People’s Grocery had taken root. Ahmadi, an Iranian American from Los Angeles who studied Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, had been active in Oakland’s EJ movement for a couple years before starting People’s Grocery. Like the EJ movement, food justice shared an emphasis on environmental racism, economic and health disparities. Ahmadi felt that it was a logical progression from EJ to food justice, that food justice was in fact an “outgrowth of EJ” . The link between EJ and food justice made sense at multiple levels: “Nutrition, and land, and economic development. Those were really kind of the three things that started to triangulate for me” . Simultaneously reading up on the “social determinants of health” literature, and specifically interested in the relationship between malnutrition and resistance to toxins, Ahmadi turned to the work of Carl Anthony and Urban Habitat to guide his thinking about land use and structural racism. He continues, “[I was] craving something different, craving to be more entrepreneurial, craving to create alternative models. I connected the dots and saw this food security issue, and started learning about that.” Ahmadi found that food justice was a way to tackle multiple drivers of inequality in West Oakland, but only if it helped the community move away from a dependant “recipient” model towards a more economically self-sufficient one. Ahmadi’s story highlights the emphasis on growth and change, plastic square flower bucket on sustainability and community development that dominates the discourse employed by urban agriculture and food justice organizations.
For many activists, there is a sense of personal satisfaction or fulfillment that arises from developing creative strategies for changing the food system, from envisioning what a just sustainability might look like, and actively working to achieve this alternative vision. The material realization of this vision—a garden, a farm stand, a grub box—and the labor necessary to bring them to fruition, serve both the individual activist and the surrounding community. In East Oakland at the turn of the millennium, urban agriculture was mostly taking place in school gardens, community gardens, and people’s backyards, rather than through organizational garden projects. In terms of organized food justice-oriented urban agriculture activity, Grey Kolevzon’s work with Cycles of Change and EBAYC described in the previous section was concentrated primarily in San Antonio and Fruitvale. Few food justice organizations ventured into “Deep East Oakland”, the area east of Fruitvale, comprising a number of flatlands neighborhoods such as Elmhurst, Eastmont, and Melrose. Jason Harvey, founder of Oakland Food Connection, often tells the story of growing up in East Oakland where his mother supported him and his brother on food stamps. After a stint in the Air Force, Harvey returned to Oakland and got involved with the West Oakland Food Collaborative in 2003 . In early 2005 he began scouting out the work of the various organizations and noted that very little food justice work was happening in East Oakland where he had grown up.
Soon after he established Oakland Food Connection, formally establishing it as a 501 in 2007. Much of his work is concentrated in the area along MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, with a small farmer’s market, café, and bulk whole foods retail outlet in the Laurel neighborhood, a rooftop garden at E.C. Reems Academy, a charter school next to Castlemont High, his alma mater, as well as gardens at a handful of other schools . He focuses on both food production and culinary education, underscoring the linkages between “food, community, and culture” . Another East Oakland urban agriculture program grew out of Slide Ranch, an educational farm in Marin County where schoolchildren from San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond learn about sustainable agriculture on one or two day field trips. Four of the garden-based educators working there were inspired by the way the children “blossomed” at Slide Ranch, but wanted to create a similar space within an urban area itself rather than busing them to a rural area. So they began searching for a space in Oakland and found an apartment with a large yard “perfect for a garden” advertised on Craigslist. They moved into the apartment on 23rd Avenue and International Blvd. in East Oakland’s San Antonio District . Shereen D’Souza, a South Asian American who grew up in New Jersey, had been working with hillside farmers and starting school farms in rural Honduras, before moving to SOL in 2004 on the invitation of one of the founders. She worked for Oakland Based Urban Gardens in West Oakland as a garden-based educator for several years before taking the helm of the California Food and Justice Coalition, a statewide food justice policy advocacy group. She describes SOL as “a living space, as well as a food justice project… We grow as much of our own food as possible, we have chickens and gardens, we buy bulk food from either Mandela Foods Coop or Rainbow and also if we need produce we go to the farmers markets” . SOL offers classes on sustainable agriculture and urban agriculture to neighborhood school groups, “and for older students, a critique of the industrial food system” . Mostly the youth come to SOL with other organizations that have included Bantaay Srei, an organization that helps Southeast Asian girls transition out of sex work; Street Level Health Project, an organization working with the children of jornaleros ; and Cycles of Change, a bicycle-oriented job training and education organization.
Their central program is a summer intern project for teens. She explains that SOL’s reach is limited due to meager funding. This was by choice, as their focus has primarily been on creating a sustainable living center rather than an NGO. Hayes’ Office of Sustainability focused primarily on reducing energy use and bringing hybrid and hydrogen vehicles into the public transit fleet. Under Hayes’ tenure, Oakland also joined the Chicago Climate Exchange, and teamed up with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Cities of Boulder, Santa Monica, and Arcata in a lawsuit against several federal agencies for violating the National Environmental Policy Act by funding “certain overseas industries that exacerbate climate change” . In 2005 Mayor Jerry Brown, along with the mayors of 50 other cities around the world, signed the UN World Environment Day Urban Environmental Accords and pledged that Oakland would become a more ecologically sound, economically dynamic, and socially equitable city by 2012. As a result of steps taken toward this commitment, it ranked in the top ten sustainable cities in 2005, 2006, and 2008 . The high sustainability rankings were due in part to the city’s inclusion of the food system into its sustainability plan. In January 2006 on the recommendations of the Life Enrichment Committee, the Oakland City Council authorized the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability “to develop an Oakland food policy and plan for thirty percent local area production” . Building on a food assessment for Alameda County conducted in 1999, and inspired by similar assessments in Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, and a number of other North American metropolises, two UC Berkeley graduate students in the Department of City and Regional Planning completed the Oakland Food Systems Assessment for the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in May 2006 . The document has since served as a springboard for food systems change in Oakland. Upon the report’s recommendation, the City Council unanimously passed Resolution No. 80332, approving a seed grant for $50,000 to establish a municipal food policy council whose mission would be “to cultivate a sustainable food system by eliminating hunger, plastic plant pot increasing health, expanding a greener economy, and honoring diversity for all current and future generations of Oakland, especially the least served, by ensuring the availability and accessibility of a wide variety of local, safe, sustainably-grown, and nutritious food” . The Oakland Food Policy Council was seated in 2009 and has since developed an Action Plan that includes first steps towards “transforming Oakland’s food system,” including advocating for the protection and expansion of urban agriculture . 94 Arising from the same food systems vision, the Health for Oakland’s People and Environment Collaborative, an umbrella organization consisting of several community development organizations and spearheaded by the Alameda County Public Health Department, the Food Bank of Alameda County, and the Community Food Security & Nutrition Policy Program of Alameda County UC Cooperative Extension, competed for and won a two-year planning grant in 2007 for $495,200 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to develop a municipal program encompassing economic development, local food systems, green built environment, and public health education. HOPE was unique in the diversity of stakeholders it brought together: city officials, non-profit workers, food justice activists, students, homeless people, and homemakers. Teams of Collaborative members surveyed six “micro-zones”, # mile radius areas surrounding central intersections in the six poorest flatlands neighborhoods, interviewing community members and surveying food prices and availability in local stores.
They also conducted several community listening sessions and design charettes and funded an inventory of vacant land in Oakland with agricultural potential which has since been used by the OFPC and Oakland Climate Action Coalition to support their recommendations.95 HOPE continues to serve as the community engagement arm of the OFPC.While Oakland briefly seemed to be a national leader when it came to formally expanding urban agriculture thanks to the release of the Oakland Food System Assessment, the activity of the HOPE Collaborative, and the creation of the OFPC, municipal interest in urban agriculture briefly waned. The election of Ron Dellums as Oakland mayor saw the dissolution of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and the city’s entire sustainability program was shifted onto the shoulders of one man in the Public Works Department. Other cities soon took up the mantle, making strides in urban agriculture policy: Seattle, for example, declared 2010 as the “Year of Urban Agriculture” and passed a sweeping overhaul to allow the expansion of urban agriculture ; Cleveland legalized livestock ownership and committed $1.1 million to a pilot urban farm . In San Francisco, efforts to scale up urban agriculture through policy reform gained momentum, as well, ironically due to the visibility of urban agriculture across the Bay. Mayor Gavin Newsom actually announced his Healthy and Sustainable Food for San Francisco Directive in July 2009 standing in front of City Slicker Farms’ WOW Farm in West Oakland, “a junkyard-turned-farm in West Oakland that could serve as a model for how land could be converted in San Francisco” . The Directive signaled municipal commitment to improving the food system, and specifically addressed the importance of encouraging urban agriculture through “community, backyard, rooftop, and school gardens, edible landscaping, and agricultural incubator projects” and ordered all city departments “having jurisdiction over property [to] conduct an audit of land suitable for or actively used for food producing gardens or other agricultural purposes” , a response to public pressure to facilitate urban agriculture on the city’s more than 3,000 privately owned and 2,000 publicly owned vacant lots in the city . In the year and a half that followed, an umbrella organization of urban agriculture activists called the SF Urban Agriculture Alliance , working in conjunction with the SF Food Policy Council , pushed through one of the nation’s most comprehensive pieces of urban agriculture legislation: Ordinance 66-11. Passed by the City’s Board of Supervisors in April 2011, it greatly expanded the area where urban agriculture is permitted in San Francisco and allowed sales of produce by home gardeners . Back in Oakland, despite the dragging of feet by the Dellums administration, interest in urban agriculture is slowly managing to take root within City Hall. These changes were due to the activity of the OFPC whose recommendations received airtime during the 2010 mayor race. At-Large Council Member Rebecca Kaplan, during her bid for election in the 2009 mayoral race, included food issues in her platform and has consistently advocated for adopting the OFPC’s recommendations. While she did not win the election, she continues to advocate for progressive food system overhauls from her seat on the Council, including the expansion of urban agriculture in the city. At the January 2011 presentation of the OFPC’s Transforming the Oakland Food System report to a Council sub-committee, Kaplan lobbied the committee to support the OFPC’s recommendations for urban agriculture zoning changes.