 When I started doing this work, I was really, yes, thinking about food disparities and public health and all that good stuff, but really what I was thinking about was how do we give low income and poor black women and their children what they need to have happy lives? How do we pour back into black women? When we restore the balance to the lives of black women and children, then everybody else benefits. The Black Feminist Project is where joy and radical resistance meet. We use the intersections of food justice and reproductive justice to create economic and community development projects for black women and marginalized genders and their children. We have an urban farm called the Blackjoy Farm. It is a 5,400 square foot lot where we grow amazing food and when we talk about healthy food and we talk about empowering folks, we've got to think about accessibility. And so we make it easy for folks to have access to the work that we're doing. I think every community should be growing food. I think we should all have food growing green spaces. Many communities in urban spaces lack adequate amount of green space. That is, I think that is an inherent issue in all urban communities, regardless of socioeconomic status. The Bronx is the poorest borough in the city and it's the most densely populated and therefore we have the least amount of green space in proportion to the population in this borough. Food is literally our lifeblood and if we are to heal our communities, it starts with understanding that our food system in large part must be local. The Blackjoy Farm really is indicative of what happens when you are determined to thrive in spite of and because of the things that have happened to you. We grow amazing food here. We have sunflowers, we grow eggplant, we've got onions, we have chickens that we harvest for eggs and then we put those things in that box and don't get more farm the table and that. We have a food box that we do every other Friday where we give away food boxes to people in the community and these are not just one-of-the-mill sort of food pantry boxes. I always like to say that we need to be the blue apron of the hood. The food box is probably becoming just as popular as our urban farming program because it does speak to that like getting great quality food. That's resonating with folks and now we really understand the importance of public green spaces. We're seeing folks of all races, all ethnicities, all ages investing in our work. We invite families to come here and learn earth science and grow food and then take that food home with them. We ask people to come here and just sit. There's no requirement that you have to come here and give us sweat equity. There's no requirement that you have to come here and work. You can come here for respite. This is a place of magic. It is the embodiment of black girl magic and black woman joy. For a lot of people who see this farm and have kept up with this farm, I think that they think that this just kind of happened overnight over the course of a year. This was a lot of work. This was like six years of organizing. I started doing this work back in 2006 looking for a space and I was doing what we call guerrilla farming. Now guerrilla like the animal. Guerrilla like the warfare. And I was liberating lots. It's called the trespassing, breaking and entering, tomato, tomato. The point was that I was going into spaces, seed bombing, planting, sunflowers with the help of the community. What it did was start to create a following of people who now had a very similar demand as me. And that demand was we are entitled to a space that we can have ownership and investment in. And so with the help of community members, we were finally able to identify this lot and got a license. This is now a guaranteed public green space for this community. And so I'm deeply proud of us doing that work, not just of myself, but also of community members who jumped in, got in where they could fit in, helped create the people power that we needed to make this project successful. We know that the work that we are doing is impactful. We know that the work that we are doing is resonating with people and we are hearing about it, we are seeing it and we are feeling it.