Heritage Foods and Entrepreneurial Growth: Ingredients for Transformative Change

Income inequality

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Systemic racism drives migration in Latin American countries. Individuals of color, women, and children experience interpersonal and community violence, lack of educational opportunities, and poverty. Individuals flee their home countries for fear of persecution due to environmental racism and cultural genocide. Indigenous families are forced to assimilate, losing access to language, ancestral knowledge, and land. During their migration journey, individuals may endure trafficking, exploitation, and sexual abuse. Although seeking asylum is a human right, refugees continue to face systemic racism as well as complex trauma leading to emotional detachment from their children, continuing a cycle of trauma. They also face barriers such as inability to work legally, stable housing, and unaffordability of legal representation. Other barriers include access to healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods leading to nutrition insecurity and impacting overall wellness for these families.

The garden-to-table program is an initiative focused on combating systemic racism by bridging ancestral knowledge and entrepreneurship opportunities. This innovative program will create visibility for women of color who are susceptible to femicide and land displacement in their home countries. Following a community participatory approach with three phases of development, the first phase began with identifying experienced Latin American and Native land stewards who have experienced land displacement and cultural erasure. Oral stories will be collected in their respective native languages and interpreted to Spanish and English establishing cross-cultural linguistic information systems. In the second phase, an enriching and inclusive garden curriculum will be developed where all ages will benefit from learning. In the third phase, workshops will be facilitated by experienced agricultural program members, passing down cultural knowledge to youth and other individuals who have not benefited from land-based relationships. Produce grown will be utilized for nutrition education and food distribution. A strong component of the program will include scholarships for participants of the gardening classes, cooking demonstrations, and farmer’s market that can be utilized for initial legal representation retainers, entrepreneurial venture seed money, and additional workforce training. Donations will be made based on items made in workshops and produce distributed at the farmer's market.

Historically, community edible gardens and farmers markets are not accessible to low-income families in suburban areas. Although our initial project is an individual farmers market, we hope to expand into a county-wide cooperative where advocacy for land access in empty lots all around Los Angeles county can be converted to edible community gardens with farmers markets. Establishing more garden-to-table programs throughout Los Angeles county will ensure that individuals of color, land-displaced migrants, victims of violence, and low-income individuals experiencing systemic oppression will have opportunities to collaborate in community power-building towards social and economic equity. Underserved communities will be able to build a relationship with the land, what’s grown on the land, and lead more holistic and dignified lives in a healing environment. In the first year of project implementation, we hope to impact a total of 2,000 lives and duplicate the amount each following year.

We will utilize community partnerships to measure impact as we have done for previous programs. In collaboration with graduate-level student interns from local universities, we will implement quantitative and qualitative data collection methods through community focus groups, pre-program assessments, post-program impact surveys, and participant testimonials. We will track program attendance, program retention, and outreach engagement after each series. Stipend distributions, stipend uses, and success of new entrepreneurial ventures will be tracked through interviews with participants within 6 months of the program pilot year. Program evaluations will be done to better inform future curriculums and establish further program sustainability. Community forums will be held each year to measure impact at a grander scale in Los Angeles county. The forums will evaluate increased advocacy for navigating California zoning laws, land access regulations, and increase in similar initiatives.