all went and seen it together. It's sitting there fallow. I think we take that space. If the city wants to help us, we get it. If not, we find private investors. But we build that into an alimony for everyone that really feel like they from the start feel welcome. We build that outdoor kitchen again. We start having the basketball go to 11 o'clock at night where kids are safe, but people are still guarding and farming, doing all their things. That it's a space where the kids from the projects, from the schools, everything come down. We keep replicating that. Just keep replicating it. Thank you, Christopher. So I'm sure that there are questions from the audience, potentially from people who are coming in virtually. Before we open up the floor, I just wanted to ask one final question. I think it's clear part of why I thought it was important to put this event together is modeling. I really wanted to model how we should be in community and bring it together. I mean, you're just talking about just how it seems like there's this chasm between the work happening in San Francisco and the work happening in the East Bay. And I think it's important that we get together. We are exchanging ideas, breath, energy in the same space. And I think that is the foundation of powerful collaborations. I think that so often we like to jump into the work before we get to know each other, before we get to build genuine connections and seeing each other as human beings. So I think it's important for you all to see each other and the work that you do. And I think it's important that we see and know the powerful leaders in our communities who are working with historically marginalized communities to build power and do the good work. So I think it's clear that all of you have like a deep affinity for and connection to the people in the communities in which you're working. So I'm just wondering if you can just share what is it that you love about, you know, these geographic communities, the people, the energy in these spaces that you spend so much time. As a young black man, it was very hard to be a young black man. It was very dangerous all the time. I grew up living in Germany for most of the part of my early life. And living over there, I still had to watch 90s movies and stuff about black culture, which were mainly black men being gunned down because of gun violence. And when I came back to America, it was like the story that you won't live to be the age of 21, you know, and that's not okay for anybody to hear. But I remember looking at young black men and being like, wait, are you going to kill me? Are you going to kill me for a pair of shoes? Is this really what it's like? Can I really walk down the street? And it's real. That's like, we got to understand that, you know what I mean? So it's like, I just want to, I want to make sure that people know that I love them and that I care about them. If anyone else doesn't, because I see all these young people being like hurt, and they don't know how to express it. And when the media is portraying black people stealing Louis Vuitton during Christmas and all this stuff, why are they stealing Louis Vuitton? What do they need? Do they have to pay their rent? Are they hungry? What's going on? Let's talk about both sides of this type of thing. So I think when I see these communities of all people being hurt, Asian people, Latin people, people, poor white people, like you said, everyone being targeted and just, just placed to like separated and like kind of tricked into not messing with each other. I think that's what we've really got to understand is like, I moved to San Francisco because I see it as a village. And I think that we need to treat everybody like we live in a village and that we all respect each other, especially our youth and our elders. And that like the middle between people, we like, we work really hard so we can keep all of everybody else safe. You know what I mean? We need the wisdom of the elders and we need the energy of the youth to inspire us. And I want to show that and that's serious. You know what I mean? This is something that that's why we were all here. We didn't like just the universe didn't put us here randomly. You know what I mean? Like I've been trying to get to you, Brian Terry, for years trying to figure out how to do it. So it's like, I want youth to know that man, like don't give up. Like if you're doing the right thing, it's always going to come back to you the right way. Bayview, I tell you, we moved to Bayview. I took one look, we came in here late at night and I said, whoa, dude, man, where, what is this? You know, and then the sunlight, the sun arose the next morning. I was like, oh, wow. And then I got to learn a little about San Francisco and Bayview has the sunniest, it's the sunniest area in San Francisco, Bayview. They call it Umatak. That's what the First Nations called it. Umatak, Bay by the shore. And I got to tell you, man, you know, sometimes I get mad because if you want something other than a burrito or bonn meat, it ain't in Bayview. You know what I mean? You got to travel. Even if you want to, I had a broccoli, you got to grow it. Sometimes I get angry at Bayview, you know? Um, if you want some social stimulation, you got to go to New Bay. But, okay, then I started reading the history. Bayview isn't an asshole by nature. They used to dump all of the refuse of this city was dumped in the Bay for years, for decades, you know, and then there was some socialites who caught wind of it. And so it was made that way, but it's a very beautiful place. That's why I've really loved the nature there. I mean, good God, dude. I came out here and I was like, yo, you can grow food all year in this area. I look at it, yo, some places that you think are ghettos and I see million-dollar views, not to commodify a view, but to see these spectacular views and what's called a ghetto, like Jesus, you know? And then with a hard day, whatever, I'm driving down one of those precipitous 90-degree-angle hills and I see a view and it's like, whoa, I'm in Cali, yo, word. It's a golden state for many reasons. And I love, I love Bayview. And, you know, back in the days, there's a thing called Adam Rogers Park. Adam Rogers came from Bayview and he was uniting the people and settling the gang violence and all that. And he had the brothers out there cleaning up the streets, you know? He was trying and then when they were doing construction, he came down and said, yo, you got to hire from Bayview, you know? So I think there's great potential in Bayview and we're working to really fix it up because it will be the Riviera soon. It will be the Riviera soon and this is going to be the most happened spot in San Francisco. It's going to be Bayview. People are going to be sailing up from the peninsula up to Bayview. They're going to be doing those eco tours, radiation to World War II tours. They're going to go to the candlestick park. They're going to go to the Beatles tour that we're going to organize where they see the first place the Beatles performed, Cal Palace, last place they performed, candlestick park, walk in distance y'all. They're going to go on these community garden tours, you see? Because Bayview has a lot of green space. That's what's unique about it. So that's what we love about it. That's what we love because we're going to take the lead out of the soil using plants and then we're going to show kids how to do it and then they're going to be like, yo, Bayview is a standard barra of environmental rehabilitation. And I hope and pray what we're working for is that the people who's living there right now don't get displaced and they take part in that prosperity that's going to come. Yeah. For me, East Oakland feels like so much of what I love about the Bay and what drew me so much to having such an affinity for the Bay because it is one of the last places in Oakland that really doesn't feel like it's changed so much as other parts of Oakland. Being surrounded by so many black folks in my community feels so important to me. I learn so much from my community all the time from the people that I get to see every day and work with. And yeah, just like, again, that history that still is so very present, like a lot of the people we work with have like uncles and aunts and like people in their family who are with the Panthers and it's just like a very common thing, you know, that history is so very present and it feels so alive with the people that I see and get to work with. So that's what I love about. Yeah. Thank you. And I'm glad you all are illuminating the richness of these communities, you know, the wider culture often looks from the outside and describes these places as poor, right? And we know that people might be in dire economic situations, but these are rich places. You don't go in and do what has historically been done to these communities if they aren't rich. You don't go like Africa and Asia and Latin America. They're not poor because you don't go in and steal the resources and, you know, oppress the people of poor places. And I think we need to understand these local communities in a similar way. These are filled with richness and brilliance and we do need to shift resources into these communities, but, you know, they're vibrant, they're lively and people are there and they're doing the work and people have been doing the work. So I do want to open up the floor if there are any questions for our panelists and if there are any people out in Beyonce's cyber world, internet space, if you have any questions, please ask your questions as well. How critical it is now in our communities, you know, to invest in food and the future of our children. And so I'm just wondering why not a more radical approach? And I ask because I am literally seeking the answer because I'm spent. I mean, I feel like what I do for feeding the community once a month is radical somewhat because I don't ask, you know, I mean, I literally just started doing it. And I found the time during the pandemic and I just took it and I didn't stop, you know, I have a full-time job and I still keep going. But like for me, I don't think that I don't really want to ask to take Hunter's Point Youth Park, but I also don't want to go grow a bunch of plants and then have them ripped out. So I think about how do we be smart about this? But we need more people that are on our side rather than just trying to extract or take instead of using it for just like Instagram or whatever their organizations. But I'm looking for more people to just give and then walk away or be a part of it. You want, if you want to really get radical, I didn't drop this one because this is quite radical, but you really want to get radical with this. Check it out. Are you in Bayview? Okay, so whatever neighborhood, right? If we can get access to everybody's backyard or everybody's sunny window seal, we can augment food production. That will require trust. People will be liking each other. It requires some challenges, but if you want to get radical, that's a radical way to go, I think. Yeah, one other thing I think, you know, so like there's a woman up in New York, and I'm blanking on her name right now, but she was talking about Seneca Village, which is part of like Old Central Park. It's a black community that was in Central Park, and they buried these people basically when they put the park in when Olmstead designed it. Amber Tam, she came up with this idea of like taking a percentage of Central Park and giving it back to being a food garden. It's the same thing that I'm talking about, like with Alamany being right next to the projects. If we do this in Golden Gate Park, if we do this in the Panhandle, all these places like Golden Gate Park is humongous. If you built a farm on there just like Alamany, that was completely free. Think about if people just knew they can go get free food for dinner. That's the same thing. If we can do that in Hunter's Point, same thing, just come there and get free food. If we can hire a couple of people to have a job as a farmer and feed people in their own community, that is so empowering to those people, but then to know that you can come down and just get free food if you don't have the money, you know what I mean? And same thing, my home girl created a food fridge like in Harlem, and they just stock it with free food, but it's the organization to be radical. Yeah, second that like I think for me kind of goes back to just having that organized, I feel like a lot of us are wanting to be oriented towards being very radical. Like this work is by nature very radical, and having that building those relationships with each other. Like this, I know some folks who doing like guerrilla gardening in the East Bay and, you know, land back for Native people to be able to have access to land. Like that stuff is very much happening in the Bay and, you know, in pockets across the country, and it's really about like, yeah, kind of building together and like working together to like expand that and broaden that. And I just want to really quickly speak to the radical nature of the work that you all are doing, because I think that obviously we know that many of these kind of structural impediments are baked into public policies and we have to address public policy. I think, you know, having been in this field for over two decades, it's exciting to see more people who are conscious about the power of their, you know, consumer choices, right? And people are thinking about, you know, going to the farmers market as opposed to going to the corporate owned supermarkets and people are thinking about, you know, buying fair trade products and all these choices I think that we can make as individual consumers. But I think what troubles me is that a lot of times people get stuck at that individual consumer and they aren't thinking about like the kind of community work that you all are doing. And I think that, you know, we should have this kind of internal revolution, but we have to be investing in our communities. But in terms of the work that you're doing, I think oftentimes people might look at, you know, have these very kind of reductive ways of thinking about activism and activism being like, you know, on the ground confrontational base building. And that is important work. It's a cornerstone of movement building. But I think that when we think about our industrialized food system, these seemingly apolitical acts like growing food, you know, making meals from scratch, building community around the table with friends and family and community, the face to face interaction and work that you're doing. I think it's highly political, dare I say, radical acts of, you know, everyday acts of resistance is the way that I think about the work that you all are doing. So I just really want to uplift this work is highly radical in our industrialized food system. But then also, man, I broke into UC Davis, like literally, like I don't have a college degree, but I take all my apprentices to UC Davis, we make wine there, we get to harvest grapes, we learn from some of the top professors. And I think that's what you do is you figure out how to hack the system. And that's been radical. So like, when he says college like, you know, pipeline, all that stuff, like, I literally am creating a space where young people can go to Davis. I want them to follow me to go to Davis. I'm not trying to promote not having a college degree. But if you have had a different life, maybe you don't see yourself going to college fully, let's just do it a different way. I mean, like, you don't have to go the whole time. You can go in, learn what you need to learn, and then get back out and start doing the same thing on the street and help someone else create that organization. Yes, we have a question from the Zoom. Can we do that one real quick? Yeah. Okay, this is a great conversation. How can we get this learning about food or at least the thinking about it into the school system? What we need to do is US, the San Francisco Unified School District, let's partner up. Okay, we have a technology of Zoom. So one person can be in many different classrooms. I'll teach them how to grow microgreens. You know, I did it with the boys and girls, Vissy Val, William Mays Clubhouse up there. We can teach them how to do that. We can teach them how to do their own fertilizer. We know that the school district this year coming up, they need a new vendor, a new food vendor now. See, they're going to cease the relationship with the present vendor. They need a new one. Great opportunity now for them to get with something groups like us. He's growing some grapes. She's growing legumes and veggies out there. We've got the microgreens. Get with us. We're local. This checks off their racial equity thing on the box. Boom. And it's going to be cheaper for them, right? They're going to save money, pay the teachers more with the money they save messing with us. You see, that's what we should do. Unified School District in San Francisco. Get with us so we can supplement your menu with healthy food, healthy. I think about how in high school, the military would come and do their spiel to all, I don't know, seniors, juniors or something like that. It's like the military and they would come to our lunches and do pull-ups, do push-ups and try to get and sell their thing to all these kids who are not sure what they want to do or whatever. And especially, I don't know, I feel like it's very much a thing in Black and Brown communities. It's the military coming in and promoting what they have to offer. And I think that can be a similar thing for the work that we do, the things that we have to offer for our community. The farm that is right down the street from your school, I think there is a way to reach the kids in a way that is already kind of happening. But it really is about, yeah, we are here and we are very much about wanting to connect with the youth. And there's so much opportunity to do that just, yeah, kind of about being in talks with people who are in the schools and also inviting schools to come visit us. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It reminds me of an experience that I had when I was like 15 years old in high school. An older white gentleman came in, had his face blown off, had his hands blown off. He was in the Vietnam War and he told the story about how he jumped on a grenade literally to save his troop. And I remember all the youth that were my age laughing and not taking it seriously. But this guy told the most incredible story where he was just talking about why he wanted to save his people and how it made him feel a certain way, even though it left him scarred. And I remember walking away from that experience and being like, that's what I want to do when I grow up. So I feel like being able to go to an actual school and like speak as much as we're talking about right now and having the courage to talk about kids, like two kids about why we take it so seriously, why we love them so much and how we want to see them have a future. I feel like that can like literally change someone's life in a heartbeat, you know, and each one of our spaces is an activation site for youth to come. And it's having that organization again about when they can come, like being aligned with SFUSD's programming, being like we're having a gardening program and part of it is 280 Vineyard Day, part of its microgrids, part of it's going to East Oakland, you know what I mean? Like it really comes down to organization, man. Like the more that I'm thinking about this talking, it's like we need to be organized and we need people to help us do it. We need people in the mayor's office or wherever that are helping us run these schedules, because I don't think that's what we need to be doing. I think we need to be talking to the youth and somebody else needs to be helping us fill the program. We have a question up here. I just wanted to also say Oh, do you mind using the mic? I'm sorry. Yes, sorry. You're opening up opportunities for you to also get connected to the land and to animals and to plants and to soil the beings that live in the soil. So you're opening up not only opportunities for kids to be growing their own food and learning that process, but you're also opening their minds up to who we live with and going back to Brian's point about veganism and connecting back to our animal and plant kin. You guys are doing that. And so not every kid is going to be wanting to grow food, but there might be interested in the butterflies that come through the bees, the native bees, and opening up their mind to this whole environmental connection. You might spur their interest in that. So in addition to everything that you're doing, you're also doing that. You may not see that right now, but you might see that in 10 years when one of your students comes to visit you and say, Hey, guess what? I am an environmental science and I'm interested in amphibians. I'm interested in this and they're an advocate for our animal and plant kin. So I just wanted to say that. You know, that reminds me, Brian, you had mentioned earlier interrelatedness of we were at that point we were speaking about, you know, that all these neighborhoods are afflicted by similar things. And then you mentioned this long beef by KRS, by BDP. And so yeah, I wanted to also mention that, yeah, what happens to humans, you know, happens to animals too. We got a little bit cognizant of how we treat the animals, not just animals that normally eaten, but the insects. There's a bee shortage, you know, the insect apocalypse is upon us. So we got to be thinking about pollinators, how to protect them. I mean, it's all related because if you make a place that's good for growing food, it's going to be a good habitat for animals because those animals, from their excrement to their pollen transporting gives us food. That's how we get it. Yeah, one other thing I was going to say. So Danny, well, for what you said, you just reminded me, probably one of the biggest reasons why I'm here today is a fourth grade teacher that I had named Mrs. Nazar. I swear to God, this lady like used to take me to slaughterhouses, all these weird things in Germany where we would go see how chicks were born, how animals lives were taken, farms, we would find fossils, all these things, you know what I mean? But this lady literally instilled in me a life cycle and how all of us are connected. And it's funny when I think about it to this day. I'm like, there's no 4-H program in San Francisco. There's nothing like that. There's one in San Mateo, but when I think about youth being in touch with animals so they can understand why they do or don't want to eat meat, but if they do, how they care for it, how they actually, yeah, same thing, fishing, all that kind of stuff, like caring for your waterways, why it's all interconnected and why it's all so important, why you don't just throw trash into the bay, how we all drink the water, how it all comes back down as rain. I feel like we don't get that simple conversation, but it is simple, even though it's a big idea, you know what I mean? You use it in cartoons and kids understand it. And I just want to suggest the work of Zen master Tick-Not Han who recently passed away and, you know, in general, he talks a lot about just his idea of interconnection. There is no separation when we're looking at each other or the soil or, you know, trees. We're looking at a reflection of ourselves, but he has some really compelling work about just how we can understand this interconnection through food. So I think we have time for maybe two more questions. Yeah, I actually wanted to go back to the woman there who basically said she's tired and I think we can't dismiss that and also in relation with to, you know, our economic sovereignty, right, as black people, it has to be such an underlying issue around, you know, foundational, right. So when we're talking about the youth, how important is the education around how that can be helpful to their families? Like how are we keeping the families involved and attached to our youth around this educational aspect? I think we have to center this education holistically in an America lens. And what I mean by that, this is my opinion, this is my theory. America, in this, America, a corporation has the same rights as a human being here. America really, it, the idea of America, really likes property. It's big on property, it's big on LLCs. We have to educate the youth in terms of how can you become financially free? How can you get to a place where you have time and mobility? How can you get to a place where you use money as a tool rather than you're chasing a check every week? And how do you one day achieve passive income? Or how do you achieve multiple streams of income? If I'm talking to a kid in Bayview, I mean, I ain't rich either. So I'm trying to figure it out. But I'm gonna say, yo, first thing you need to do is look around you and be able to find value in where you at. Because where you at, you can see a parsimon tree. And if it has fruit on it, even all every fruit tree, every fruit fall off, you get a dehydrated, dehydrated, you don't have a dehydrated, you go to every freaking, you find a way, someone's gonna let you borrow it. And then you're gonna go out and sell it. I'm saying that because that's what I'm doing. I'm not that particularly, but you know what I'm saying? That's the world I'm in. So that's what I'm thinking about. You live in Bayview, try to find value. Do you know how to clean up dirt? I just mentioned you can use plants to clean up stuff out the ground. Maybe you can find a job doing that. I'm centering everything around finance. That's my answer. So for us, we have these savings accounts for our youth. So all of the, we have a community supported agriculture program, which are these weekly bags of produce that people can just subscribe to. And it's beyond just our East Oakland community. So it's the Greater Bay Area. People will subscribe to our program, get a bag of veggies, and it's sourced from black and brown on farms throughout the Bay. But basically all the money that we get through the CSA goes to savings accounts for the kids in our programming. We have camps through the summer and basically all this, all the breaks. So spring, fall and winter. We have an after school program. And we COVID has made it a little hard to do some of the programming, but we've had in the past like community field trips to like the woods, go on hikes, like really, because yeah, we do a lot of youth programming, but it is also like we want to support the families of these kids as well. Kelly, our founder, like started the farm because she had a daughter and she was like, I need a space for my daughter to feel safe and to like have access to our environment and nature. And so that's really like, you know, at the center of like all the work we do is supporting mothers, supporting single mothers, supporting families through the kids. And so that's kind of at the root of like all the work and all the programming that we do with the kids. So these are just beautiful ideas when I think about all this. I think about the mayor's budget just came out recently. And it's an insane amount of money. It's like a lot, a lot of money, millions and millions and millions of dollars. And I think about once again, with organization, if we were able to build some kind of subsidy for families that are able to get jobs either, you know, so when I see black people doing work in the streets of the city or something like that, it's usually cleaning up trash or something like that. You know what I mean? It's like, what if we actually pay these people to care for the land? What if that money then allowed their kid or if their kid was in a program, they would get some kind of stipend, something that would go towards their college, all these types of things. You know what I mean? This money being raised could be used to not only heal a community, but pay for it in the future as well. Like, when we say invest in the community, why don't we actually invest in the community? That's the way I see it. I think we have enough time for one more question. Just for all present and for those listening, will you please share where we can donate to your fund for the children, please? Oh, for the savings account that you just mentioned? Yeah. Can you all just give your, you know, socials where people can find the work and if they want to, you know, further dig in? Please. Thank you. Yeah. So I work with Acton on Verba Youth Urban Farm. Our website is annvfarm.org. And you can find links for all of our programming. You can subscribe to our CSA. I'll leave some flyers at the table. And our CSA is beatbox, B-E-E-T box. So you can also look that up. And then I believe our Instagram handle is annvfarm as well. So dragon spunk. If you'd like to support or you want to volunteer or you just want to learn dragon d-r-a-g-o-n-s-p-u-n-k dot org. Go there and please go there and thank you so much for your interests. Yeah. So 280 project 280project.com. It's the same thing on Instagram. And all I ask for is send people my direction. Even if you don't know what you want to do with the organization, if you know somebody that has land, if you know somebody that has a vehicle possibly that we can use to drive people up, if you know somebody in the mayor's office that we can talk to to get this stuff going, this is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for any way we can get in as fast as possible so we can do the jobs that we need to do and get back to saving the world, saving the youth, beating each other. Oh yeah. And yeah, by the way, I've, yeah, I verify this brother does that every single apartment. I went with him in every part. So it's being done. And we've remediated soil and we've taught kids and we've turned blight into beauty in Bayview and you know, therapy hard to quantify. So please feel good in supporting because the work is being done and this sister right here is doing it in East Oakland. So the work is these eight projections. We're talking about stuff you already done did not to mention what we are doing now. So also feed the people collective. If you look up feed the people collective on Instagram, that's how you'll find us. We're a mutual aid collective, not a nonprofit. We are literally like a fooboo with food for us by us doing it in the streets and yep. Can we all give a big round of applause for these powerful community builders, change makers, unsung heroes who are doing the great work. Thank you all for being a part of this program and hope you have a great evening. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. Thanks to our panelists from the 280 project from Dragon Spunk GRO and from Acta Nonverba and thanks again, Bryant Terry. We truly appreciate it and thanks Kaiser Permanente for sponsoring us and Black Food is available for sale in the back. Please pick up your own copy or borrow it from the library. So before everybody leaves, one other idea that I have, I'm trying to get into this research stuff. I'm trying to get to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's estate because I want to figure out what the slave involvement was with his wine production. I've been trying to contact them and over the internet they keep telling me no. So if anybody can help me figure out how to raise funds to get down there so I can go actually do this research, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to figure out how can I unlock some of these hidden things so I can bring that back to the wine industry and show people that like we've been here, we've been fermenting, we've been growing, we've been, we've been in America so yeah.