Feed Denver

09/26/2020

Chef Njathi Wa Kabui is passionate about good food. Growing up in Kenya, his mother’s subsistence farming provided for all of the family’s food needs, while his father ran a restaurant in the city nearby. Vegetables, sugar cane, bananas, guavas, and…

05/13/2020

This is well put, with suggestions for policy to support a stronger food system.

Understanding our food and how it gets to us is no simple task. This overview is a snapshot of the situation of workers and dynamics in our country’s food and farm system. The goal was to outline the current situation in the pandemic and possible solutions for each part of the food chain. It is......

05/12/2020

Do you remember Carmen and Jorge selling Colombian empanadas are the farm market? Great interview about dealing with COVID as a restaurateur. (Don’t be deterred by the dark screen, it goes into the video)
If you can, order takeout from their spot La Chiva on South Broadway.

https://www.lachivacolombian.com/

Jorge Aguirre, owner of La Chiva Restaurant lifts up the cloche to reveal what Colombia is truly about. Video production and Edition by Maria Sierra Narratio...

04/19/2020

Today's mindfulness thought....😉

03/19/2020

This is great!

These learning opportunities can help build local food security during the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. Last week, we encouraged you to keep hope and manage your stress in the face of this pandemic. Despite all of the chaos, we have to pause, take stock and plan for something entirely new. Individ...

11/02/2019

This amazing being deserves this and so much more!

"I am so grateful to receive this award on behalf of my family and mother. In the words of Beatriz Beckford, our keynote speaker, I would agree that as those who are marginalized everyday, when you are not valued somewhere you need to leave. You are worth it. My students, crew, and people who made Frontline Farming happen showed me that. They uplifted me and I thank them. Finally I am so proud to stand here today and receive this honor as a farmer.

I am the child of immigrants from Ethiopia and Yemen. I grew up here in the 80’s as the go to person on what a child from a famine riddled place looks like. Being from a country that is one of the most topographically diverse and agrarian based communities, I believed that food was not going to the right places as a matter of policy and misunderstanding. How could such a food growing haven along the equator, a land of 13 months of sunshine be the face of famine. I aimed my work at macro level policy work until I realized that the food system was not a matter of benevolence and food as a right but rather exports, tariffs, and profit. How can it be possible, that only thirty years later, my other home, Yemen, has become the face of one of the worst famines in history.

We know that our food system is broken. We do not need more statistics to show that racism is alive and well and centers itself in our most powerful weapons. Food is a weapon. I have heard many people say that when there is suffering and blood is spilling, people will react to the broken food system that has centered more and more control in the hands of corporate interests. But many of us know here, that the blood is already flowing. I was born in Denver, and call this my home too. How can it be that We know that 1 in 30 adults and one in eight children in Colorado face hunger. We take solace in being the fittest state and yet our childhood obesity has reached 20 percent. Our babies are stuffed and starved.

Colleagues, I want new metrics! Not those that read our bodies like time past. Not those that tell me how overweight black women are or what the eating preferences my people have. I want metric that speak to the broken system. The system. Who is getting money in food movement work? Who is deemed worthy of the language of grants? Who owns food businesses and who works in them? Speak to me of the real food chain? Our homes are not food deserts. And by the way did you know how many of our indigenous communities thrived in deserts and call deserts homes?

Often times people of color are seen as being on the receiving end of food access efforts. Often times the term poc is used interchangeably with poverty. Yet we know that the food system itself, on the production side, is made up of poc. We bear the brunt on both sides. It is estimated that 80percent of farm workers in the Us are undocumented workers. We have created systems in which those who are most abused by the food system are not allowed into the rooms where policies are made.

I am proud to stand here with all of you my colleagues because as we know that food is a weapon, it is also a shield. Those of us who sit here today understand this and are warriors.We are clear about the costs. Our work is urgent. I come from traditions I call on. In the Muslim faith within one of five pillar is that we practice sedakka, which is the practice giving without asking for substitution or return. I grew up making mass meals for those less fortunate. I come from the traditions of the black panthers and the free breakfast program where food was not revolutionary but a means of insuring survival. I lean on the history of the many women- mothers and grandmothers who have made their kitchens a space for us all to be authentically ourselves and to be fed. They showed us how to communicate love through a language of food. I am inspired by the caravans of food that organized for standing rock, I am excited for the new generation of seed savers and those reclaiming and standing firm in their cultural food ways, and I am enlivened to be in a room with you all who are soldiers in this love." Fatuma Emmad

Kathy Underhill is a nationally recognized leader and policy expert in solving hunger and was the founding CEO of Hunger Free Colorado. To honor her legacy, Hunger Free Colorado’s board of directors created the Kathy Underhill Scholarship Award to recognize an individual leading change as it relat...

10/03/2019

Amazing urban farm work in Cleveland! Congratulations UAI and the whole Tod-All team. You’re rocking it, Dave!
Margaret Morgan-Hubbard Zsofia Pasztor Edward Hill

Since its start nearly a decade ago, the Rid-All Green Partnership has continued to flourish, feeding and teaching generations of Clevelanders. To help further the non-profit’s mission, officials recently cut the ribbon to the new and improved learning center.

09/26/2019

Urban farm world celebrates!!! Announcement from James Godsil:

“A bright new day for the Chicago Milwaukee teams whose first among equals, Emmanuel Pratt, has been recognized for the brilliance of his servant leadership. Yesterday Venice Williams. Today Emmanuel. Heroes of the Great Lakes Heartland Renaissance.

From the NYT.

Emmanuel Pratt, 42, the co-founder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation, a community organization on the South Side of Chicago that has transformed abandoned buildings and vacant lots into a sustainable farm and cultural center, said he would use the fellowship to cover salaries and to help the group’s planned expansion into housing.

During the call with the foundation, he walked out into a field of sunflowers at Sweet Water’s 2-acre farm. “It was surreal,” he said.

Even beyond the money, he said, the MacArthur is a validation of the idea that there are alternatives to the kind of development-as-gentrification that reigns in Chicago and beyond.

“I don’t do the work to get recognition,” he said. “I do I because it’s a way of life. It’s proving that it’s not just possible, but that another way is already happening. It’s right here.”

Chicago Tribune

Pratt’s Sweet Water Foundation takes what he calls a “holistic” approach to neighborhood regeneration from its base on Chicago’s South Side.

“One of the challenges on the South Side and West Side of Chicago is there’s been a depletion of resources, access to capital,” Pratt, 42, says in a MacArthur Foundation video. “So a lot of times we don’t start with the dollars and the capital. We start with what assets are there. What humans are there. What spaces are available.”

This approach plays out at Perry Ave Commons, a community farm and related buildings in the Englewood neighborhood between Washington Park and the Dan Ryan Expressway, and in a plan for new housing that will fill vacant lots in the area.

In an interview, Pratt described a kind of organic urban regeneration that now occupies four contiguous city blocks, with features including farm and farmer’s market, the Think-Do House, a renovated 2007 house that Sweet Water says "hosts educational collaborations, community meetings, workshops, retreats, and cooking demos,' and the Thought Barn, a newly constructed open-walled wooden barn for performances and more.

“Come and visit and understand and plug in and share with us,” he said. “I honestly think we’re building what’s next, the foundation for what’s next.”

NPR

Emmanuel Pratt, 42, urban designer
"Integrating agriculture, education, and design in a resident-driven approach to community development and turning neglected urban neighborhoods into places of growth and vitality."

Female academics whose expertise and influence in areas as diverse as the impact of slavery on modern America, legislating against cyber harassment, and global warming and its effect on rising sea levels...