“Huge Victory”: Black Farmers Hail $5B in New COVID Relief Law to Redress Generations of Racism

John Boyd

Change will never come without political participation!

This Piece Originally Appeared in www.democracynow.org

A major provision in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill aims to address decades of discrimination against Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian American farmers who have historically been excluded from government agricultural programs. The American Rescue Plan sets aside $10.4 billion for agriculture support, with about half of that amount set aside for farmers of color, and allocates extra federal funds to farmers who were “subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture has faced accusations of racism for decades, but little has been done to address the problem of discrimination in farm loans. John Boyd, a fourth-generation Black farmer and president of the National Black Farmers Association, says the new funds begin to address issues he has been fighting for 30 years. “This is a huge victory for Black farmers and farmers of color,” says Boyd. Transcript

Judge Blocks Rule That Would Have Kicked 700,000 People Off SNAP

Critics had called on the Department of Agriculture to suspend implementation of the new food stamp restrictions, especially in light of the economic crisis spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

A federal judge has issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from adopting a rule change that would force nearly 700,000 Americans off food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The rule change was set to take effect April 1.

In a ruling issued Friday evening in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell called the rule change capricious, arbitrary and likely unlawful.

The rule change would have required able-bodied adults without children to work at least 20 hours a week in order to qualify for SNAP benefits past three months. It would also have limited states’ usual ability to waive those requirements depending on economic conditions. The preliminary injunction will preserve that flexibility.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it was adopting the rule change in December, but critics have called on the department to suspend implementation, especially in light of the economic crisis spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this week, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the department planned to move ahead with the rule.Article continues after sponsor messagehttps://e1edf8f6d2e972f2da50da0c223f83a4.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

While the rule applies to “able-bodied adults without dependents,” anti-hunger advocates note that category can include parents who don’t have primary custody of their kids, youths who have recently aged out of foster care and some low-income college students.

In her ruling, Howell cited concerns raised by the spread of coronavirus and its effect on the most vulnerable Americans. “Especially now, as a global pandemic poses widespread health risks, guaranteeing that government officials at both the federal and state levels have flexibility to address the nutritional needs of residents and ensure their well-being through programs like SNAP, is essential,” she wrote.

The change to SNAP is now blocked from taking effect pending the outcome of a lawsuit by 19 states plus the District of Columbia and New York City.

“This is a major victory for our country’s most vulnerable residents who rely on SNAP to eat,” D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine, who co-led the coalition behind the lawsuit, said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s rule would have forced hundreds of thousands of people who could not find work, including 13,000 District residents, to go hungry. That could have been catastrophic in the midst of our current public health emergency.”

“At a time of national crisis, this decision is a win for common sense and basic human decency,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who co-led the coalition with Racine, said in a statement. Her office noted that the change would have denied SNAP benefits to more than 50,000 people in New York City alone.

“As we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic,” James said, “the effects of this rule would be more destructive than ever.”

Food Shortages? Nope, Too Much Food In The Wrong Places

Together Inc. food bank workers distribute food at a drive-through location in Omaha, Neb., last week. Disruptions in the agricultural supply chain caused by the coronavirus pandemic are making it difficult for food banks.

In recent days, top U.S. government officials have moved to assure Americans that they won’t lack for food, despite the coronavirus. 

As he toured a Walmart distribution center, Vice President Pence announced that “America’s food supply is strong.” The Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner for food, Frank Yiannas (a former Walmart executive) told reporters during a teleconference that “there are no widespread or nationwide shortages of food, despite local reports of outages.”

“There is no need to hoard,” Yiannas said.

In fact, the pandemic has caused entirely different problems: a spike in the number of people who can’t afford groceries and a glut of food where it’s not needed. 

Dairy farmers in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Georgia have been forced to dumpthousands of gallons of milk that no one will buy. In Florida, vegetable growers are abandoning harvest-ready fields of tomatoes, yellow squash and cucumbers for the same reason. 

“We cannot pick the produce if we cannot sell it, because we cannot afford the payroll every week,” says Kim Jamerson, a vegetable grower near Fort Myers. Those crops will be plowed back into the ground. “We’ll have to tear ’em up,” Jamerson says. “Just tear up beautiful vegetables that really could go elsewhere, to food banks, and hospitals, and rest homes.”Article continues after sponsor message

The country’s food distribution system, in normal times, is a marvel, efficiently delivering huge amounts of food to consumers. But it relies on predictability, like a rail system that directs a stream of trains, on set schedules, toward their destinations. Now, some of the biggest destinations — chain restaurants, schools and workplace cafeterias — have disappeared, and supply chains are struggling to adapt.

Jay Johnson, with JGL Produce, a vegetable broker in Immokalee, Fla., is the kind of person who makes this system work — matching buyers with sellers. “You’re getting phone calls, text messages, emails, all day and all night,” he says. ” ‘What’s your price on this? What grade? Can you do a better deal?’ You’re doing all these micronegotiations throughout the day.”

On Tuesday, March 24, he says, that all changed. “Everything got quiet. Wednesday, the 25th, superquiet. Thursday, now we’re getting nervous.”

Normally, chain restaurants buy a steady supply of produce, week after week. But most have shut down — and did so just as Florida’s vegetable harvest shifted into high gear. “Now you’re sitting there with all this production, perfect weather, and everybody’s like, ‘Oh no,’ ” Johnson says.

He told vegetable grower Mike Jamerson, Kim’s husband, that “we’re in trouble here. And it’s to the point where I’m going to fill my warehouse up and I’m going to have to tell you to stop picking.” That’s when workers stopped picking yellow squash on Kim Jamerson’s farm. 

A week after Jamerson told NPR that they’d have to “tear up” their crops, the situation had improved a bit. Workers have resumed picking, but it’s now a “salvage operation,” Jamerson says. Workers are discarding vegetables that weren’t picked in time. The vegetables that they salvage will be sold at cut-rate prices, with some going to food banks.

Something similar has happened to dairy farmers. Milk sales in supermarkets have increased, but not enough to make up for the drop in sales of milk to schools and cheese to Pizza Hut. Factories that make milk powder can’t take any more milk. So some milk cooperatives have told their farmers to dump the milk that their cows are producing. 

The situation is especially dire for Florida’s tomato growers, who sell 80% of their production to restaurants and other food service companies, rather than to supermarkets. “Think about all the sandwiches that people eat at lunch when they go out. Burgers, or salads at restaurants,” says Michael Schadler, from the Florida Tomato Exchange, which represents some of the state’s largest growers. “Many of those food service items have tomatoes.” 

Schadler says growers already are “walking away from big portions of their crop,” writing off huge investments. 

Meanwhile, food banks and pantries are having trouble supplying enough food to people who need it, including millions of children who no longer are getting free meals at school and people who’ve lost jobs in recent weeks.

Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, a network of food banks and charitable meals programs, says that these programs normally receive large donations of unsold food from retail stores. In recent weeks, though, as retailers struggled to keep their shelves stocked, “we’re seeing as much as a 35% reduction in that donation stream from retail,” Babineaux-Fontenot says.

Food banks are trying to claim more of the food that is stranded in the food service supply chain, either through donations or by buying it. 

“We are capturing some of that. I know we’re not capturing all of it, but we have a whole team of professionals whose job is to try to make sure that we capture as much of it as we possibly can,” Babineaux-Fontenot says. “So we’re having conversations with major restaurants. We’re having conversations with major producers, with trade associations, the whole gamut.”

Kim Jamerson thinks “it’s just a shame” to have enough food, but not be able to get it to the people in need. “A woman who’s got two kids how can she live on unemployment, go into a grocery store and pay 90 cents for a cucumber? She just can’t do that.”

Part of the problem is that it takes labor to move produce from one place to another, and people are still figuring out who will pay for that. Jamerson says she can’t afford to pay workers to pick a crop that will be donated. She wants the government to step in, provide workers or the money to pay them, and make sure food gets to where it’s needed. “The government could send the food to the hospitals, the rest homes, to the food banks, to the churches,” she says.

Jay Johnson, the produce broker, says there are signs of hope. The food banks in Florida, he says, are starting to buy some of his vegetables and figuring out new ways to distribute them. 

They asked Johnson to pack some vegetables in smaller packs, so food banks don’t need so many volunteers to repack them. “They’re understaffed, and don’t have warehouse space, and they’re having to think creatively,” he says. 

“I see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel here,” he says, adding that he won’t make money on those sales to food banks. Farmers won’t either, but at least they’ll be able to keep their workforce employed until, hopefully, better times arrive.

Food Banks Get The Love, But SNAP Does More To Fight Hunger

People load their vehicles with boxes of food at a Los Angeles Regional Food Bank earlier this month in Los Angeles. Food banks across the United States are seeing numbers and people they have never seen before amid unprecedented unemployment from the COVID-19 outbreak

Millions of newly impoverished people are turning to the charitable organizations known as food banks. Mile-long lines of cars, waiting for bags of free food, have become one of the most striking images of the current economic crisis. Donations are up, too, including from a new billion-dollar government effort called the Farmers to Families Food Box Program.

Yet many people who run food banks are ambivalent about all the attention, because they know the limitations of their own operations. They point to a stream of food aid that’s far more important than food banks: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Food banks actually have two separate functions. They provide food to people who need it, but they also find new homes for food that might go to waste — often because farmers and food companies haven’t been able to sell it. This second job can be unwieldy and labor-intensive.

Take, for example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new food bank donation program. It was set up, in large part, to relieve distress among farmers and food companies who can’t find places to sell their products — like Borden Dairy, a Dallas-based milk processor which saw demand plunge when restaurants and schools closed in mid-March. The company couldn’t find buyers for all the milk its farmers were producing, and asked some of them to simply dump the surplus.Article continues after sponsor message

Too much milk

As part of the new USDA program, though, Borden Dairy won a $137 million contract to send 44 million gallons of milk to charitable organizations, mainly food banks.

Tony Sarsam, Borden Dairy’s CEO, says it “gives a sense of purpose and meaning to this organization. And it’s also important because we work with so many independent farmers. It gives them stability.”

More than a hundred companies got similar contracts from USDA, worth a total of $1.2 billion. They include wholesale distributors of fresh produce and meat. More contracts are coming, with the department expecting to spend about $3 billion on this new program. It has become an emergency buyer of surplus food, and the purchase price includes money to transport the food to food banks.

Sarsam and other companies who’ve won USDA contracts now have to figure out how to give away these products. It means setting up a new and mostly unfamiliar supply chain. “We have to get off to the races, and find connections in the charitable community that can take our products. We’ve been on the phones non-stop,” he says.

It’s more complicated than one might imagine. “Cold storage is a big deal; not everybody has enough cold storage for it,” Sarsam says.

So far, he’s only found takers for about 10% of the milk that the company needs to give away to earn that full paycheck from the USDA.

Robin Safley is on the receiving end of these donations. She’s executive director of Feeding Florida, an association of twelve food banks. Those organizations deliver food to a couple of thousand small non-profit groups that hand it out to people at temporary distribution points known as food pantries.

“First of all, we’re grateful, right?” Safley says. “Grateful in a lot of ways.”

But the logistics of getting food to the right place at the right time is a challenge even in normal times. Throw in social distancing, volunteers worried about their safety, and a wave to potential donations from USDA-funded companies, and it gets downright daunting.

“That means we have new people to deal with. How many trucks are they sending, and where are they sending them?” Safley says. “We don’t want them to stack up on some of the other trucks that we have moving.” She compares it to solving a Rubik’s cube.

The USDA has a separate program that buys commodities and donates them to food banks, but it’s smaller than the new effort, amounting to roughly half a billion dollars worth of food donations each year.

There is, however, a whole different way to help people get the food: Simply distribute money that people can use to buy groceries.

Money instead of food

This is what makes SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, so effective. Last year, 35 million people received $55 billion in SNAP benefits, down from a peak of 47 million people and $76 billion in 2013. The program, which falls under the aegis of the USDA, delivers roughly nine times more food to people than the entire Feeding America network, which includes food banks.

Jess Powers, who’s worked with several food assistance programs, says that this method — transferring money, rather than bags of produce — is better in a lot of ways. For one thing, she says, “it’s just more efficient.” SNAP recipients simply pay for groceries using an electronic benefits card. Also, people have more freedom to buy what they need, and the money they spend helps local businesses.

“It has this multiplier effect in communities, and it’s actually a better economic value because it creates economic activity,” Powers says. Unlike the new USDA commodity purchases, though, SNAP does not solve the problems of farmers who’ve lost restaurant sales due to the pandemic.

Food banks themselves, in fact, are among SNAP’s biggest fans. “Those of us in the anti-hunger community, we truly believe that SNAP is far and away the most important component of our social safety net against hunger in our country,” says Craig Gundersen, an economist at the University of Illinois who also works with Feeding America.

Yet SNAP doesn’t enjoy the same bipartisan applause as food banks. Over the years, many politicians — mostly conservatives — have tried to restrict access to the program, citing relatively small scale abuses by recipients.

Before the current crisis, the Trump administration had moved to cut access to SNAP for hundreds of thousands of people. It has since put those moves on hold, and it is allowing states to increase SNAP benefits to families that currently don’t get the maximum amount. Some anti-hunger groups are calling on the USDA to go further, and boost the maximum amount of SNAP benefits that people can get.

Gundersen says food banks do have a big role to play, and they have some distinct advantages. Unlike SNAP, anybody can show up and get food, with no proof of citizenship required and no complicated application procedure. “People may run out of money at some point over the course of the month, and they have their local food pantry where they can go get more food. Wonderful!” Gundersen says.

But food pantries aren’t big enough to do what SNAP does. Even with billions of dollars worth of extra food donations, they mainly just fill in the gaps.

Puerto Rico struggles with less

Puerto Rico, however, is in a notably different situation than the rest of the country. Instead of SNAP, Puerto Rico has a program called the Nutrition Assistance Program, which delivers significantly less aid to people on the island. And unlike SNAP, which spends more money when more people qualify for benefits, Puerto Rico’s program has a fixed budget, which means that in tough times, like today, each deserving person has to make do with less assistance.

As a result, charitable organizations in the territory have been shouldering a bigger share of the burden, and a leading food distributor in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Produce Exchange, will soon be delivering food to them under a new USDA contract worth $107 million.

Gualberto Rodriguez, the company’s president, says he’s gotten used to working with community organizations. After Hurricane Maria, the company also delivered food to them under contracts with the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We’re a much poorer community here. So one thing we have is just a lot more webs of help that are embedded in our community,” he says. “These are not strangers taking care of strangers. These are our neighbors taking care of neighbors. So it’s a very special thing that happens when we go through these situations in the Caribbean and in Puerto Rico, in particular.”

But when asked whether it would be better to transfer money instead, so that people could buy food from local businesses, Rodriguez paused.

“It’s a great question,” he said, finally. “I believe the commercial system works really well, if you empower people with the money to buy from it. It creates entrepreneurial activity where people figure out a way to address the needs of that person who has purchasing power. So I think it would [be better.]”

Frederick Douglass On How Slave Owners Used Food As A Weapon Of Control

American writer, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass edits a journal at his desk, late 1870s. Douglass was acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution of slavery he had escaped as a young man. He made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies.

President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” The president’s muddled tense – it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following – provoked some mirth on social media. But the spotlight on one of America’s great moral heroes is a welcome one.

Douglass was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 – he did not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate – to a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father (whom he never knew and who was likely the “master” of the house). He was parceled out to serve different members of the family. His childhood was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.Article continues after sponsor message

THE SALT 

‘Nurse, Spy, Cook:’ How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through Food

At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery orator and activist. Acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution he had escaped, he made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies. His memoirs bring alive the immoral mechanics of slavery and its weapons of control. Chief among them: food.

As a young enslaved boy in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass bartered pieces of bread for lessons in literacy. His teachers were white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had no food. At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery orator and activist.

“Never mind, honey—better day comin,’ ” the elders would say to solace the orphaned boy. It was not just the family pets the child had to compete with. One of the most debasing scenes in Douglass’ first memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes the way he ate:

“Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.”

Douglass makes it a point to nail the boastful lie put out by slaveholders – one that persists to this day – that “their slaves enjoy more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world.”

In truth, rations consisted of a monthly allowance of a bushel of third-rate corn, pickled pork (which was “often tainted”) and “poorest quality herrings” – barely enough to sustain grown men and women through their backbreaking labors in the field. Not all the enslaved, however, were so ill-fed. Waiting at the “glittering table of the great house” – a table loaded with the choicest meats, the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay, platters of fruit, asparagus, celery and cauliflower, cheese, butter, cream and the finest wines and brandies from France – was a group of black servants chosen for their loyalty and comely looks. These glossy servants constituted “a sort of black aristocracy,” wrote Douglass. By elevating them, the slave owner was playing the old divide-and-rule trick, and it worked. The difference, Douglass wrote, “between these favored few, and the sorrow and hunger-smitten multitudes of the quarter and the field, was immense.”

The “hunger-smitten multitudes” did what they could to supplement their scanty diets. “They did this by hunting, fishing, growing their own vegetables – or stealing,” says Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, who, of course, is named after the activist. “In their moral universe, they felt, ‘You stole me, you mistreated me, therefore to steal from you is quite normal.’ ” If caught, say, eating an orange from the owner’s abundant fruit garden, the punishment was flogging. When even this proved futile, a tar fence was erected around the forbidden fruit. Anyone whose body bore the merest trace of tar was brutally whipped by the chief gardener.

Frederick Douglass, circa 1879.George Warren/National Archives

But if deprivation was one form of control, a far more insidious and malicious one was the annual Christmas holidays, where gluttony and binge drinking was almost mandatory. During those six days, the enslaved could do what they chose, and while a few spent time with distant family or hunting or working on their homes, most were happy to engage in playing sports, “fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. … It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas.” To encourage whiskey benders, the “masters” took bets to see who could drink the most whiskey, thus “getting whole multitudes to drink to excess.”

The nefarious aim of these revels was to equate dissipation with liberty. At the end of the holidays, sickened by the excessive alcohol, the hungover men felt “that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum.” And so, Douglass wrote, “we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field – feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”

Douglass sounds even angrier at these obligatory orgies – he calls them “part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery” – than at other, more direct forms of cruelty.

“It was a form of bread and circus,” says Opie. “Slaves were also given intoxicated drinks, so they would have little time to think of escaping. If you didn’t take it, you were considered ungrateful. It was a form of social control.”

When he was about 8 years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, which proved to be a turning point. The mistress of the house gave him the most precious gift in his life – she taught him the alphabet. But when her husband forbade her to continue – teaching slaves to read and write was a crime – she immediately stopped his lessons.

It was too late. The little boy had been given a peek into the transformative world of words and was desperate to learn. He did so by bartering pieces of bread – he had free access to it; in Baltimore, the urban codes of slavery were less harsh than in rural Maryland – for lessons in literacy. His teachers were white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had no food. “This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge,” Douglass wrote in one of the most moving lines in Narrative.

“This also shows the ingenuity of enslaved people,” says Opie, “and how they tricked and leveraged whatever little they had to get ahead.”

Today, when one thinks of Frederick Douglass, the image that springs to mind is of a distinguished, gray-haired man in a double-breasted suit. It is difficult to imagine him as a half-starved boy garbed in nothing but a coarse, knee-length shirt, sleeping on the floor in a corn sack he had stolen. As he wrote in Narrative, “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”

It is a heartbreaking image – redeemed by one little word, “pen.” A pen that he wielded with passion, clarity and irony to gash the life out of slavery.

Inequality & Structural Racism in the Food System

Addressing racism must be at the core of what we do as an anti-hunger community, and we cannot end the cycle of food insecurity and chronic disease without changing the fundamental systems and policies which perpetuate racial and other forms of inequality.

We’ve been watching the news, horrified, for the last two weeks. As police violence runs through every state, it’s clear that this is what racism looks like in America.

The reality is that racism is also fundamental to why many of our Black neighbors don’t have enough to eat. With decades of discriminatory policy that have led to poorly-funded schools, higher unemployment, lower homeownership, and worse access to food, it’s no surprise that double the number of Black households face hunger as compared to white households. The staggering economic effects of COVID-19 are set to make that even worse.

Our mission to end hunger must include taking action on racism. So, non-Black allies, we invite you to join us in recommitting to fighting racial discrimination and violence in all its forms.

Five quick actions to take right now as an ally for Black lives:

1. Donate to the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation and NOWTRUTH.ORG‘s “War on Human Inequities” (WOHI) – a nonprofit project of the two. See more below.
2. Get educated on how you can be a better ally. Here’s an anti-racist reading list to get you started.
3. Learn more about why tackling racism is so key to ending hunger in America.
4. Talk to your kids about anti-Black racism and police violence. Start with this great guide.
5. This is the only beginning of the road to justice for George Floyd and many. many others. Sign the #JusticeForFloyd petition and take a stand on excessive police violence.

Black Lives Matter, and we must stand with those demanding justice, accountability, and action to confront the racism and inequality that lead to police violence and hunger alike. We’re hopeful that, together, we can make a difference.

AMWF and NOWTRUTH.ORG‘s “War on Human Inequities” (WOHI) recruits and develops leaders from low income backgrounds and organizes campaigns to address economic survival issues that people face. The WOHI agenda includes:

• Funding essential community services through progressive taxes
• Food Insecurity
• Judicial Reform
• Social Justice Reform 
• Criminal Justice Reform
• Workers’ Rights
• Affordable Housing
• Health Care
• Equal Education
• Welfare Reform
• Living Wage and Equal Pay
• Immigrant Rights
• Environmental justice

AMWF bases its work on the following principles:

• Unity. WOHI is committed to building an organization that brings together activists from varied segments of the community by uniting families on welfare, senior citizen activists, rank-and-file union leaders and community activists into one organization.
• Multi-issue. WOHI is building a multi-issue organization that adds strength and helps support the efforts of other single-issue organizations. By working collaboratively with progressive legislators and other social action groups around the state, WOHI has developed a multi-issue agenda called the “War on Human Inequities”, which addresses such issues as Food Insecurity, Judicial Reform, Criminal and Social Justice Reform, revenue, tax reform, jobs, wages, child care, health care, housing, education, and the safety net.
• Power in grass-roots organization. The key factor determining the ability to make a difference in the community is the size of its network of grass-roots activists. Whether building support for the initiatives of constituent organizations or developing independent campaign, WOHI seeks to empower ordinary people to change social policies that affect their lives. The WOHI organizing approach focuses both on developing commitment and leadership of people new to social activism, and on working with existing activists and organizations to strengthen their effectiveness.

1) Judicial Reform to END the Grand Systemic and Endemic Corruption; Social Justice Reform to END the Grand Systemic and Endemic Corruption of which Systemic Racism is a part; 

2) Criminal Justice Reform; Gun Violence;

3) COVID-19 & Our Communities; 

4) a. Hunger and Food Insecurity;

4) b. Homelessness; 

5) Racial Injustice, Equality, Racial Justice is Education Justice, Support Ethnic Studies Programs, Black Lives Matter Barber Shop, Islamophobia, Xenophobia;

6) Wealth Inequality, Income Gap, Poverty and Basic Needs;

7) Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline; School Safe Zones; Protecting Students’ Civil Rights; Facing Hate and Bias at School, Teen Violence and Abuse, Teen Depression and Suicide, Youth Alcohol Usage, Transportation; 

8) Immigration, Refugee Crisis, Families Belong Together, Dreamers;

9) Healthcare, Obesity, Smoking;

10) Climate Justice Reform, 

11) Voting Rights;

12) Sport and Athletes Human Rights

Background:

• The Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun, CityLab, 2018
• 4 Not-So-Easy Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System, Yes! Magazine, 2017
• Leaders of Color Discuss Structural Racism and White Privilege in the Food System, Civil Eats, 2016
• Growing Justice: Transcending Racism in the Food System, The Next System Project, 2016
• Dismantling Racism in the Food System, by Food First, 2016
• Uprooting Racism in the Food System: African Americans Organize, Huffington Post, 2013

Videos

The underlying racism of America’s food system: Regina Bernard-Carreno at TEDxManhattan

Impacts of Gentrification on Food Insecurity

Impacts of Gentrification on Food Insecurity

A video documentary researching the impacts of gentrification and urban renewal on the availability of food in Church Hill, the oldest neighborhood in Richmond, VA.

Bridging indigenous knowledge and science to end hunger | Muthoni Masinde | TEDxUFS

Bridging indigenous knowledge and science to end hunger | Muthoni Masinde | TEDxUFS

Muthoni reveals how indigenous knowledge is crucial for small-scale farmers, food security in Africa and the creation of effective solutions for managing the agriculture in rural areas that are plagued by droughts and mass hunger. The talk explores bridging recent technological innovation with indigenous knowledge, through the ´ITIKI´ computer science tool which can predict meteorological data inexpensively and accurately and assist local farmers. Muthoni Masinde is a computer scientist with B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D computer science degrees from the University of Nairobi, the Free University of Brussels and University of Cape Town respectively. She is currently Head of the Department of IT at the Central University of Technology. One of her greatest research achievements is the development of a novel tool to predict droughts in Africa. The tool taps into the rich African indigenous knowledge on natural disasters and augments it with ICTs. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Black Food Matters: Race and Equity in the Good Food Movement | Devita Davison | Change Food Fest

Black Food Matters: Race and Equity in the Good Food Movement | Devita Davison | Change Food Fest

In this video: Devita Davison, director of marketing and communications at FoodLab Detroit, shares the story of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, explaining the barriers there still are today for food entrepreneurs of color. FoodLab Detroit is transforming Detroit’s local food economy by supporting a diverse community of food businesses and allies working to make good food a sustainable reality for all Detroiters. About: Devita Davison, a native of Detroit and granddaughter of a preacher, lived almost 19 years in New York before moving back to her hometown of Detroit in 2012. Her words are not just letters strung together; they are vessels for love and fight, heart ache, wisdom, and profound joy. To say she wears her heart on her sleeve is an understatement; whether decrying injustices in the food system or expounding on the beauty of a ripe strawberry in summer, her passion for food justice is palpable. Stay up to date with all our Quickbites and exciting projects from Change Food! http://changefood.org Change Food is a grassroots movement creating a healthy, equitable food system. We provide various levels of expertise to organizations that are not getting sufficient support yet are creating real, replicable change. In addition, through conferences, events and special projects, Change Food raises public awareness and connects various parts of the food movement. Want to get to know us more? Get our monthly newsletter: http://bit.ly/signupCF Support us on Patreon!: http://bit.ly/PatreonCF Like us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/ChangeFoodFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/changeourfood Like us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/changeourfood LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7427675 Google+: https://plus.google.com/+ChangeFoodOrg

Systemic Racism in Our Food System

Systemic Racism In Our Food System

The incredible Pam Koch talks about our broken food supply and much more in the new episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, which is up now https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/PamKoch