What’s Next?
By Nate Kleinman
My colleagues asked me if I would write a discussion of the future of Co-op Gardens for this report. While our focus here has mainly been on what we’ve accomplished over the past eight months, in each of our various working groups (most of which I’m a part of) our focus is on where we’re going, so I’m happy to attempt this task.
Of course, the way we’re structured — as an open, non-hierarchical, consensus-based collective, with no one person or committee driving the overall direction of the organization — makes it difficult to predict where we’re headed. Therefore my intent is to offer best guesses based on my knowledge of the people and working groups of CGC. I hope my experiences will provide a window into how we work and where we might be going. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve broken it down into six sections:
1. Free Seed Distribution
The surest bet is that we will build on the successes of our 2020 free seed distribution. The Seed Distribution Working Group is our largest working group, with a core of “Seed Distro” organizers meeting via Zoom every week since our first meeting on April 10th. With much more time to prepare for our 2021 distribution, we expect to get seeds out earlier and more deliberately. We aim to get seeds to more people this year, and through more local and regional seed hubs. We also plan to double down on our efforts to recruit seed hubs in historically oppressed communities — a critical focus of our diverse group of organizers.
There are still some unknowns, including how many people or organizations will apply to be hubs, how many seeds we will be able to get donated to us, and where we’ll base our central seed sorting, packing, and shipping operation (it will be somewhere in the Philadelphia area again, that has already been decided). We also don’t yet know how the relationships between the seed hubs and the main CGC organizing collective, including the Seed Distro WG, will develop. Within our decentralized model, each seed hub is unique, and that won’t change — but we do hope to find ways to help seed hubs become centers for resource-sharing beyond seeds. We’ve had many discussions about offering more support to hubs, but unless we suddenly receive some serious monetary donations, it’s unclear how much additional support we’ll be able to muster.
Many Hands, Many Seeds. Contributed art by Mary K
2. Resource Sharing
Since the beginning of CGC, a major focus has been facilitating resource-sharing toward helping more people grow more food. In the early days, we proposed using existing online platforms (especially craigslist) and a novel hashtag (#coopgardens) to help people find others in their communities offering free resources. By early summer we put a resource-sharing map front and center on our website (www.CoopGardens.com), thanks to the work of an ad hoc group organizers. Anyone with gardening, farming, or food-processing/preparing resources can put themselves on the map, so anyone in the US who comes to the CGC website will be able to find someone nearby who can help them grow food.
At present, the map has over 250 entries, in all but five US states, and with a few scattered entries from around the world. It’s a great start, but in order for it to be as useful a tool as we want it to be, we need many more people to add themselves. The Seed Distro Working Group is seeking to get as many seed hubs on the map as are willing, and we will also be leaning on the Outreach Working Group and the Media Working Group to reach more people in 2021 and help further populate the map. For the foreseeable future, this will likely be our main tool for facilitating free sharing of resources.
3. Racial Justice, Reconciliation, & Reparations
The interrelated issues of racial justice, reconciliation, and reparations, are huge and challenging. They often seem intractable. But there is a broad commitment among CGC organizers to keep them at the center of our work. We recognize that the United States is both deeply scarred by our history of white supremacy, and that all of us — especially people in BIPOC communities (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color) — are still continually wounded by its ongoing persistence. As people of conscience, we all have a role to play in fighting white supremacy, building bridges of reconciliation, and making amends.
For months now, CGC has been blessed to have a BIPOC Working Group. Some members of the collective have focused most or all of their CGC energies in that group, and it has improved the overall collective immensely. Members of the BIPOC group led the drive to create Community Agreements for CGC, with a focus on racial justice (including specific support for reparations), and helped ensure the Seed Distribution group prioritized getting seeds to BIPOC communities. Recommendations from the group have helped to make our main organizing conference calls more grounded and inclusive, and requests from the group led to the creation of two new working groups: the Accountability Working Group and the Anti-Oppression & Allyship Working Group (AOA). AOA, in turn, took up another specific request from the BIPOC group to study the issue of reparations and report back to the broader group about how we as CGC can further the cause of reparations. The results of that process are ongoing, but for many weeks now the AOA group and the BIPOC group have been working together on a “Reparations Roadmap,” a document we believe will both guide us moving forward, and serve as a model for other organizations (in particular majority-white organizations) interested in the concept of reparations but unsure of how it might relate to their work.
As a white person myself (my ethnic heritage is primarily Eastern European Jewish), and as a leader within this collective, I’ve done my best to not duplicate the patterns of oppression that undergird so many organizations in our society. I try hard to both defer to BIPOC colleagues on issues related to justice and equity, while also not creating extra emotional or intellectual labor for them in the process. It’s certainly a balancing act, but in the context of respectful relationships based on mutual aid and solidarity, I believe we have managed to build a multiracial/multiethnic community worth taking pride in and nurturing further.
Moving forward, racial justice and equality will continue to be driving forces in all of our work. Whether it’s the Seed Distro Working Group beginning to address issues of racial justice within the broader seed community (such issues are too often ignored or addressed only superficially), the Policy Working Group developing and lobbying for anti-racist public policies, or the Land, Work & Livelihoods Working Group working to support and empower BIPOC people who want to make a living off the land, I have no doubt we will continue to center the cause of racial justice and reparations in everything we do. We hope all of you reading this will help to hold us accountable if we ever fail to live up to that commitment.
4. Land, Work & Livelihoods
Among the most difficult issues we’ve attempted to address is land justice. At a time when the number of Black farmers has plunged from nearly 1 million to less than 50,000 in just a century, the USDA and other lenders still discriminate against Black farmers, and corporations snap up farmland left and right, few equity issues are of more importance. As a new organization, CGC lacks the resources and experience to make the kind of difference we would like to. But that won’t stop from trying — though we will do our best to defer to the organizations and individuals that have been working on land justice issues for a long time.
Our primary purpose from the beginning was to get more people growing food, but we realized very early that access to land was the primary factor determining whether or not an individual or group can grow food and achieve anything approaching food sovereignty. Our Outreach Working Group began reaching out to land trusts to determine whether any would be willing to explore opening some of the land they control up to agricultural production, and in particular under the control of BIPOC farmers or gardeners. When the first offer of land (about 60 acres in New Hampshire with no structures or other improvements) came our way just weeks later, we realized we might be moving too fast: we had no process in place to figure out what to do next. We ultimately decided that the Work & Livelihoods Working Group (created to examine and attempt to deal with the crisis of unemployment sparked by the pandemic) would become the Land, Work & Livelihoods Working Group, so that these interrelated issues could be addressed together.
In 2021 and beyond, I am hopeful the Land, Work, & Livelihoods Working Group will find ways, however small, to help members of the CGC collective create new sources of prosperity and perhaps even new communities in which to live and work and play. Under the leadership of Bonnetta Adeeb, we are discussing incubating a Black-led seed-growers cooperative in southern Maryland. We are continuing discussions about how best to use the privilege of many of our members to help convince white-led organizations to commit themselves to land justice and reparations. And we are also focusing on land justice issues in our Policy Working Group as we craft a policy platform for CGC.
5. Policy
I am optimistic that policy will become a much larger focus for CGC in 2021. With a new administration coming to power in Washington, D.C., and the pandemic laying bare existing inequities in food and farming like nothing has in living memory, issues that our collective cares about are going to be front and center. Next year also marks just two years before the expiration of the last farm bill, when negotiations and lobbying for the next one traditionally begin in earnest. While the CGC Policy Working Group spent a good portion of 2020 working on a “policy platform” for CGC to adopt, we still have work to do to finish it. It’s my hope and expectation that in 2021 we finish our platform, begin sharing it with the wider world, and start using it as the basis for lobbying efforts. I’m also hopeful that by spelling out our stances on some of the major issues of the day (many of which, of course, are not even under discussion in the halls of power) we will be able to start joining existing coalitions in the broader food sovereignty community and lend our energy to their efforts.
6. Organizational Expansion
In order to make all of the above a reality, we will need CGC to continue growing. We need to continue recruiting new volunteer organizers — we hope our call for new “Commissioners” aids in that effort — and we need to find the financial resources to fund our work. In less than a year we have accomplished so much, while we’ve barely spent any money and relied exclusively on volunteer labor. That is unsustainable. If we had unlimited funds at our disposal, I would advocate for hiring many of the volunteer organizers who currently devote so much of themselves to this project — in some cases working more than full-time hours — without asking for anything in return. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve compensation. In the next year, we are already planning some major fundraising efforts — including an online concert event — which we hope will allow us to go beyond merely funding the costs of seed distribution. We don’t ever want to fall into the trap of the “non-profit industrial complex” (becoming a bloated “institution” focused primarily on justifying our own existence) but it would be nice to have the resources to hire people for some key roles to ensure continuity well into the future and allow us to help more and more people grow their own food.