People’s Grocery: Food Empowerment in the Inner City

“We have a lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­gram called the Growing Justice Institute,” Henderson told Organic Connections. “It came about because we were try­ing to fig­ure out how to be more effi­cient; our pro­grams had become very labor inten­sive and we needed to fig­ure out a way to get more peo­ple to have access to our food and information.

“We actu­ally ended up going back to some of the foun­da­tional tenets of com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing, where if you talk to ten peo­ple and nine dis­agree with you, you focus on that one per­son. We real­ized that there were plenty of peo­ple in West Oakland who were already knowl­edge­able about healthy food. We just needed to find out who they were and sup­port them to do their own projects and enter­prises in a net­work. In that way more peo­ple could have access to infor­ma­tion and ser­vices through a method that wasn’t one non­profit try­ing to talk to 30,000 people.

“We now have six to ten new fel­lows [local activists or orga­niz­ers] per year com­ing on board from West Oakland, who come up with their own ideas for food, health projects and enter­prises, or who already have food projects and enter­prises that they just want to have be more acces­si­ble. After a work­shop series and a sequence of coach­ing ses­sions with us, we launch this project or enter­prise in part­ner­ship with the fel­low. Through the net­works that they cre­ate, more peo­ple in West Oakland have access to a suite of ser­vices and enter­prises, as opposed to just the one or two that we could do once a year.”

The 2011 fel­lows are engag­ing in projects such as cook­ing classes, a revenue-producing com­mu­nity gar­den, a raw food stand and meal ser­vice, a health and nutri­tion demon­stra­tors’ pro­gram, and a food trans­porta­tion resource ser­vice, which pro­vides peo­ple liv­ing in low-income hous­ing a trans­porta­tion ser­vice to get back and forth to food pantries. More such pro­grams are in store from the 2012 fel­lows who have recently come on board.

Henderson has observed a major advan­tage to empow­er­ing neigh­bor­hood cit­i­zens. “It can be a very fine line between being actu­ally infor­ma­tional and patron­iz­ing,” she explained. “This is espe­cially true when work­ing with a com­mu­nity that’s been deal­ing with poverty. They have all kinds of non­prof­its and social ser­vices try­ing to tell them every lit­tle thing to do with their lives, and that they’re not doing well. It can be very frus­trat­ing and fatiguing.

“Our Growing Justice Institute fel­lows are peo­ple who have been liv­ing in West Oakland, who know every­body. People don’t find them patron­iz­ing, even though they might just find them annoy­ing. They know them. ‘This is that crazy per­son who’s been doing raw food for­ever; and Billy, can you please just shut up about the raw food?’ But they do it in a fun kind of way, and they will actu­ally lis­ten to him because it’s Billy and not me, whom they don’t know.”

In addi­tion, People’s Grocery hosts reg­u­lar events that attract hun­dreds of peo­ple from through­out the area. “In our West Oakland gar­den we have these big events once a quar­ter, and between a hun­dred and three hun­dred peo­ple come to get a free meal. There’s a bouncy house and all kinds of dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties for the kids, there’s a DJ with music, and they just get to hang out and party. Throughout the day we infuse lit­tle mes­sages here and there about what they are eat­ing, like ‘So this meal is actu­ally a raw salad. Bet you didn’t know that was raw, huh?’ and ‘Nope, that’s actu­ally not meat; it’s tofu. Have you ever eaten tofu before?’ All of these lit­tle things in fact start them think­ing about it in a way that they didn’t even real­ize was education.

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“We then get back in touch with all those peo­ple. We con­tinue invit­ing them to the gar­den for weekly gar­den events, which are much smaller and more tar­geted. People come to the gar­den, har­vest, cook together, and then eat and talk about what­ever is on their minds. It’s not just a ses­sion where we do a bunch of nutri­tion edu­ca­tion, but a ses­sion where we get to actu­ally hear what’s going on in people’s lives. If we can con­nect food to some of those things, we do. But more than any­thing they see us as a source of sup­port and a resource for them; and if we are able to slip in some food edu­ca­tion, they are much more in a state to listen.”

Personal Motivation

It was shortly after fin­ish­ing col­lege that Henderson decided reha­bil­i­ta­tion of our crip­pled food sys­tem was some­thing she wanted to be part of. “Originally I was super-involved with cli­mate change and mak­ing sure that the coun­try could be energy effi­cient,” Henderson recalled. “When I was learn­ing about sus­tain­abil­ity as a holis­tic con­cept, food was always the thing that got my heart going, and I engaged in food-related projects on the side as an extracur­ric­u­lar activ­ity. But then when Michelle Obama planted the White House gar­den, I knew that I really wanted to work on it full time; it seemed like there was going to be enough invested in it nation­ally to make it a pos­si­ble career choice for me. I promptly quit my energy-efficiency job and moved over into the food world. When I applied to People’s Grocery I was lucky enough to get the position.

But there were even more per­sonal rea­sons for Henderson’s choice of career. “I have a fam­ily in which my elders—my grand­mother, great aunts and uncles—were just rid­dled with dia­betes and diet-related dis­ease. Not many of them are alive any­more. It was depress­ing to try to put together why so many of my fam­ily mem­bers were strug­gling so much health­wise, and in real­ity it was because of food.

“My mom was the first one who broke ranks and actu­ally started eat­ing healthy, because she didn’t want that to hap­pen to her. She knew that her other fam­ily mem­bers were suf­fer­ing from things that were com­pletely pre­ventable, so she just got her­self together and she raised us to eat very healthy from day one. I grew up extremely con­scious of the fact that what I put into my body is directly con­nected to my health and how I feel. Watching the rest of my extended fam­ily go through what they did made me feel like there needed to be a wider effort beyond just me and my imme­di­ate fam­ily to ensure that peo­ple like my aunts and uncles had an eas­ier time of under­stand­ing the con­nec­tion and being able to do some­thing about it.”

To learn more about People’s Grocery and their many activ­i­ties, visit www.peoplesgrocery.org.