On Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023, the Cultivating Justice initiative of the Jewett Center for Community Partnerships (JCCP), located in the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life (CSPL), will host a series of workshops entitled “Growing Power.” The workshops will focus on helping members of the Middletown community gain agricultural skills, including fishing, gardening, and raising chickens. 

The day’s activities will start with opening remarks at 10:00 a.m.. All the workshops will take place from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and then repeat from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (with the exception of “Urban Chicken Keeping,” which will only take place in the morning session). The afternoon session will also include a workshop called “Building Leadership and Organizational Capacity” (BLOC). Lunch will be served between sessions.

Cultivating Justice formed out of the work of the Re-Imagining Justice Initiative, which supports the work of Middletown-based organizations to advocate for criminal justice reform, more humane alternatives to incarceration, and the abolition of prisons. Cultivating Justice focuses on providing for community needs that stem from stable food supply, access to land, environmental justice, and agriculture, specifically focusing on BIPOC and people who had been incarcerated.

Associate Director of the JCCP Diana Martinez has been instrumental in the founding of Cultivating Justice and the planning of the Growing Power workshop series. 

“Growing Power seeks to connect or reconnect families and young people—specifically BIPOC, incarceration-impacted, and low-income families—to agriculture, ancestral relationships with nature, and skills that promote food security, intergenerational relationship building, and wellness,” Martinez wrote in an email to The Argus. 

Associate Professor of the Practice in the Center for the Study of Public Life Amy Grillo is another key organizer of Cultivating Justice and Growing Power. Both initiatives, she explained, stemmed from conversations she had with Martinez and Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice Lorenzo Jones about the systemic barriers to agricultural development faced by BIPOC in Connecticut.

“We started talking about Lorenzo’s experience in trying to start [a] farm,” Grillo said. “Then we started talking about obstacles and racism in farming and agriculture as a whole, and the limitations [to] access for people of color in the state of Connecticut to [do] anything agricultural or even, frankly, outdoors.”

After their conversations, Grillo and Martinez hosted a series of meetings open to students and Middletown community members to investigate the skills and knowledge that folks were most interested in learning about.

“[The workshop series] is the result of a series of one-on-one and group conversations with community and University members who expressed a direct interest in learning and practicing skills like gardening, fishing, and community organizing.” Martinez wrote.

Martinez also highlighted some of her own takeaways from the community meetings.

“It became clear that if [we] want to cultivate justice, the [organization] itself…has to be community-owned, not Wesleyan-owned,” Martinez said. “If we want to do this right…the community has to own it and then Wesleyan can support it.”

Grillo emphasized the importance of the meetings in determining not only the needs of community members, but also the agricultural expertise that various Middletown leaders and business owners have to offer.

“We started learning more about what community interests and strengths were,” Grillo said. “A lot of what’s being offered on Saturday is not coming from Wesleyan, it’s coming from community organizations…. The folks who are leading the workshops are all community people, not Wesleyan people.”

Each of Saturday’s workshops will be hosted by Middletown community members, many of whom own or work with a local agricultural business based in or around the city. “Gardening 101” will be led by Kristianna Smith and Stacy Barka of the Fire Ring Farm, and representatives from Sasha’s Whole Earth and Fruitful Ascension will co-host “Black Herbalism & Healing.” Additionally, members of Life 1122 will teach “Fishing 101,” while Grillo will host “Urban Chicken Keeping,” alongside Lorenzo Jones, owner of local farm Chicks Ahoy. 

The workshops also cater to families and individuals in various living situations within an urban area, in an effort to expand access to agricultural knowledge and food security in Middletown. 

“[In ‘Gardening 101’], we’re gonna walk through with people what you can grow inside, by a window, [or] out on your porch, depending on how much space you have,” Martinez said. “The basis [of the workshop] being that everyone has a right to grow their own food, and sustain themselves.”

Martinez outlined some of her anticipated outcomes for the workshop series, including creating opportunities for development of personal knowledge, technical skills, and self-care rituals, especially for families of color and recently incarcerated people. 

“How do we include re-entry work in this [series] so that folks who are in recovery, folks who are recently de-carcerated, and folks who are at home for a bit also have access to this?” Martinez said. “We’re thinking about what they need not just in the technical, job-skills [sense], but also in the therapeutic [sense] of working with dirt, growing things, and working with animals in a way that can feed the soul.”

In addition to fostering personal and professional growth on an individual level, the organizers of the workshop series also see this platform as an opportunity to empower the greater community. 

“We’re gonna spend the day teaching people things about how to raise chickens, how to grow food in your backyard (or on your fire escape, if you don’t have a backyard), and we’re gonna teach them about traditions of Black herbalism,” Grillo said. “But, really, it’s not about teaching them to grow tomatoes. It’s about teaching them to grow community power…. Ultimately, the big aim of all of this [is that] the community gains strength and access to these things that they should have access to.”

Martinez explained that building agricultural knowledge in the Middletown community is just one of many ways to bring community members together for a common goal. She expressed optimism that Saturday’s workshops will lead to community members becoming more acquainted with one another and encourage them to organize for other shared community interests—an objective that will be emphasized during the afternoon’s BLOC training workshop.

“That’s why we’re tying [these workshops] with the BLOC training,” Martinez said. “There’s a clear thread through all of this of power and building power…if we stand collectively. We are a block of folks who have been traditionally marginalized in this work and in this field…here learning from each other. But we are [also] a voting block and an advocating block, and we are an organized, legislative block. That’s a whole different kind of game.”

Martinez also described Saturday’s workshops as a starting point for a number of other workshops and initiatives that will be designed and implemented under the umbrella of Cultivating Justice. 

“We hope that this is the first of many such workshops, that we can help folks develop relationships with each other and with nature, and that we can begin to organize community members around issues related to the intersections of racial justice, justice system reform, environmental justice and agriculture access.” Martinez wrote.

Both Martinez and Grillo envision several long-term benefits to the Growing Power workshop series and subsequent initiatives. They each emphasized the strengthening of bonds between students, faculty, and staff and community members as one of their primary objectives.

“Universities are not there to make mostly privileged kids become more privileged,” Grillo said. “I think every university has a civic mission and a responsibility to its immediate community…. Every scholar, every faculty member should be thinking, ‘How does the work I’m doing here in the university…affect the people who live in my community?’ I’m all about trying to make the boundaries between the university and the community more porous.”

Martinez identified students as potential key partners in building community connections and achieving progress in environmental justice in Middletown through Cultivating Justice.

“Wesleyan students have so much to offer…and have the capacity to do things that maybe community partners don’t [have] because they’re [running] their organizations,” Martinez said. “We imagine many partnerships, [including] opportunities to work with the Long Lane Farm folks, the folks who are working on sustainability on campus and at the city level, and folks who are interested in community organizing, base building, and education.”

Ultimately, Martinez and her collaborators hope that the Growing Power workshop series will begin to foster a sense of community and build connections among its participants.

“We’re developing whole people who are connected to nature, connected to each other, and feel a sense of responsibility for each other,” Martinez said.

 

Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu.