Part 3 | New Growth and Sharing the Bounty
by Asha Gowan
Part 1 and Part 2 thoroughly situated our farm in the context of history that’s crucial to understanding the current state of Southside, Asheville. You learned how urban renewal, redlining, and gentrification have targeted and systematically divested our historically black neighborhood of resources to the point of food apartheid.
Part 3 will explore the impact we are currently making in our community and beyond. Our less than one acre of richly fertile land is facing the risk of shutdown by HACA’s plan to establish a $200,000 playground in its place.
HACA hasn’t made it’s final decision, and we’re not waiting – we’re taking action now to reach out and communicate not only the vital importance of our work but also to express our deep appreciation for our existing community, especially our youth.
Read this article to learn more about:
- Our community outreach this year
- New partnerships and alliances
- Our favorite highlights from your letters and petition statements
- A special feature on our youth programs
Sign our petition to fight for our future.
Find more ways to support and protect the farm.
2024 Community Involvement
Photo Credit: Mike Talyad
We’ve really been leaning into community engagement this year! If you follow us on social media, you’ve seen the potlucks, farmer’s markets, double the amount of BIPOC-only workshops, benefits, dinners, garden days, and so much more.
To mention a few, this July, we partnered with New Belgium Brewing to host a BIPOC farmer’s market that showcased food, art, and crafts by other local vendors and business owners of color.
More recently, @sowtrueseed spotlighted the farm’s Feed Asheville box program, now in its third year of delivering free, fresh food to BIPOC families weekly. In addition to free distribution, some of the food harvested from the farm is used in youth education classes and herbal medicine workshops like the Salve Making workshop we led in July. With community at the center of everything we do, we’re using the fruits of our labor to create a full circle of nutrition and healing.
Our schedule is booked with events all the way out to September so follow us on Instagram @southsidecommunityfarm or Facebook to stay updated.
Speaking of impact, we’ve also been making headlines! Just this past April, artist, educator, and Southside resident, Cleaster Cotton, was featured in a Citizen Times article focusing on the farm’s value as she expressed:
“This is a place that is so necessary for this community. For the health and well-being and the psychological healing and also so people can get some good food.”
Yet, in another feature by BPR News, Monique Pierre, the Housing Authority’s new CEO, voiced what she thought was a more urgent imperative:
“One of our biggest concerns is that our children have a place to play where they have fun activities, basketball courts, and engaging games that give them that social emotional developmental opportunity to run around and be kids outside.”
Hold on a second! Engaging kids in fun activities outside is a big part of what we do at Southside Community Farm. In fact, we work with youth every summer at the Arthur Edington Center, a community center which is owned and operated by the Housing Authority. This year is no exception, and our staff has worked hard to create fun, engaging, educational opportunities for Southside’s children around the topics of food, farming, ecology and more. While there are several playgrounds and basketball courts available in proximity to the Edington Center, there really is no other resource like our farm in the area, including for our children. We know that nature-based play and education have a profound impact on the “social emotional developmental” of children, and we get to see to see that impact through our work.
And we’re expanding. Our team is always thinking of creative ways to enhance community connections, build collective food sovereignty, and create educational opportunities for people of all ages. We want to share some of this year’s most exciting highlights!
Partnerships & Alliance
From kindergarteners all the way up through college students, we are working to educate young people about land stewardship and food sovereignty. Check out some of the powerful partnerships we’ve cultivated this year as we foster the curiosity of future farmers, chefs, scientists, and justice workers.
Read to Succeed
While play is essential for the social emotional development of children, the ability to read is just as vital. That’s why we’ve partnered with Read to Succeed, a literacy program committed to closing the opportunity gap between black and white students statewide. With the 5th largest achievement gap in North Carolina, Asheville’s children need their community to step up and get involved.
This summer, we designed literacy enrichment activities to encourage ecological awareness for our Southside neighborhood kids at the Edington Center summer camp. This included investigating books on plant growth, the environment, and more. We also made sure to include fun activities like creating flower petal collages, making salsa, and planting mint!
Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project
The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project is the product of a special collaboration between Princeton University, Spelman College, and the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance (UCFA). Their mission is to collect the oral histories of people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways throughout the Southeastern US and Appalachia.
However, they also are contributing to the decolonization of anthropology by ensuring the interviewees’ have the rights to their stories. This guarantees that knowledge keepers remain the owners of their knowledge. Critical to any community’s psychological healing is the preservation of its history as told by its own members. We are excited to be part of the preservation of land-based wisdom!
Three of the project’s interns have been working closely with our farm manager, Chloe Moore, to record the stories of key staff members, founders, and members of our community. The interns are college students who are spending the summer learning how to conduct interviews while getting to hear powerful stories about food, farming, and culture. They have also spent time doing some hands-on learning while volunteering on the farm, where we’ve had the privilege of getting to know them more deeply. Check out their growing archive of stories here.
Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund
The Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund sponsors month-long paid apprenticeships for young adults to live on sustainable farms where they learn more about the slow agriculture lifestyle. On these farms, they not only work and offer their help, they come away inspired and equipped with the knowledge necessary for creating change in their own communities.
This is our second year working with ASLF. We onboarded 2 apprentices last summer including Anaya Harry, a UNC Asheville student who returned this summer for her second year of apprenticeship. Anaya is double majoring in Biology and Health & Wellness Promotion with a concentration in plants. She plans to have a career in the development of safer, research-backed medicines sourced in plants and herbalist knowledge. It has been a great pleasure to get to work with Anaya as she learns hands-on skills at Southside Community Farm.
Letter & Petition Highlights
We want to take a moment to express our huge appreciation for your continued support. Working tirelessly to come up with a regular schedule of events and resources for the community, our staff was blindsided, as many of you were, when the Housing Authority announced potential plans to remove the farm.
Even so, the way you all have come through with your consistent attendance at meetings, your involvement in our events, and your support at our markets far outweighs any discouragement.
Here are some of the letters and words of support expressed in the 2024 petition that continue to warm our hearts and validate everything we’ve put into this place.
Sincerely, Poppy
Poppy’s letter, illustrated with carefully chosen stickers and sweet asides, will be something we treasure for many years to come. You may have seen mention of it on social media but we’re featuring it here because Poppy gives us hope. She embodies the kind of young person we’re invested in nurturing – a proactive member of her community, a concerned earth citizen, and a spokesperson for our plant relatives. Here’s an excerpt we love re-reading:
“I love Southside! I love how they provide free and affordable food for the community. I like how much space there is too. I don’t want Southside to get removed because its a very nice garden for everybody to visit.”
Poppy
Respectfully Yours, CEFS
This April, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) at North Carolina State University also expressed strong support for our farm, effectively denouncing HACA’s Resolution 2024-11. Directly addressing the resolution’s concerns about pests and rodents, the letter stated that CEFS members visiting the farm site observed “proper sanitation practices” where “cooked food and trash” were “properly disposed of.”
In addition, the letter, referencing the Housing Authority’s own strategic goals, said that Southside Community Farm went above and beyond in supporting “Asheville’s Housing adults, youth, and children,” providing “educational and enrichment activities for all communities.”
One particular statement from the letter resonates:
“In a nutshell, destroying this community-built farm has far reaching impacts to food security and the physical, mental, emotional and social health of the community.”
Petition Statements
Here’s a small sampling from this year’s 3,177 petition statements currently on file from Asheville community members, organization leaders, and more!
“Myself and my neighbors in stumptown have relied on southside farm for fresh vegetables, medicinal plants, and free seeds for our own gardens. this is an indispensable resource in our community and i am demanding that the housing authority does not evict or in any way inhibit the incredible work being done at southside farm…let our farm stay.”
Lillian
“As a single parent raising a 7yo, I have relied on places like southside and bounty and soul to provide us with healthy fresh food we could not otherwise afford. My daughter attended headstart and loved the gardens as much as the play areas. please keep southside farms!”
Latara
“I am the director of Lonnie D. Burton child development center next door. Many of the families we serve as well as our teachers/students utilize this garden in multiple ways. This garden is a huge resource for our school community as well as the neighboring community we serve. It is VITAL this remains as a healthy and educational resource for the children and families of the community.”
“SCF inspired us all the way up here in Brooklyn, NY. The Prospect Heights Community Farm is indebted to their vision. Our farm has proven to provide far beyond food. The community is more unified, happy & well fed. We have events as well to support local artists. A community farm is a ‘playground’ for young & old and all in between.”
Sign our petition to fight for our future.
Find more ways to support and protect the farm.
Youth Program Feature
Children are an integral part of our philosophy of sustainability. How can we really work towards a sustainable future without teaching young people how to tend and care for the earth? Whenever possible, they should be given the opportunity to get their hands in the dirt too! As a black-led farm in a predominantly black neighborhood, it is a great joy for our staff to serve as role models of farming and land stewardship for black kids and other kids of color. We work with youth of all ages, preschool through high school.
This year, as mentioned before, we’ve teamed up with the Read to Succeed program to design an environmentally-focused curriculum. Each lesson features a book to read and a hands-on activity that gets kids thinking green.
Through Read to Succeed, we are working two days per week through the summer with young children in the Southside neighborhood. One day of the week we work with our kindergarteners and 1st graders, and the other day of the week is dedicated to our 2nd and 3rd graders.
The students are having a whole lot of fun, while also connecting with new topics and experiences. Read To Succeed’s Co-Executive Director, Ashley Allen, had this to say about our program:
“It’s been amazing for summer camp students at Chosen PODS to see themselves in roles where they have not always historically been represented. From ecology to gardening, biology, and caring for the environment, the partnership with Southside Community Farm has given students a magnificent jump start in building a passion for exploration and learning.”
Among the many lessons we offer here, our kids are:
- tasting and trying fresh, healthy foods
- planting seeds and using cuttings to grow food
- understanding the importance of seed saving, identification, and sharing
- learning about pollinators and companion planting
- engaging in creative play and craft using natural materials from the farm
For example, in one of our lessons, we taught kids about companion planting via the Indigenous three sisters – corn, beans, and squash. We help children engage with the concept of ecological cooperation by comparing the story to family dynamics, asking questions like, “who here is the oldest sibling in their family, like the corn sister? What do you have to do when you’re the oldest sibling? How does your family work together, like the garden?” We topped off the lesson with a fun craft project, visualizing the three sisters’ harmony with construction paper, yarn, and other materials.
This fall, we are excited to add Lydia Koltai to our staff as a youth educator! Lydia is a black mother, gardener, and herbalist with years of experience teaching children about gardening. We can’t wait to have more staff dedicated to our youth, and to see what amazing things Lydia creates.
When we’re not hosting classes, we enjoy the neighborhood children just coming by to use the fridge, pick blueberries and enjoy the farm. Southside Community Farm offers a beautiful public green space that is well-used and well-loved by our neighbors. There are many families and children who spend time on the farm learning and exploring at their own pace outside of any structured classes, workshops, and events.
Nature- & Farm-Based Social Emotional Learning
While playgrounds do offer children engaging settings for social emotional development, research shows that nature- and farm-based play – with learning at the center – often provide much richer developmental benefits.
One 2022 Natural Medicine Journal article analyzed 20 peer-reviewed papers on the “outcomes of outdoor education programs”:
“Outdoor education was associated with prosocial behavior, a reduction in hyperactivity-inattention, and decreased mental health struggles and peer problems. Better teamwork among peers was reported, with students developing greater respect and better communication and interaction skills.”
As a powerful example, consider the Farm Sprouts Program located at the Michigan State University Tollgate Farm and Education Center, where young children engage in stewardship and farming over an 8-week period.
The program assessed the impact that this style of educational, on-farm play had on children through parent interviews with the following results:
- Improved conversation skills/interests
- Asking more in-depth questions
- Improvements in decision-making skills
- Increased interest in nature
- Spending more time outdoors
- More adventurous and interested in exploration
- Spending more time gardening as a family
- Increased conversations around food and where it comes from
Clearly, children experience distinct benefits when their education includes nature immersion. Furthermore, when they are made to feel a part of a community that has cultivated a space where farming and healthy food can be their playground too, the seeds of real stewardship and connection to the Earth are sown.
Photo credit: Jason Garris
All Grown Up
Southside Community Farm was founded in 2014, which means we’ve been influencing kids in the Southside neighborhood for a decade.
“At just 9 years old, I became one of the first youth volunteers to work in the Southside community garden,” reflects community member Bentley Harper-Pierce, age 19. “My mom, Shuvonda Harper worked at the Edington center and volunteers in the Southside community where she grew up. She and some other community members helped start the garden by planting seeds and watching it grow. My mom would bring all the kids that hung out at our house to the garden.” That experience, he says, sparked a lifelong passion for gardening and landscaping. Now, ten years later, “the skills and knowledge I gained in that garden inspired me to start my own landscaping and gardening business with my friends.”
We are so proud of Bentley and the other young adults who grew up with the farm and are now deep in the work of caring for the land. Southside Community Farm is not only protecting our community’s future, but building the next generation of Earth advocates.
Take Action Now!
Southside Community Farm needs your help to continue this vital work.
Sign our petition to fight for our future.
Find more ways to support and protect the farm.
Part 4 Coming Soon! “Coming Full Circle: The Current 2024 Risk”
The final part of this 4-part series will not only summarize the timeline, but also provide up-to-date information on the current risk to the farm and what we can do about it.
<< Back to Part 2: Resilience in the Face of Food Apartheid
>> Forward to Part 4 “Coming Full Circle: The Current 2024 Risk” (coming soon)
About the Author
Leave a Comment