The Essential

People's Project

Sheila and Clovetta Mack, Teachers & Color Of Change members from Oakland, California.

“Being a teacher is most rewarding because I can make a difference in young children’s success for their futures. The pandemic has allowed me to be the voice for students and for parents. I continue to educate students on a daily basis in a variety of school districts. All of them have individualized lesson plans around the areas of their need. My expectations for them are the same as if I were in the classroom physically with them. Black students should have the assurance that they can feel safe at school like everybody else and that they can be able to thrive academically.” – Sheila Mack

“I started a petition with Color Of Change to fight for reparations for Black Students in Oakland where the school to prison pipeline is prominent. If they did away with the police department and used the extra money towards students it would make amends to some of the hardships and make a better environment for Black boys and Black children in the Oakland public schools. How can our children compete without computers? How can they compete without access to the Internet? In a pandemic, where does it leave our families?” – Clovetta Mack

Learn more about the Reparations for Black Students campaign and about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign. 
Photographer: Sarahbeth Maney

COC member Shannel Hawkins of Oakland, CA

“A big passion for me right now is financial literacy within the Black community, especially for Black women. I advocate for financial literacy with a partnership with Snowball Wealth and work with them on educating and uplifting women on the topic of money.

As a Black woman, we have the largest amount of student debt out of any other group in the U.S. In my first year of college, I took out one loan, and then the longer I stayed, the loan amounts just kept getting bigger. I had to work full-time, sometimes had two or three jobs at once, while my white counterparts were able to enjoy school, focus on class, and relax. At one point, I even was unenrolled in class due to a late tuition payment.

After I graduated, I didn’t realize what was going to happen with my student debt, no one really told me. I was a first-generation student and this was all new to my parents. It gave me a lot of anxiety. I just saw a big number on every statement. I had heard about people who paid off their student loans in one year, just grinding super hard, but I felt that was nearly impossible for me.

So I attended a seminar with Snowball Wealth. They eliminate the shame about student debt, created a plan for me, and helped me manage my loans. It reassured me that I’m not the only one suffering from student debt and that I am capable of paying them off. Now I want to pass on the things I’ve learned tackling my student debt to other women in my community and show them you can still live your life with student debt and also invest in your future.” Shannel Hawkins

Photographer: Sarahbeth Maney
Learn more about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign.

Shannon Maldano, Founder of YOWIE, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“As a store, we were mostly online through the pandemic, but the reality is that people love our storefront and miss coming into our space. We want people to feel like they can explore and that the products have a pedestal to speak for themselves. There’s nothing like walking into a space, picking up a ceramic that you’ve been eyeing from afar and falling in love with it. Last March, I had no idea when I’d be able to open again so we quickly transitioned to being fully online. We drove all of the products home and took iPhone photos to get them up on the website. I started thinking of ways we could survive online for the years ahead and wanted our assortment to reflect our audience’s habits. We knew everyday life now included going to the grocery store every other day, so one of our first products was this huge tote that you could use for groceries and errands. We also knew people were home cooking more so we brought in more pantry items. And after the protests last Summer, being a Black and women-owned business, we received so much support our store was emptied out in two days. Like a lot of other Black business owners, it was really hard to access capital at that time. We applied to everything I could find locally and nationally, to get grants or small loans. We weren’t in the space to apply for a PPP loan so we applied to little things here and there and we didn’t get anything until the end of the Summer. It was all over the map of who was getting the money, and a lot of us felt frustrated. Instead of business owners looking and applying for financial help, business groups and local leaders should be reaching out to us. There should be a database connecting Black businesses with funding. We need long-term support to make sure we’re not doggy paddling through the different difficult stages of building a business.” – Shannon Maldonaldo of @helloyowie

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com

Photographer: Kriston Bethel

Lynn Darby, Student, Temple U, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  

“I know I want to teach in predominantly Black communities to play a role in closing the achievement gap. I also know that I’m in this profession first and foremost to make an impact in student’s lives, but I also know that I have this huge debt that I have to pay off, so it, unfortunately, makes me have to consider the financial side of things when considering where I want to teach because I need to make sure that I’ll be financially stable. A problem not only at Temple but almost all universities right now are that they are still charging full-priced tuition for remote learning while college campuses are essentially shut down and students don’t have access to the same resources. We’re not getting the same robust education that we once were, we’re missing out on in-person field experiences, and yet we’re still being charged full tuition. Additionally, this issue is disproportionately affecting Black and Brown students and causing a spike in dropouts among people in our community which really speaks to the achievement gap and how the pandemic is exacerbating the systemic problems that we already faced. It’s the motivating factor of why we started @RefundUs_TU to bring awareness to this issue that colleges are essentially robbing us at this point. They’re valuing this style of education with fewer resources, just as much as fully in person and it’s mind-blowing honestly. In my opinion, there is no reason why students should have to go into debt at the same rate that they were prior to the pandemic when they certainly aren’t getting the same quality of education right now. College is supposed to be a way to create opportunities for yourself and be successful. However, when you have factors like generational wealth that make it easier for some people to attend and systemic barriers that make it harder for others to attend the system becomes inequitable and unjust and those are factors that should never be a part of any aspect within our education system.” Lynn Darby

Learn more about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign. 

Hector Gerardo, Director of 1Freedom for All: 

“We don’t do charity work. We do community organizing work. We organize youth to identify and work on an issue in their community. Youth develop their own campaigns to create solutions and action plans to end whatever issues they see affecting them and their community. Issues/problems like, food insecurity and the school to prison pipeline. The young people in our organization are shedding light every day on the work that elected officials should be doing. People that have power should be doing the work that we’re doing — but they’re not — so it has to be us, to represent us, to make sure that we’re alright.” 

“We don’t receive funding from any politicians or government agencies. We do this all out of pocket: we’ve paid our drivers, we’ve paid ourselves, we’ve paid our young people with our own money. Right now, we understand that we can’t do that anymore. The pandemic has made it impossible for small organizations like our own to fundraise and we need financial support more than ever. We need the community to help out, which is why we created this fundraiser, so we can keep our office doors open. Our organization has been overlooked for three years and it’s time for people to know that organizations like mine are out there.”

“Now, we’re shedding light on how the pandemic has shown that our communities have never been in positions of power and that we’ve always been struggling. Because it shows. The BIPOC community and residents of the South Bronx get COVID at a higher rate than any other community.  We’ve died at a rate higher than any other race. And why is that? Because our communities have been in a pandemic way before Covid-19.” 

1Freedom focuses on helping solve food insecurity in the South Bronx and emphasizes involving youth from the community in their organizational efforts to help create a multi-generational campaign to drive systemic change. 

Black and low-wage workers should be able to meet basic necessities without working multiple jobs. We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Learn more here. 
Photographer – Tyler Welsh 

Jenea Robinson, Founder of Marsh & Mane, Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 

“I’m the owner of Marsh + and Mane, a beauty supply lifestyle boutique. Like many naturalistas, I am a product junkie myself! Prior to opening my own store, I used to spend so much time in the beauty supply store shopping for new products and looking up ingredients. I was also a part of different hair groups and blogs—it was just a passion of mine. While I enjoyed shopping for products, the experience was not a great one. So I decided to open the type of beauty supply store I wish I could shop in! Over the last 5 to 10 years I’ve seen an increased focus on Black beauty supply store ownership specifically. We spend the most in this industry but do not make up the majority when it comes to ownership. I was fortunate enough to find three Black women who own beauty supply stores in other parts of the country and they helped me understand the ins and outs of the business. I wanted to create an experiential beauty supply experience. I know people say retail is dead but people still shop for hair and beauty products in person, we still want to see them, smell them.  Being shutdown for a few months during the pandemic was hard. You put all your time, your energy and resources into opening this business and then the world shuts down and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I had to shift focus to solely online sales and thankfully, online sales increased because by April everyone had settled into the idea of being home and doing their own hair. In the near future, I definitely want to grow and expand to have other locations and open up other concepts specifically for Black women.” Jenea Robinson Founder of @marshandmane

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com 
Photographer: Kriston Jae Bethel

Sarah Thankam Matthews, co-founder of Bed Stuy Strong: 

“We’re experiencing a profound and traumatic loss at a huge societal level. Mutual aid is one tool in the toolbox to reach out a hand and say, you are not alone. Like, you’re not going to struggle and bear this by yourself, because that’s an inhumane burden. A lot of what gets Bed-Stuy Strong attention and is sort of made tangible with numbers is our grocery deliveries. We live in a capitalistic world, driven by metrics, so people hear, oh, 23,000 people supported through free and contribute-what-you-want grocery deliveries, that’s great. But one of the things we also did recently was, we found out that one of our neighbors we were supporting in our network passed away. So we got up a collection to send to the family and sent food over. I think that this is what’s also important: actually getting to know people, fighting alienation, emphasizing that we’re in this together. A year into the pandemic, I think that organizers are really tired and running on fumes. They’re having to make complex decisions with diminishing resources. I believe mutual aid is essential, and also that mutual aid is not a silver bullet. We need real redistribution at the government level, real support, a social safety net. Anything less is a violation of the social compact. My message to all people and particularly to people that hold positions of power is that it’s essential to stay human and to invest ourselves in other people. To forever prioritize profits, productivity, and the economic engine is the sign of a lost society. It’s essential not to be callous about people’s lives and it’s essential to have empathy for what people are going through right now and demonstrate that empathy as a verb.” –  @smathewss of @bedstuystrong

Bed-Stuy Strong was founded in March in the days after the pandemic hit NYC and has supported more than 23,000 people with a week of groceries in that span. 

We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Join us here. 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh

Sabrina Brockman, owner of Grandchamps

“When Covid hit, we had a conversation about the need for maintaining access to food for our local community and how we could grow that during this time when we were worried about accessibility for food. We partnered with Brooklyn Supported Agriculture who were already operating partially out of our space distributing groceries.” 

“Protecting people and staff was at odds with continuing to operate and what the government was allowing us and encouraging us to do. We didn’t always have access to PPE and when we did it came at a much higher cost. We felt like we needed to operate in a way that protected as many people as possible. I recognized that few would feel sympathy for the fact that we decided not to do outdoor dining but from a values perspective, we didn’t feel right about that. And so we didn’t do it.”

“ I think the way that we operate, the way that we do business is something others can learn from. It’s not an approach that maximized profitability but it’s an approach that really invests in people. And we see the reward from that through employee retention, our sales, the engagement that we have with our customers that allows us to have a pulse on the needs of the community. So as business owners, we have a lot to contribute to bigger conversations with local officials and agencies on how we can develop our local economy in a way that serves a broader group of people.”

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh

Alexis Mena, founder of UniverseCity: 

“When the pandemic first hit, I was managing a hydroponic farm inside of a middle school for another non-profit. And when it all first started happening they called me up and were like ‘We are going to close out all the farms.’ And I refused, I said ‘Absolutely not, this is a major resource to this community. The moment we take this resource to produce our own food out of Brownsville, is the moment that we become pushed further into insecurity…”

“… A few months later, I realized that this wasn’t enough. We were able to grow maybe 300 pounds of food a month which can serve between 15 and 25 families in a population of 35,000 people. It just wasn’t enough. So I started reaching out to people in the community and by the end of the year we worked with more than 23 mutual aid groups and nonprofits and we supported a network of over 70 free fridges while maintaining two of our own. So we really surprised ourselves as to how much we were able to do as an 80%-90% volunteer effort.”

“Last year, we distributed 2.5 million pounds of food but I can’t say that I’m proud of every single pound of that food. A lot of that food was not good for my people. A lot of that food was not good for their immune systems. I’m proud of our efforts. I’m proud of how we came together. We’re choosing to take back the means of production, cutting the umbilical cord to the white capitalist supremacist system that we’re a part of, and stop leaning on them to sustain us. We’re not growing to sell to people, we’re growing so people can heal themselves with the food. My goal this year is to grow 100,000 pounds of food throughout New York State and bring it back to this community. That’s not even a quarter of what we did last year, but I believe it’ll be more impactful because it’ll be done with these hands.” 

Black and low-wage workers should be able to meet basic necessities without working multiple jobs. We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Learn more here. 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh

Sheila and Clovetta Mack, Teachers & Color Of Change members from Oakland, California.

“Being a teacher is most rewarding because I can make a difference in young children’s success for their futures. The pandemic has allowed me to be the voice for students and for parents. I continue to educate students on a daily basis in a variety of school districts. All of them have individualized lesson plans around the areas of their need. My expectations for them are the same as if I were in the classroom physically with them. Black students should have the assurance that they can feel safe at school like everybody else and that they can be able to thrive academically.” – Sheila Mack

“I started a petition with Color Of Change to fight for reparations for Black Students in Oakland where the school to prison pipeline is prominent. If they did away with the police department and used the extra money towards students it would make amends to some of the hardships and make a better environment for Black boys and Black children in the Oakland public schools. How can our children compete without computers? How can they compete without access to the Internet? In a pandemic, where does it leave our families?” – Clovetta Mack

Learn more about the Reparations for Black Students campaign and about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign. 
Photographer: Sarahbeth Maney

COC member Shannel Hawkins of Oakland, CA

“A big passion for me right now is financial literacy within the Black community, especially for Black women. I advocate for financial literacy with a partnership with Snowball Wealth and work with them on educating and uplifting women on the topic of money.

As a Black woman, we have the largest amount of student debt out of any other group in the U.S. In my first year of college, I took out one loan, and then the longer I stayed, the loan amounts just kept getting bigger. I had to work full-time, sometimes had two or three jobs at once, while my white counterparts were able to enjoy school, focus on class, and relax. At one point, I even was unenrolled in class due to a late tuition payment.

After I graduated, I didn’t realize what was going to happen with my student debt, no one really told me. I was a first-generation student and this was all new to my parents. It gave me a lot of anxiety. I just saw a big number on every statement. I had heard about people who paid off their student loans in one year, just grinding super hard, but I felt that was nearly impossible for me.

So I attended a seminar with Snowball Wealth. They eliminate the shame about student debt, created a plan for me, and helped me manage my loans. It reassured me that I’m not the only one suffering from student debt and that I am capable of paying them off. Now I want to pass on the things I’ve learned tackling my student debt to other women in my community and show them you can still live your life with student debt and also invest in your future.” Shannel Hawkins

Photographer: Sarahbeth Maney
Learn more about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign.

Shannon Maldano, Founder of YOWIE, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“As a store, we were mostly online through the pandemic, but the reality is that people love our storefront and miss coming into our space. We want people to feel like they can explore and that the products have a pedestal to speak for themselves. There’s nothing like walking into a space, picking up a ceramic that you’ve been eyeing from afar and falling in love with it. Last March, I had no idea when I’d be able to open again so we quickly transitioned to being fully online. We drove all of the products home and took iPhone photos to get them up on the website. I started thinking of ways we could survive online for the years ahead and wanted our assortment to reflect our audience’s habits. We knew everyday life now included going to the grocery store every other day, so one of our first products was this huge tote that you could use for groceries and errands. We also knew people were home cooking more so we brought in more pantry items. And after the protests last Summer, being a Black and women-owned business, we received so much support our store was emptied out in two days. Like a lot of other Black business owners, it was really hard to access capital at that time. We applied to everything I could find locally and nationally, to get grants or small loans. We weren’t in the space to apply for a PPP loan so we applied to little things here and there and we didn’t get anything until the end of the Summer. It was all over the map of who was getting the money, and a lot of us felt frustrated. Instead of business owners looking and applying for financial help, business groups and local leaders should be reaching out to us. There should be a database connecting Black businesses with funding. We need long-term support to make sure we’re not doggy paddling through the different difficult stages of building a business.” – Shannon Maldonaldo of @helloyowie

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com

Photographer: Kriston Bethel

Lynn Darby, Student, Temple U, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  

“I know I want to teach in predominantly Black communities to play a role in closing the achievement gap. I also know that I’m in this profession first and foremost to make an impact in student’s lives, but I also know that I have this huge debt that I have to pay off, so it, unfortunately, makes me have to consider the financial side of things when considering where I want to teach because I need to make sure that I’ll be financially stable. A problem not only at Temple but almost all universities right now are that they are still charging full-priced tuition for remote learning while college campuses are essentially shut down and students don’t have access to the same resources. We’re not getting the same robust education that we once were, we’re missing out on in-person field experiences, and yet we’re still being charged full tuition. Additionally, this issue is disproportionately affecting Black and Brown students and causing a spike in dropouts among people in our community which really speaks to the achievement gap and how the pandemic is exacerbating the systemic problems that we already faced. It’s the motivating factor of why we started @RefundUs_TU to bring awareness to this issue that colleges are essentially robbing us at this point. They’re valuing this style of education with fewer resources, just as much as fully in person and it’s mind-blowing honestly. In my opinion, there is no reason why students should have to go into debt at the same rate that they were prior to the pandemic when they certainly aren’t getting the same quality of education right now. College is supposed to be a way to create opportunities for yourself and be successful. However, when you have factors like generational wealth that make it easier for some people to attend and systemic barriers that make it harder for others to attend the system becomes inequitable and unjust and those are factors that should never be a part of any aspect within our education system.” Lynn Darby

Learn more about Color OF Change’s Student Debt Elimination campaign. 

Hector Gerardo, Director of 1Freedom for All: 

“We don’t do charity work. We do community organizing work. We organize youth to identify and work on an issue in their community. Youth develop their own campaigns to create solutions and action plans to end whatever issues they see affecting them and their community. Issues/problems like, food insecurity and the school to prison pipeline. The young people in our organization are shedding light every day on the work that elected officials should be doing. People that have power should be doing the work that we’re doing — but they’re not — so it has to be us, to represent us, to make sure that we’re alright.” 

“We don’t receive funding from any politicians or government agencies. We do this all out of pocket: we’ve paid our drivers, we’ve paid ourselves, we’ve paid our young people with our own money. Right now, we understand that we can’t do that anymore. The pandemic has made it impossible for small organizations like our own to fundraise and we need financial support more than ever. We need the community to help out, which is why we created this fundraiser, so we can keep our office doors open. Our organization has been overlooked for three years and it’s time for people to know that organizations like mine are out there.”

“Now, we’re shedding light on how the pandemic has shown that our communities have never been in positions of power and that we’ve always been struggling. Because it shows. The BIPOC community and residents of the South Bronx get COVID at a higher rate than any other community.  We’ve died at a rate higher than any other race. And why is that? Because our communities have been in a pandemic way before Covid-19.” 

1Freedom focuses on helping solve food insecurity in the South Bronx and emphasizes involving youth from the community in their organizational efforts to help create a multi-generational campaign to drive systemic change. 

Black and low-wage workers should be able to meet basic necessities without working multiple jobs. We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Learn more here. 
Photographer – Tyler Welsh 

Jenea Robinson, Founder of Marsh & Mane, Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 

“I’m the owner of Marsh + and Mane, a beauty supply lifestyle boutique. Like many naturalistas, I am a product junkie myself! Prior to opening my own store, I used to spend so much time in the beauty supply store shopping for new products and looking up ingredients. I was also a part of different hair groups and blogs—it was just a passion of mine. While I enjoyed shopping for products, the experience was not a great one. So I decided to open the type of beauty supply store I wish I could shop in! Over the last 5 to 10 years I’ve seen an increased focus on Black beauty supply store ownership specifically. We spend the most in this industry but do not make up the majority when it comes to ownership. I was fortunate enough to find three Black women who own beauty supply stores in other parts of the country and they helped me understand the ins and outs of the business. I wanted to create an experiential beauty supply experience. I know people say retail is dead but people still shop for hair and beauty products in person, we still want to see them, smell them.  Being shutdown for a few months during the pandemic was hard. You put all your time, your energy and resources into opening this business and then the world shuts down and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I had to shift focus to solely online sales and thankfully, online sales increased because by April everyone had settled into the idea of being home and doing their own hair. In the near future, I definitely want to grow and expand to have other locations and open up other concepts specifically for Black women.” Jenea Robinson Founder of @marshandmane

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com 
Photographer: Kriston Jae Bethel

Sarah Thankam Matthews, co-founder of Bed Stuy Strong: 

“We’re experiencing a profound and traumatic loss at a huge societal level. Mutual aid is one tool in the toolbox to reach out a hand and say, you are not alone. Like, you’re not going to struggle and bear this by yourself, because that’s an inhumane burden. A lot of what gets Bed-Stuy Strong attention and is sort of made tangible with numbers is our grocery deliveries. We live in a capitalistic world, driven by metrics, so people hear, oh, 23,000 people supported through free and contribute-what-you-want grocery deliveries, that’s great. But one of the things we also did recently was, we found out that one of our neighbors we were supporting in our network passed away. So we got up a collection to send to the family and sent food over. I think that this is what’s also important: actually getting to know people, fighting alienation, emphasizing that we’re in this together. A year into the pandemic, I think that organizers are really tired and running on fumes. They’re having to make complex decisions with diminishing resources. I believe mutual aid is essential, and also that mutual aid is not a silver bullet. We need real redistribution at the government level, real support, a social safety net. Anything less is a violation of the social compact. My message to all people and particularly to people that hold positions of power is that it’s essential to stay human and to invest ourselves in other people. To forever prioritize profits, productivity, and the economic engine is the sign of a lost society. It’s essential not to be callous about people’s lives and it’s essential to have empathy for what people are going through right now and demonstrate that empathy as a verb.” –  @smathewss of @bedstuystrong

Bed-Stuy Strong was founded in March in the days after the pandemic hit NYC and has supported more than 23,000 people with a week of groceries in that span. 

We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Join us here. 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh

Sabrina Brockman, owner of Grandchamps

“When Covid hit, we had a conversation about the need for maintaining access to food for our local community and how we could grow that during this time when we were worried about accessibility for food. We partnered with Brooklyn Supported Agriculture who were already operating partially out of our space distributing groceries.” 

“Protecting people and staff was at odds with continuing to operate and what the government was allowing us and encouraging us to do. We didn’t always have access to PPE and when we did it came at a much higher cost. We felt like we needed to operate in a way that protected as many people as possible. I recognized that few would feel sympathy for the fact that we decided not to do outdoor dining but from a values perspective, we didn’t feel right about that. And so we didn’t do it.”

“ I think the way that we operate, the way that we do business is something others can learn from. It’s not an approach that maximized profitability but it’s an approach that really invests in people. And we see the reward from that through employee retention, our sales, the engagement that we have with our customers that allows us to have a pulse on the needs of the community. So as business owners, we have a lot to contribute to bigger conversations with local officials and agencies on how we can develop our local economy in a way that serves a broader group of people.”

Whether you’re looking for Black-owned shops to support or want to submit a Black business you think we should uplift, visit BlackBusinessGreenBook.com 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh

Alexis Mena, founder of UniverseCity: 

“When the pandemic first hit, I was managing a hydroponic farm inside of a middle school for another non-profit. And when it all first started happening they called me up and were like ‘We are going to close out all the farms.’ And I refused, I said ‘Absolutely not, this is a major resource to this community. The moment we take this resource to produce our own food out of Brownsville, is the moment that we become pushed further into insecurity…”

“… A few months later, I realized that this wasn’t enough. We were able to grow maybe 300 pounds of food a month which can serve between 15 and 25 families in a population of 35,000 people. It just wasn’t enough. So I started reaching out to people in the community and by the end of the year we worked with more than 23 mutual aid groups and nonprofits and we supported a network of over 70 free fridges while maintaining two of our own. So we really surprised ourselves as to how much we were able to do as an 80%-90% volunteer effort.”

“Last year, we distributed 2.5 million pounds of food but I can’t say that I’m proud of every single pound of that food. A lot of that food was not good for my people. A lot of that food was not good for their immune systems. I’m proud of our efforts. I’m proud of how we came together. We’re choosing to take back the means of production, cutting the umbilical cord to the white capitalist supremacist system that we’re a part of, and stop leaning on them to sustain us. We’re not growing to sell to people, we’re growing so people can heal themselves with the food. My goal this year is to grow 100,000 pounds of food throughout New York State and bring it back to this community. That’s not even a quarter of what we did last year, but I believe it’ll be more impactful because it’ll be done with these hands.” 

Black and low-wage workers should be able to meet basic necessities without working multiple jobs. We’re calling on Congress to enact a living wage. Learn more here. 
Photographer: Tyler Welsh