Instead of fingers pointing, bad, bad, bad, how can we use the situation that has struggles from different perspectives and use it as a community engagement piece?” She gave the approval to move forward. After funds were approved and all parties had decided to move ahead, CSF hired an architect familiar with community design and conferred with the Community Advisory Council before plans for the urban farm were drawn up. In 2009, the nonprofit hired a farm manager to oversee the project, Makena Scott, who was one of very few African American CSF employees at the time. Her job description included coordination of the site construction as well as on-the-ground community outreach. City Slicker Farms attempted to solicit input from park users, especially the homeless and scavenger communities, by asking Scott to consult with them, a task she found challenging logistically. Multiple CSF staff, in later interviews, asserted that a top priority for the organization was that everyone who used the park before their development would still be able to use it. This stated goal caused some conflict with local neighborhood associations, who were concerned about crime and homelessness in the area. Yet because the garden’s initial construction took away the park’s seating area and didn’t immediately replace it, the itinerant populations who were regular users of the park also felt pushed out and angry. The nonprofit attempted to be responsive by holding community meetings, but these meetings did not completely resolve tensions. The working poor rarely have time to attend meetings, black plastic plant pots or may not feel comfortable speaking in them. Homeless and itinerant populations rarely attend such meetings. In my later conversations with the itinerant population in the parks, they did not feel included.
The project broke ground on November 1, 2009. In 2010, City Slickers held a barbeque at the site to try to bring together all sectors of the neighborhood and get them talking to one another, which several attendees reported was successful for the evening but didn’t seem to have lasting effects on community relationships. CSF at this point had run into significant problems in navigating city processes, especially in receiving a legal agreement, accessing their money when they needed it and hiring laborers and contractors. Their initial time line was delayed and neighbors and members of the Community Advisory Panel were upset by the lack of communication. Instead of conveying some of their roadblocks to the community, they remained silent. Community outreach during this time was very low. By the fall of 2010, when I spoke to homeless men in the park who were relaxing after finishing their recycling for the day, I met Antony, who was not happy about the Union Plaza Urban Farm across the street. When asked about the motivations of the nonprofit, Antony told me, “They don’t give a fat fuck.”In September 2010, Union Plaza’s raised beds were built and filled with rows of seedlings, the fence was in place and some fruit trees had been planted. City Slicker Farms felt confident enough to organize a Harvest Festival marking the Grand Opening ceremony for Union Plaza Urban Farm and Fitzgerald Park. On the day of the festival, rain was threatening but when I arrived everyone seemed to be in good spirits. I helped unload tables and chairs on the grassy triangle of land called Fitzgerald Park, and laid out fliers at an info booth for City Slickers Farm next to tables piled high with orange Baby Bear pumpkins for Jack-O-Lantern carving.
The pumpkins are small and portable – perfect for a child to carve. In the adjacent triangle-shaped park, Union Plaza, rows of raised beds were visible through the four foot high wooden fence, whose gate was propped open. I had been volunteering with City Slicker Farms for five months at the time of the Harvest Festival, watering and weeding and planting in their gardens, seeding flats in their greenhouse, feeding the chickens, and selling produce at their weekly farm stand. I helped out in the office and attended a workshop on the problem of lead in soils. From the beginning I noticed that the majority of volunteers were white and well-educated. Yet the neighborhood surrounding them was mostly African American and low-income, a disparity I grew more and more curious about as I spent more time at their garden sites. For years the nonprofit was run by a predominantly white staff, and has struggled to find ways to connect with its targeted audience in the West Oakland neighborhood that surrounds them. Much of the labor to run their farms was supplied by year-long Apprentices who are offered housing in West Oakland and minimal pay. This apprenticeship model is common among more rural organic farms, but created unique problems in an urban context, setting the organization up for further racial disconnections and barriers to relationship building with the community. Apprentices were some of CSF’s most visible faces in the community, interacting on a daily or weekly basis with neighbors and volunteers. The fact that the apprenticeship was a very low-paid position meant that they tended to be possible mostly for idealistic young people coming from a fairly affluent background, or with some sort of safety net in place; it is no surprise that most of the Apprentices ended up being white. The year-long time frame of the apprenticeships also created barriers to creating long-term relationships between CSF and the neighborhoods in which they work, because as soon as trust began to form, a new Apprentice would arrive.
Working under the Apprentices was a shifting network of volunteers, providing much of the needed labor to tend the market gardens, most of whom were also white. I spoke with Rebecca Sirna, a former Apprentice and at the time the Backyard Garden Manager, about why it has been so difficult for CSF to attract and retain volunteers and employees who are people of color. When I began my research, Rebecca was the only visibly non-white full-time staff member, although interestingly, Rebecca was raised in a predominantly middle-class, white environment. In explaining the barriers to the involvement of people of color in CSF, she mentioned the status of farm work within the African-American community, and its historical association with slavery, as well as the unattractive economics of nonprofit work.Often when I spoke with CSF employees and other volunteers about race relations, they would bring up the fact that there weren’t many volunteers from the WestOakland community in a slightly puzzled, or almost hurt, tone. They reasoned that with high local unemployment and low access to food, why wouldn’t people want to volunteer with City Slicker Farms? However, this is clearly an assumption, and one that many types of poverty alleviation programs make: that people might not have money, but they have time to give. Often poor families are working a variety of part time jobs and busy with side projects and so are actually not able to give their time away for free, and may be offended by the assumption. This trend continued during the Harvest Festival – the majority of the volunteers helping to run and staff the CSF booths were white. However, the Harvest festival was an explicit attempt to address these conflicts and involve more members of the surrounding community, park users and local residents, in the project. One way they hoped to diversify the crowd was by inviting other Oakland food justice groups to participate. Other booths around the park perimeter represented an array of other food-justice-focused nonprofits that CSF had invited to the festival. They had collaborated with Jason Harvey, black plastic garden pots the African-American founder of the Oakland Food Connection, who was offering a healthy vegetarian meal out of his food truck, with veggie dogs, cabbage salad and a chili topping. Kijiji Grows, founded by a Kenyan man, was there to promote their installations of aquaponics systems in gardens. All of the nonprofits mentioned are run by predominantly African-American or African staff for a predominantly African-American audience, and CSF seemed to be deliberately reaching out to them, thereby ensuring more visible diversity in the nonprofit workers at the site. I stopped by the face-painting booth. The tiny, cold brush tickled my cheek as a cheery pumpkin surfaced, stroke by stroke. City Slickers had set up their farm stand, as always, with fruits and vegetables for sale at a sliding rate, with flowers and herbs in vases and eggs stacked on one end of the table. They offer three categories “Free Spirit” – no money exchanges hands – “Just Getting By” – reduced rate – and “Sugar Daddy/Mama” – which they liken to Whole Foods prices for organic vegetables. Several homeless collectors of scrap metal who usually hang out in the park, all African-American, had showed up and were partaking of the free food. One of them, a thin, rather young woman named Keisha was either in a manic mood or high on something, and kept trying to talk to the City Slickers staff in rapid staccato sentences. A CSF staff member quickly wearied of the near-monologue, to the point where she said, “I am done with her.”
Walking around the edge of the park and poking my head into the booths, I ran into a white local resident who brandished a petition to close Alliance Metal, the scrap metal dealer across the street. He passionately spoke of the noise, pollution, and what he saw as the effects on crime in the area. I could see that the CSF employees nearby were respectful but hadn’t signed the petition and didn’t seem to want to be overtly supporting his cause, a stance which was later confirmed by the Executive Director. I thanked him for his perspective on the situation but did not sign the petition. By the time formal presentations began, rain hoods were up and umbrellas had sprouted around the patch of grass used as a stage. The diverse crowd was of a good size for a drizzly day, perhaps 30-50 people. Nancy Nadel spoke, the local Council member who was a strong supporter of the project. The CSF Executive Director, Barbara Finnin, spoke and then turned it over to a clown show by the kids in Prescott Circus troupe, a longtime West Oakland nonprofit. This was a huge hit with the crowd, which cheered as a trio of eight-year-olds juggled and danced. During the kids’ performance, Diedre got up and started dancing, and the laughter got a little more nervous, though still indulgent. During the break-down of the tables after the Festival ended, an African-American neighbor who hadn’t attended came out to ask if he could have a pumpkin for his kids, and since one of the main reasons for holding the festival was to reach out to the neighbors, they were more than happy to give him a few. All in all, CSF staff judged the event a success. All during the Festival, City Slicker employees had been giving tours of the actual farm space across the street. CSF employee Rebecca Sirna talked about the challenge of educating residents about how to harvest. CSF reports repeated problems with people coming in and uprooting plants, for instance collards, which nonprofit employees believe was an attempt to harvest them. The plants were pulled up while still immature, but if allowed to grow to full size and harvested by taking only a few mature leaves at a time from each plant, they will produce much more food over a longer time. Therefore CSF is attempting to ask local residents and people who want to use the food from the site to harvest only during the hours when employees are working there, which at that time was about eight hours a week, over the course of afew days. Finnin and other CSF staff repeatedly mentioned in interviews that it has been difficult to communicate this policy clearly to other users of the park. Posted signs didn’t seem to help. “People don’t read them,” says Finnin. Instead, the policy seemed to be interpreted in many different ways, passed by word of mouth, and many local residents and park users with whom I spoke seemed confused about whether they were able to harvest from the garden, or angry because they felt excluded from the space. For instance, I was told a disturbing story circulating in the neighborhood about a homeless African-American woman who was picking greens inside the fence, the gate of which was at that time only secured by a loop of rope, and easily slipped off.