Rows of raised beds bursting with leafy greens — kale, collards and lettuce — lay against the backdrop of Douglas firs. Pear and fig trees, sunflowers, tomatoes, eggplants, chard and a medley of other fruits and vegetables span 1.15 acres of farmland.
Located in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, Black Futures Farm aims to restore the connection between Black people and the land.
In 2019, a food-growing group of Black folks, including Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Hoover, started Black Futures Farm. Growing out of a smaller project called We Grow PDX, Black Futures Farm officially broke ground on their own farm site on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020 with more than 150 volunteers.
Black Futures Farm is a part of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, a Metro Community Placemaking grantee in 2022. The coalition used their $22,000 Community Placemaking grant to fund improvements at Black Futures Farm to create a safer and more welcoming gathering space for Black, Indigenous and other people of color. The grant also supported programming and events at the farm, including a part-time outreach and event coordinator.
“It’s really important, especially with funding and financial support, that we can make decisions for ourselves in terms of ... gathering and support and how we’re together,” said Black Future Farms director and co-founder Mirabai Collins.
The coalition is dedicated to food sovereignty, or people’s right to healthy, good quality, culturally specific foods. Food sovereignty is not only about access to food, but also the production of food, which should be socially just, sustainable and ecologically sound.
Food sovereignty acknowledges that social and environmental justice are inherently connected. It is a movement to rebuild the relationship between people, food and land. Principles of food sovereignty include localized production, care and appreciation for the people involved in the process of food production, and access to fresh and healthy food.
Community resiliency and access to land are integral to food sovereignty. For the Black community, particularly in Oregon, hundreds of years of oppression, displacement, gentrification and discriminatory housing practices have resulted in deeply rooted systemic barriers and land loss.
A series of racist practices, policies and laws culminated in a loss of the equivalent of $326 billion worth of Black farmland across the United States during the 20th century. Today, Black-owned farms account for 0.1% of farmland in Oregon — a 0.4% decrease from the Black-owned farmland in the United States.
“I think, for me, the physical place is the easy place to start, but it’s probably the most difficult and elusive from a community standpoint,” said former coalition executive director Charles Smith. “Because, yeah, you’d like to have a place, but it has a history of being a little less permanent than we might think in our imaginations.”
Smith proposes a different idea of placemaking, in which place is both a physical and emotional space. At Black Futures Farm, Black Sunday has been an established community event since the farm’s inception. Every Sunday from May through October, Black folks are invited to gather at the farm and be in community.
“At our first planning meeting, there were all these things going up on the chalkboard, like CSA, and how we’re going to do this, we want to do that, and how do we raise funds,” Collins said. “And, in the midst of it all, I saw the days of the week just getting filled with stuff, and none of it was what we were there for, which was really just Black people growing food and sharing food.”
Black Sundays catalyzed the creation of Black Futures Farm, and the team is committed to keeping Sundays free for a community gathering event. The practice of growing food, enjoying food and being together is critical to their work.
“I think that’s probably pretty common, where you have this sort of inspired beginning, and then all of the things it takes to keep it going can eclipse the thing itself,” Collins said. “Fortunately, we saw that early on.”
The farm ecosystem in greater Portland is vast and vibrant. Many groups partner with Black Futures Farms to support their work, from other urban farms, schools, youth organizations, neighborhood associations, creatives and other community members.
Community partnerships are essential to the purpose and flow of Black Futures Farm, fueling new ideas and change. At the farm, education is not viewed as hierarchical or exclusive but as an exchange and a collaboration. They invite community members to share their knowledge and experience from what they know in their bodies and in their lives.
Aspiring to grow and expand
“We’d like to launch a capital campaign to purchase some land with a structure on it as part of an expanded, semi-urban Black Futures Farm site where we can host traveling farmers and interns, have a full kitchen for sharing meals and farm-to-table events, and have a bit more autonomy around infrastructure,” Collins said.
Running a farm requires a vast network of support. People can support the farm in many ways, including volunteering their time to grow food, volunteering their trade or technical skills and donating . Collins hopes that the farm can invest in tree care, connect with a contractor to help with small building and repair projects.
Food and community are intrinsically intertwined. As Black Futures Farm continues to grow, their central values will continue to bring people together to grow food and eat together, creating a strong social fabric in the community and finding joy in connecting with food and others.
“Black people were gathering on Sundays to grow food before we had a farm,” Collins said. “So Black Futures Farm is really an outgrowth of that practice.”
Community Placemaking Grant Program
Placemaking means different things to different people. For Collins, placemaking evolves out of collective imagining and collective practice. Placemaking is keeping or reclaiming a place. It is the strong relationships within a community.
Smith encourages grant applicants to understand different folks’ perspectives on placemaking.
“Being engaged enough to kind of see how other people see what placemaking can be, one, opens up our own thinking about what we might do, but two, also helps to hone in on people who are making the decision — how they see placemaking and how you can talk about your own work in the context of their own definitions,” Smith said.
The Community Placemaking grant program equips communities with the resources they need to develop, plan for and implement projects using creative, community-based methods.
The application requires applicants to address how their proposal fulfills the program’s four main objectives:
Placemaking: People’s connections to each other and to places they care about are strengthened.Equity: People of color and members of historically marginalized communities have power and resources to influence their neighborhoods and communities.Partnerships: People’s efforts are maximized because they work in partnership with each other and with Metro.Leadership: People participate in projects and decisions that affect them.
Applicants may write their responses or respond to the application questions in video format.
The grant program serves as an opportunity not only to address challenges and opportunities from a community-based, equitable, arts and culture-focused approach but also as an opportunity to strengthen the social fabric of your community.
“I would say reach out to other grantees and sort of be in community that way,” Collins said.
Article reprinted by permission from Metro, the Portland-area’s regional government. Article edited by Portland Tribune staff.
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