Growing Our Own: Characterizing Food Production Strategies with Five U.S. Community-based Food Justice Organizations

Abstract

Community-based organizations (CBOs) leading the U.S. food justice movement have helped expand community food production. Understand­ing the nature of this work is one key to being able to more effectively support and expand it. The literature, however, contains little scholarly work characterizing production-related practices of food justice CBOs. To help fill that gap, this paper draws from participatory action research with five CBOs to identify and characterize their community food production activities and goals.

This research was conducted over five years, during a project called Food Dignity, using three main methods: digital storytelling; collaborative pathway modeling; and conventional case study methods that included interviews, participation and observation, and document analysis. These data sets were examined to identify what production activities the CBOs support and why they under­take them.

Results suggest that the CBOs invest in community food production in eight main ways. Five are directly related to food. Listed roughly in decreasing order of intensity and frequency of the activities, these are (1) growing vegetables and fruits, (2) supporting community gardens, (3) sup­porting individual gardeners, (4) supporting local farmers, and (5) fostering other kinds of food production. Additionally, three crosscutting strate­gies underpin all the CBOs’ work, including community food production: (6) connecting people and organizations, (7) promoting community food

systems, and (8) integrating their activities with community (as opposed to food) at the center. The CBOs’ goals for these activities are transforma­tional, including achieving community-led and sustainable food security, health, and economic equity.

The CBOs’ crosscutting activities and long-term goals point to supporting and assessing out­comes that include food production and access but are also nonfood related, such as leadership devel­opment and feelings of belonging or owner­ship. Their wide range of food production activities and social change goals need more support for expan­sion, trial and error, documentation, and assess­ment. In particular, intentionally supporting food justice CBOs in their crosscutting strategies, which are foundational and yet less visible and under­funded, may multiply the range and reach of their impacts.

Full text

Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
ISSN: 2152-0801 online
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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 167
Growing our own: Characterizing food
production strategies with five U.S.
community-based food justice organizations
Christine M. Porter *
University of Wyoming
Submitted March 30, 2017 / Revised July 24, September 11, and November 13, 2017 /
Accepted November 15, 2017 / Published online June 18, 2018
Citation: Porter, C. M. (2018). Growing our own: Characterizing food production strategies with
five U.S. community-based food justice organizations. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and
Community Development, 8(Suppl. 1), 167–185. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2018.08A.001
Copyright © 2018 by the Author. Published by the Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems. Open access under CC BY license.
Abstract
Community-based organizations (CBOs) leading
the U.S. food justice movement have helped
expand community food production. Understand-
ing the nature of this work is one key to being able
to more effectively support and expand it. The
literature, however, contains little scholarly work
characterizing production-related practices of food
justice CBOs. To help fill that gap, this paper
draws from participatory action research with five
CBOs to identify and characterize their community
food production activities and goals.
This research was conducted over five years,
during a project called Food Dignity, using three
main methods: digital storytelling; collaborative
pathway modeling; and conventional case study
methods that included interviews, participation and
observation, and document analysis. These data
sets were examined to identify what production
activities the CBOs support and why they under-
take them.
Results suggest that the CBOs invest in
community food production in eight main ways.
Five are directly related to food. Listed roughly in
decreasing order of intensity and frequency of the
activities, these are (1) growing vegetables and
fruits, (2) supporting community gardens, (3) sup-
porting individual gardeners, (4) supporting local
farmers, and (5) fostering other kinds of food
production. Additionally, three crosscutting strate-
gies underpin all the CBOs’ work, including
community food production: (6) connecting people
and organizations, (7) promoting community food
* Associate professor and Wyoming Excellence Chair of
Community and Public Health; Food Dignity and Growing
Resilience Principal Investigator; Division of Kinesiology &
Health, College of Health Sciences, University of Wyoming;
1000 East University Avenue, Department 3196; Laramie, WY
82071 USA; christine.porter@uwyo.edu
Contributors and Supporting Agencies
Blue Mountain Associates; Feeding Laramie Valley; Whole
Community Project; East New York Farms!; Dig Deep Farms;
and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Funding Disclosure
Food Dignity (http://www.fooddignity.org) was supported by
A
griculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant
no. 2011-68004-30074 from the U.S. Department of Agricul-
ture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
FoodDignity

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168 Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018
systems, and (8) integrating their activities with
community (as opposed to food) at the center. The
CBOs’ goals for these activities are transforma-
tional, including achieving community-led and
sustainable food security, health, and economic
equity.
The CBOs’ crosscutting activities and long-
term goals point to supporting and assessing out-
comes that include food production and access but
are also nonfood related, such as leadership devel-
opment and feelings of belonging or ownership.
Their wide range of food production activities and
social change goals need more support for expan-
sion, trial and error, documentation, and assess-
ment. In particular, intentionally supporting food
justice CBOs in their crosscutting strategies, which
are foundational and yet less visible and under-
funded, may multiply the range and reach of their
impacts.
Keywords
Home Gardens; Community Gardens; Community
Farms; Public Health; Community Food Systems;
Community Food Production; Food Justice;
Community-based Organizations; Community-
based Participatory Research (CBPR); Food
Dignity
Introduction
The United States is a wealthy nation with more
than enough food to supply the needs of all its
residents (Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations [FAO], 2002; Hiza & Bente,
2007). However, in 2015, 12.7% of households in
the U.S. were food-insecure, and about a fifth of
American children were growing up in households
that were uncertain they will have enough to eat
every day (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, &
Singh, 2016). This problem of inequity is one of
many problems in the U.S. food system that the
food justice movement aims to help resolve
1 In this paper, my use of “we” denotes the larger Food
Dignity co-investigation team, particularly those named in
Table 1. Some of the data I analyzed for this paper are codified
knowledge products in their own right, particularly digital
stories and collaborative pathway models, authored by other
co-investigators, as cited. Our work was conducted as partici-
patory action research, or community-based participatory
(Sbicca, 2012), by localizing healthy food
production, among other things. With immediate
goals that might include sharing healthy food,
selling such food at low cost, equipping people
with production and job skills, and/or providing
opportunities for income generation (Daftary-Steel,
Herrera, & Porter, 2016), many CBOs leading the
U.S. food justice movement have been working to
expand community food production.
Little scholarly work about production-related
practices of individual CBOs, much less multiple
ones, has been published. However, understanding
the nature and purposes of this community food
production work is foundational for knowing how
to best support it, for informing strategy with eval-
uation, and for beginning to estimate its current
and potential array of yields. To help build that
foundation, this paper draws from over five years
of action research with five such CBOs to identify
and characterize their community food production
activities. The research questions this paper ad-
dresses are: (1) how do these five CBOs support
community food production work? and (2) what
their goals are for that work?
We conducted this research as part of the
Food Dignity project. Food Dignity was a five-year
effort (2011–2016) to document, support, under-
stand, and partially assess food system sustainabil-
ity and security strategies employed by five CBOs
in the U.S.: Blue Mountain Associates (BMA) in
the Wind River Indian Reservation; Feeding Lara-
mie Valley (FLV) in Laramie, Wyoming; Whole
Community Project (WCP) in Ithaca, New York;
East New York Farms! (ENYF!) in Brooklyn, New
York; and Dig Deep Farms (DDF) in the unincor-
porated areas of Ashland and Cherryland in the
San Francisco Bay Area of California. I was the
principal investigator and lead academic
collaborator in Food Dignity.1
In this paper, I use the phrase “community
food production” to mean micro- and small-scale
research (CBPR). However, the research questions I ask of this
multiproject data set and the analysis and conclusions here are
my own. Thus, though I have checked my data uses, interpre-
tations, and conclusions with co-investigators, and though this
draws extensively on the wisdom, expertise, and work of
others as cited, I am responsible for this work as sole author.

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 169
work to produce food, especially, but not only,
fruits and vegetables, for hyperlocal consump-
tion—whether in the producers’ own households
or in the immediate geographic community—via
share or sale. The production being “community-
based” means the food work is done for, by, and
with community members to self-provision and/or
to reach explicit food justice goals (as opposed to
solely as a business). All the CBO community food
production work described in this paper is
community-based.
Literature Review
Support of community-based food production is a
social change strategy used in the U.S. community
food movement that is striving for community
food security, sustainability, justice, and sovereignty
(Broad, 2016; Saul & Curtis, 2013; Winne, 2008,
2010). Enabling people to grow some of their own
food in home and community gardens has become
a fixture of that work, and of some obesity preven-
tion initiatives (Gatto, Martinez, Spruijt-Metz, &
Davis, 2017; Lawson, 2005; Zanko, Hill, Esta-
brooks, Niewolny, & Zoellner, 2014). Supporting
food gardening and other forms of community
food production may take society a step closer
toward food justice and food security, including
because that enables consumers to also become
producers (Allen, 1999). Although, as Allen notes,
ensuring households have enough to eat every day
should be the work of “a non-retractable govern-
mental safety net” (Allen, 1999, p.117), the work of
the food justice movement includes building food
systems where fewer people need to use such a net.
Certainly, interest in gardening has been grow-
ing in the U.S. (Taylor & Lovell, 2014). Today,
over a third of U.S. households grow at least some
of their own food, even if only herbs on a window-
sill. From 2008 to 2013, the number of gardening
households increased by 17% overall, driven largely
by a 63% increase among the millennial generation
(National Gardening Association, 2014).
As summarized below, a rapidly growing body
of literature demonstrates a trio of positive out-
comes from community production via home and
community gardening in improving health,
producing meaningful amounts of food, and
providing ecosystem services.
In health benefits, a recent meta-analysis of 22
quantitative studies suggests that gardening has
significantly positive effects on physical, mental
and—especially for community gardens—social
health (Soga, Gaston, & Yamaura, 2017). Addi-
tional studies that were not included in the meta-
analysis, mainly because they used observational
and/or qualitative research designs, suggest health
benefits of gardening may also include increased
fruit and vegetable intake (Alaimo, Packnett, Miles,
& Kruger, 2008; Armstrong, 2000; Litt, Soobader,
Turbin, Hale, Buchenau, & Marshall, 2011;
Meinen, Friese, Wright, & Carrel, 2012; Twiss,
Dickinson, Duma, Kleinman, Paulsen, & Rilveria,
2003), reduced food insecurity (Baker, Motton,
Seiler, Duggan, & Brownson, 2013; Bushamuka, de
Pee, Talukder, Kiess, Panagides, Taher, & Bloem,
2005; Corrigan, 2011; Stroink & Nelson, 2009), and
increased social capital (Alaimo, Reischl, & Allen,
2010; Armstrong, 2000; Twiss et al., 2003).
Gardens also yield meaningful amounts of
food. The average yield rate across eight studies
that have quantified harvests in home and
community gardens is 0.6 lbs/ft2 (2.93 kg/m2) of
growing space (author calculations from Algert,
Baameur, & Renvall, 2014; CoDyre, Fraser, &
Landman, 2015; Conk & Porter, 2016; Gittleman,
Jordan, & Brelsford, 2012; Pourias, Duchemin, &
Aubry, 2015; Smith & Harrington, 2014; Vitiello &
Nairn, 2009; Vitiello, Nairn, Grisso, & Swistak,
2010). This approaches the yield rate of 0.67 lbs/ft2
(3.27 kg/m2) estimated to be typical of vegetable
farms (Seufert, Ramankutty, & Foley, 2012).
Community food production also provides
“ecosystem services,” that is, benefits that people
obtain from ecosystems (Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, 2005, pp. 1–2). These include “pro-
visioning” services, such as of food and health, as
described above. “Regulating” ecosystems services
that gardens and community farms provide include
preserving biodiversity, cycling nutrients, and
enhancing water quality (Calvet-Mir, Gómez-
Baggethun, & Reyes-García, 2012; Cohen &
Reynolds, 2015; Cohen, Reynolds, & Sanghvi,
2012). Social and cultural services provided by
community food production appear to include
building social capital and self-efficacy (Firth,
Maye, & Pearson, 2011; Litt et al., 2011; Ober

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170 Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018
Allen, Alaimo, Elam, & Perry, 2008) and cultural
connection and continuity (Companion, 2016).
Also, increasingly, community gardening is being
recognized as a promising social change strategy
(Altman et al., 2014; Hou, Johnson, & Lawson,
2009; Nettle, 2014; Pudup, 2008).
This trio of health, harvest, and ecosystem
service benefits of community food production
suggests that better understanding production
practices offers a rich and valuable arena for
further action research to support and learn from
this work.
Another, much smaller body of research con-
siders the processes and practices of CBOs that
support community food production, especially in
community gardens. Some research has focused on
operational processes and technical lessons for
founding and managing community gardens
through interviews and/or surveys with stakehold-
ers across multiple gardens (e.g., Armstrong, 2000;
Drake & Lawson, 2015; Saldivar-Tanaka & Krasny,
2004) or via case studies with individual commu-
nity gardens (e.g., Thrasher, 2016).
Most relevant to the research question in this
paper, about how and why food justice CBOs in
the U.S. support community food production, are
the few case studies with CBOs and community
garden projects that focus on CBOs’ goals and
how they work to reach them. Case studies with six
urban community gardens in Seattle suggest that, if
intentionally designed for these ends, such projects
can promote individual empowerment, community
connectedness, and regional networking (Hou,
Johnson, & Lawson, 2009). The Five Borough
Farm action and research project has been cata-
loguing these and other outcomes—including
those in health, harvest, and ecosystem services
catagories reviewed above—from urban agriculture
projects in New York City (Altman et al., 2014;
Cohen, Reynolds, & Sanghvi, 2012). Finally, three
case studies with three different food justice CBOs
document anti-oppression ideology that underpins
each CBO’s mission and drives its activities. These
studies were with the People’s Grocery in Oakland,
California (Sbicca, 2012), Community Services
Unlimited in Los Angeles, California (Broad, 2016)
and the Detroit Black Community Food Security
Network in Michigan (White, 2011). Each of these
organizations intentionally frames how local
histories of oppression shape their communities.
Each also uses food, including food production, as
a way to help community members provide for
themselves while connecting with one another and
growing power in order to reshape their com-
munities.
The research presented here substantiates and
expands upon this literature by being the first to
characterize the activities, strategies, and drivers of
multiple U.S.-based food justice CBOs in fostering
hyperlocal, community-based food production.
Methods
Results in this paper derive from research con-
ducted as part of the Food Dignity action, research
and education project. Food Dignity was funded
over five years with nearly US$5 million from the
USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agricul-
ture. It began in 2011 as a partnership between the
University of Wyoming, Cornell University, and
five food justice CBOs (BMA, FLV, WCP, ENYF!
and DDF). When sketching the design for this
project in 2010, I invited each of these CBOs to
collaborate. I issued these invitations with an intent
to maximize variation in geographic, institutional,
historical, and community contexts, while also
attending to practical travel considerations. Each
accepted my invitation and then participated in co-
designing our action research. Table 1 provides
introductory information about each CBO.
I derived the findings in this paper about CBO
food production activities and goals by applying a
production-specific lens to the extensive case study
data and development that anchor our research
methods in Food Dignity.
The methods and data I used in this research are:
• Extensively using conventional case study
approaches (Yin, 2009), including conducting
about 200 stakeholder interviews, extensive
insider and outsider participation and
observation, and primary and secondary
document analysis. These overall methods
are described in detail elsewhere (Porter,
2018a). Having frequently read and re-read
these materials over the course of the

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 171
project, I started this research by sketching
lists of the production-related activities that
each CBO does. I then re-read my own and
other co-investigators’ field notes; interview
transcripts that contained any variation of
the word “garden,” “farm,” or “product”;
and annual reports supplied by each CBO
about their Food Dignity–related work, to
catalogue and characterize the scope of
these activities. Finally, I grouped activities
by type, yielding the eight categories
presented in the results.
Table 1. Summary Characteristics of the Food Justice CBO Partnersa in Food Dignity
Dig Deep Farms (DDF) Blue Mountain Asso
-
ciates, Inc. (BMA) Feeding Laramie Valley
(FLV) Whole Community
Project (WCP) East New York Farms!
(ENYF!)
Umbrella
501(c)(3)
organization
Deputy Sherriff’s
Activities League
(DSAL)
BMA is incorporated
directly Action Resources
International (ARI) Cornell Cooperative
Extension of
Tompkins Count
y
United Community
Centers
Location Ashland/Cherryland
areas, Alameda
County, CA
Ft. Washakie, Wind
River Indian
Reservation, W
Y
Laramie, Albany
County, WY Ithaca, Tompkins
County, NY East New York,
Brooklyn, NY
Founding year 2010 2003; in Wind River
since 2008, started
food work in 2010
2009 2006 (ended in
2016) 1998
# year
-
round
employees in
early 2015b
Approx. 10, some
with shared DSAL
responsibilities
2 part-
t
ime 2 full-
t
ime (including
ARI responsibilities)
+ varying part time
1 full-
t
ime 7 full-
t
ime
Main co
-
investigators Capt. Marty
Neideffer, Hilary
Bass, Mike Silva, Pac
Rucker, Rashaad
Butler (& Hank
Herrera until 2013)
Dr. Virginia Sutter,
Jim Sutter, Etheleen
Potter
Gayle Woodsum,
Lina Dunning, Reece
Owens
E. Jemila Sequeira,
Damon Brangman,
Monica Arambulo
Sarita Daftar
y
-Steel,
Daryl Marshall, David
Vigil
Mission Provide access to
healthy food and
j
obs in our com-
munity where access
to both has
historically been
limited
Provide quality
programming and
professional
expertise to help
meet the health and
human services
needs of the rural
and urban
communities of
Indian Country
Community based,
designed and led
work for sustainable
food security and an
equitable, just and
sustainable food
system in Albany
County, Wyoming
(vision)
Facilitate a collab-
orative effort of
organizations and
individuals to
support the health
and well-being of
everyone in Tomp-
kins County; be a
place of dialog and
action for all the
communities that
make up Tompkins
County
Organize youth and
adults to address
food justice in our
community by pro-
moting local sus-
tainable agriculture
and community-led
economic develop-
ment
Website http://digdeepfarms.
com http://bluemountain
associates.com http://feedinglaramie
valley.org https://www.food
dignity.org/whole-
community-project
http://eastnewyork
farms.org
a The other partners, in addition to these five CBOs, were the University of Wyoming, Cornell University, and Action Resources International.
Ithaca College and the University of California, Davis, also collaborated.
b The CBOs engage, hire, support, and/or mentor additional people as volunteers, interns, temporary workers, seasonal employees, and
project-specific leaders. For example, ENYF! mentors 20 to 30 youth interns each year, BMA engages summer market managers, FLV hires
interns and VISTA associates, DDF supervises interns placed via criminal justice partnerships, and WCP supported (financially and
otherwise) multiple community leaders in specific projects each year.

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172 Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018
• Consulting the Food Dignity Collaborative Path-
way Models that were developed with each
CBO. Collaborative pathway modeling is a
form of participatory inductive program
modeling for surfacing and articulating
theories of change underlying a CBO’s pro-
grams and change initiatives (Hargraves &
Denning, 2018, in this issue). The resulting
models present the CBOs’ activities and
link each activity, via a spaghetti-like web of
arrows, to short-, medium-, and long-term
outcomes. Pathway model contents corre-
spond to columns in conventional logic
models but add detailed connectivity
between activities and outcomes. The five
CBO collaborative pathway models are
available online (Hargraves & Denning,
2017). In the analysis for this paper, I sim-
ply used the models as designed, tying each
production activity to the goals each CBO
has for it by tracing the arrows.
• Relistening to first-person digital stories. During a
2015 workshop with the organization now
called StoryCenter, 12 community partners
and four academic partners each produced
a roughly two-minute story about her or his
journey to food justice and Food Dignity
work. The full playlist is available online
(Food Dignity, 2015). For this research, I
relistened to the 12 community investi-
gator-authored stories, and reread tran-
scripts of them, to identify themes of food
production activities and outcomes.
• Reviewing records of minigrants that the CBOs
awarded to members of their communities.
Part of the scope of work and subaward
that each CBO led and managed as part of
the Food Dignity partnership was to devel-
op, implement, support, and track a mini-
grant program that supported community
member proposals for improving their local
food system. At the time of this study, I
had up-to-date records of 86 minigrant
projects awarded by the five CBOs, repre-
senting a total of just over US$110,000 in
awards. I re-reviewed these to identify
which were related to community food
production and then to characterize the
focus of each production-related project.
The results below include summaries of
what kinds of production projects CBOs
supported with these minigrant funds.
The results reported below emerged from
these multiple qualitative methods, re-applied or
analyzed through the narrow lenses of character-
izing the food production activities and goals of
the five CBOs.
Results
Each of the five CBOs (BMA, FLV, WCP, ENYF,
and DDF) has heavily invested in supporting
community food production. For example, 65% of
funded minigrant projects (i.e., 56 of the 86 ana-
lyzed, and approximately as a percentage of total
dollars awarded) were invested in food production,
including four production-related education pro-
jects. The average production-related award was
US$1,339. Amounts ranged from US$156 for a
beekeeping education project in Ithaca, New York,
to US$4,299 for materials and labor to convert a
large home yard into a production garden and then
grow produce for the Laramie community.
This section summarizes the main production
and production-support activities led by each CBO,
which I characterize in eight categories. Five are
relatively discrete food production strategies: pro-
ducing vegetables and fruits, supporting commu-
nity gardening, supporting individual gardeners,
supporting farmers, and supporting other kinds of
food production. Of these five, growing food is the
most resource-intensive in terms of the quantity of
labor, land, and material inputs required. The other
three are crosscutting strategies that underpin all
the work the CBOs do: connecting, mentoring, and
networking; promoting food justice; and integrat-
ing all activities around community and people (as
opposed to around food and food systems). The
leaders of the CBOs invest much of their time in
this complex trio of strategies, which demand great
skill, expertise, and practical wisdom.
In each category below, I describe the pro-
duction work led by each CBO roughly in order of
how centrally that work features in the

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 173
organization’s activities, with the most prominent
work mentioned first. I use present tense whenever
the activities are ongoing at the time of this writing.
In the final section of these results, I charac-
terize these eight activities, especially the three
crosscutting ones, in the context of the CBOs’
long-term goals.
1. Producing vegetables and fruits to sell
and share
All but one of the five CBOs have produced vege-
tables and fruits to sell or to share in their com-
munities. Three (DDF, ENYF, and FLV) system-
atically grow food. As outlined later, the CBOs
engage in three crosscutting activities to garner,
grow, and develop the substantial resources
required to produce food. This especially includes
gaining access to land (usually public) at low or no
ongoing direct cost to the organization.
Producing and locally selling food is DDF’s
core activity. Of the five CBOs participating in
Food Dignity, DDF manages by far the most
production land and, based in California, enjoys
the longest growing season. Since its founding in
2010 with several small and scattered sites, DDF
has expanded and consolidated into 8 acres (3
hectares) on three farms: the small and original
Firehouse Farm near their offices in unincor-
porated Cherryland/Ashland, the nearby Pacific
Apparel lot with raised beds and a greenhouse, and
City View Farm. City View is within the gates of a
juvenile detention facility in San Leandro. After
resolving multiyear struggles with sheep getting
into the fields, water supplies, and hillside planting,
City View is now DDF’s biggest farm and includes
a successful orchard. DDF sells its harvests via a
community supported agriculture operation (CSA)
and, as of 2014, at DDF farm stands.
ENYF!’s first public activity was a farm and
garden stand in 1998. By 2000, it had converted a
half-acre (0.2 ha) lot next to its host organization’s
building (United Community Centers, or UCC)
into the UCC Youth Farm. UCC staff and com-
munity members had been slowly cleaning up the
lot since 1995. Harvests are sold at the ENYF!
Saturday market and Wednesday farm stand. In
2015, in collaboration with a local public housing
community, ENYF! also co-founded the half-acre
Pink Houses Community Farm that shares harvests
with residents.
FLV, in part to expand supply for the fresh-
food sharing program it had started in 2009, first
began growing food in community garden plots
and private home yards of supportive community
members in 2011. Once they leased their first
office space in a historic Laramie city park building
in 2013, FLV also planted 550 ft2 (51 m2) around
the building; it built a hoop house in 2014. In 2016,
the organization also began growing food at the
Feeding Laramie Valley Farm in a one-acre (0.4 ha)
field, including another new hoop house, at the
local county fairgrounds.
BMA became directly involved in food-related
work in 2010, including by piloting a fruit tree
orchard and hoop house on Tribal farmland with
support from a specialty crops grant. However, the
former succumbed to loose cattle (mirroring herbi-
vore challenges DDF faced at City View before
installing an electric fence) and the latter to high
winds.
BMA and FLV both currently seek to establish
multi-acre community farms, and DDF continues
to expand production areas. Threats to land access
has meant that ENYF! has focused on protectingits
existing production land in East New York, in
addition to its expansion work, such as with the
Pink Houses collaboration. WCP, having had only
one staff member year-round, is the one CBO of
the five that did not produce food directly.
2. Supporting community gardening
Four of the five CBOs (all but DDF) have been
heavily involved in founding and/or supporting
community gardens where individuals from the
area can grow their own food at very low or even
no cost, share growing skills and knowledge, and
create and maintain green spaces in their neigh-
borhoods. For example, 20 of the 56 minigrants
awarded for food production projects went to sup-
port community-based gardening work, including
home-yard–based gardens for community use, a
demonstration garden, and several season-exten-
sion investments. In addition, as described in this
and the next section, some of the CBOs provide
formal opportunities for gardeners to share or sell
their harvests.

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ENYF! founded Hands & Heart Garden in
2006 on an abandoned lot, with support from the
New York City housing department and the
GreenThumb program of the city parks depart-
ment. Today, with continued support from ENYF,
30 gardeners grow food there, mostly for their
households and in part to supply diverse produce
options at ENYF! market stands. Gardeners whom
ENYF! supports are encouraged to sell some of
their harvest at the market if they have enough. To
facilitate this, ENYF! youth interns staff a “Shared
Table” where growers can sell their harvests with-
out needing to host their own stand. Gardeners can
even invite the interns to harvest and deliver pro-
duce to the market on their behalf. Depending on
their labor contributions, 40–80% of the proceeds
return to the grower. Since 2013, ENYF! has also
been experimenting with a new growing space with
several of its most prolific growers to supply the
market and for senior growers to mentor youth.
ENYF! also collaborates with organizers of 25 of
the neighborhood’s other community gardens (of
which East New York has more than any other
New York City neighborhood). This has included
providing technical and material support and
assisting some individual gardeners.
Starting in 2009, WCP played the central role
in founding the Gardens 4 Humanity network of
community members aiming to promote empower-
ment through urban gardening and local farm
connections. Projects have included support for
communal growing spaces at a community center
and at a church, and help with founding new
community gardens with three public housing
complexes. WCP also extensively supported one
community leader in establishing an intergenera-
tional gardening project at an Ithaca, NY, senior
housing complex and another leader in expanding a
community garden in a rural village near Ithaca
(Dryden, NY).
In Laramie, in 2010, FLV helped Laramie
Rivers Conservation District to develop the first
community garden in a city-run park. FLV then
managed the garden for its first seven years, with
16 member gardeners. In 2015, FLV also began
planning with community members for another
city park garden on Laramie’s west side, which is
underserved with public infrastructure and does
not have a grocery store. It expects to break
ground soon.
DDF started as an idea discussed among a
small group of people in 2009, some of whom
wanted to focus on gardening. However, inspired
in part by Van Jones’s work (2009), DDF ended up
focusing on professional farming instead as a job-
creation and crime-prevention strategy.
In the dry and highly rural communities of
Wind River Indian Reservation, several community
garden projects have been founded, floundered,
and failed over the years. BMA supported one
community leader with a minigrant in an attempt
to resurrect one of those projects in 2011, but this
was unsuccessful due to both water access and
travel distance challenges. BMA has focused its
gardening support on home gardeners, taking
advantage of the fact that most families have plenty
of land and sufficient water access at home, often
with extended families able to provide the mix of
labor and expertise needed to garden.
3. Supporting individual gardeners
The same four CBOs (BMA, FLV, ENYF, and
WCP) have also invested heavily in supporting
individual gardeners in their communities, beyond
their community garden–level work, including by
providing supplies, technical assistance, labor
assistance, and education. For example, 20 of the
minigrant awards analyzed went to support estab-
lishing or expanding home gardens to enable
families to self-provision, share with community
members, and/or diversify and expand produce
supplies at local markets. These ranged from one
US$400 minigrant to establish a new small home
plot up to a few US$2,000 awards made for estab-
lishing large gardens (e.g., quarter acre or 0.10 ha)
and greenhouses.
Since 2011, with minigrants supported via
Food Dignity and then as part of an expanding
food justice research partnership with me, BMA
has provided 70 families with the supplies, labor,
and technical support to create and grow new
home food gardens. Between 2018 and 2020, they
plan to support another 70 families in installing
new home gardens as part of a project we call
Growing Resilience, funded by the National Insti-
tutes of Health (Blue Mountain Associates et al.,

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 175
2017). Similarly, FLV has fully supported about 35
households in Laramie in establishing new home
food gardens. FLV has also helped dozens more
with supplies, technical advice, and moral support
provided through home visits (including me, when
I was about to give up on trying to make anything
grow at an elevation of 7200 ft. (2,195 m) in Wyo-
ming) and hundreds more in public workshops and
events that it organizes. In the nearly 20 years since
its founding, ENYF! increasingly has supported
home gardeners by hosting community-led
workshops, sharing supplies such as trellising nets
and cover crop seeds, and pairing ENYF! youth
interns with older gardeners to share labor, skills,
and stories. ENYF! supports about 20 home
gardeners each year with the internship-matching
and 150 to 200 more with workshops and material-
sharing (in addition to supporting gardeners tend-
ing individual plots at community gardens). WCP
supported improving access to gardening in com-
munities struggling with low incomes, largely via
the Gardens 4 Health network mentioned above.
This network has continued even though WCP has
not. In addition to supporting development of
community gardens at the public housing locations
mentioned earlier, the network has helped several
people create gardens at their homes. DDF, as
described above, focuses on community farming
rather than gardening. However, it does also aim to
foster home food production via example and
through some public education activities, as out-
lined in its collaborative pathway model (DDF,
Neideffer, Hargraves, & Denning, 2017).
4. Supporting local farmers
WCP was the only one of the five CBOs who
devoted substantial time to farmer support. After
expanding from a project focused on childhood
obesity prevention to one more broadly focused on
food justice in 2008, WCP focused on helping to
diversify who has opportunities to farm. This work
included supporting local farmers of color, includ-
ing at Roots Rising Farm and Rocky Acres Com-
munity Farm, and collaborating with Groundswell,
a local farm incubator. This was part of an explicit
goal in WCP’s collaborative pathway model of
“increased farming and food production by people
of color and people of limited resources” (WCP,
Sequeira, Hargraves & Denning, 2017). WCP was
the only CBO to award a minigrant to a vegetable
farm, providing US$2,000 to build a greenhouse
for both production and community education
activities.
The other four CBOs support local farms by
purchasing from them or by providing sales venues
by hosting farmers markets. DDF supplements its
CSA shares and farm-stand offerings with pur-
chases from other local, organic farms as needed
through a distributor called Veritable Vegetable.
FLV fundraises to buy from local producers, in
addition to taking donations, to supply its FLV
Shares distribution programs. ENYF! and BMA
host farmers markets with low farmer vendor fees
(US$40 and US$6 per market, respectively, in 2016,
and half that for gardeners and other smaller
vendors) so that local and regional producers can
sell their harvests in those communities.
5. Supporting other kinds of community
food production
As a much less central activity, the CBOs have
supported community members in producing food
beyond fruits and vegetables. This has been mainly
through providing financial support via minigrants.
CBOs made nine awards in this area, almost
entirely to support bee or poultry husbandry.
CBOs have also provided avenues to sell resulting
food products, such as honey and eggs, and/or
helped with other kinds of food production via
technical support and education. Unlike in the
previous four sections, the activities described here
are a nearly complete catalogue rather than an array
of representative examples.
BMA helped a family expand its flock of
chickens to yield eggs beyond its family members’
own consumption needs to sell at the Tribal farm-
ers market. FLV enabled a household to improve
and expand the conditions for a small turkey-
raising operation. ENYF! has supported a local
beekeeper in not only expanding her production
but, with minigrant funding, in teaching others
how to establish their own hives and providing
community access to a honey extractor. East New
Yorkers can also sell their honey and other
homemade value-added products (that are legal for
public sale under health codes), such as hot sauces,

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at the intern-staffed Shared Table mentioned
above. DDF has experimented in the past with
honey production, and once briefly considered
trying goat husbandry, although it has decided to
focus on produce production for now. DDF has
also been exploring options for making value-
added products from its fruit and vegetable har-
vests and for catering. WCP, in activities entwined
with the mentoring described below, provided
market-research support for a local farmer to
expand his microbusiness in selling juices made
from his harvests.
6. Connecting (networking, convening and
mentoring)
Leaders in all five CBOs invested substantial time
in foundational strategic activities that few funders
pay for, measure, or count: networking, convening,
and mentoring. These connecting activities enable
all their other work, including—although not
only—when they result in formal partnerships and
collaborations. For the smallest of the CBOs,
particularly WCP, the dominant approach for
effecting food system change is helping to enable
others to lead programs and projects.
In the case of community food production,
networking is particularly important to securing
and keeping access to land; every instance of
securing land for food production for all five
CBOs resulted from their broad, intentional, and
constant networking. For example, when DDF
leaders invited an academic Food Dignity co-
investigator to help them document and charac-
terize their network, they provided her a list of 150
individual contacts across over 60 organizations
with whom they had collaborated during their first
five years of operation. These networks are how
they obtained access to the 8 acres of land for their
production operations.
Mentoring work includes ENYF!’s long-
standing youth internship program (Daftary-Steel,
2015) and FLV’s internship programs, which sup-
port the CBOs’ production capacity while passing
on expertise in growing produce. BMA convenes
the gardeners it supports to share experience and
seeds. WCP invested heavily in mentoring and
professional development with grassroots commu-
nity leaders, including, for example, by supporting
a community garden organizer in developing her
permaculture expertise. DDF joined a regional
farmer field school for its farmers’ professional
development (Meek et al., 2017).
This constant and intentional connecting has
also sometimes fostered food production beyond
securing land access and skill development. For
example, in August 2009, WCP convened several
community leaders to discuss a funding opportu-
nity for racial healing and equity efforts. Though
the group eventually decided not to apply, at that
meeting two of the participants met for the first
time and discovered that they shared a dream of
helping to connect youth to farming and—across
race, class, and geographic lines—to one another.
By 2010, in collaboration with many others and
with further support from WCP, they founded the
Youth Farm Project. The Youth Farm began in
partnership with local family farms and now
manages its own 10 acres (4 ha), with half in
production each season.
7. Promoting (advocating; reframing; and
documenting, generating, and sharing
knowledge)
As with the connecting activities, leaders in all five
CBOs also invest heavily in activities to generate,
maintain, and expand public support, including
policy and funder support, for equitable food sys-
tems and social equity. As with the connecting
activities described above, promoting activities
support and enable all the others, including secur-
ing access to land for food production.
Some of this has focused on documenting
processes and outcomes of their current activities,
such as producing the pathway models used in this
research, quantifying food harvests, and—in new
projects in Wyoming—assessing health impacts of
food gardening. Some has been via education, with
all five CBOs having hosted formal visiting groups,
such as from schools and universities, and also
scores of informal visitors, in addition to hosting
or cohosting workshops, film nights, celebration
events, and other food justice gatherings. Some of
this work has been documenting the food
(in)justice histories in their communities and using
multiple forms of disseminating that knowledge
and framing. For example, see the redlining

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discussion in (Daftary-Steel & Gervais, 2015),
digital stories produced by several CBO-based
Food Dignity co-investigators (Brangman, 2015;
Neideffer, 2015; Sequeira, 2015), and comments by
other Food Dignity partners in a minidocumentary
about producing those stories (Luotto, 2015).
To illustrate the breadth of the CBOs’ promo-
tional activities, here is an additional example from
each. One reason ENYF! agreed to partner in the
Food Dignity project was its interest in document-
ing food production quantities. They wanted to
collect this data to illustrate one of the many ways
their work benefits East New York. As land
pressures have increased, they also have joined and
helped form increasingly formal advocacy partner-
ships, including the Coalition for Community
Advancement in 2015. FLV has worked exten-
sively with local government to secure public acres
for scaling up community food production, using
results from our harvest quantification research
(Conk & Porter, 2016) to prove that significant
production is possible even in Laramie’s short
growing season. This data was helpful in securing
the acre for the Feeding Laramie Valley farm. In a
broader policy example, the director of WCP
joined in discussions to form a county food policy
council by convening a series of Community Food
Security Dialogues in 2010 where the idea first
gained traction. In 2015, she was elected to serve as
a member of the first council. DDF, as a local
government CBO collaboration, has reframed
Alameda County criminal justice as crime preven-
tion and restorative justice work, with job creation
through food production being one strategy. Its
work earned DDF the California State Association
of Counties innovation award in 2014. BMA, the
first Tribal-led CBO doing food work in Wind
River, has put food sovereignty on the map with
the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone
nations, both with the Tribal governments and the
people.
8. Integrating food system work around
people and community (not around food)
As an academic who studies food systems, I tend
to use a lens that focuses on food, including with
the food production analysis in this paper. How-
ever, the leaders of all five CBOs center their
focus on people and communities, not food, and
they each integrate their food system work around
that. For example, the way all five organizations
articulate the historical and current systemic con-
texts of current food injustice, as described above,
put community at the center of their work, rather
than food.
In another example of this people-rather-than-
food focus, FLV names one arm of its work FLV
Shares, where the goal is to enable people to “share
the best of what southeastern Wyoming has to
offer” with one another, whether that be fresh
food, land for food production, knowledge,
money, mentorship, and/or labor. In other words,
the organizing principle for these activities is
sharing within the community, rather than food.
Further illustrations of this integration around
investing in community are embedded in the final
results section below, which also outlines why these
five food justice CBOs support community food
production in these eight ways.
Why grow our own? Transformation
These CBOs support community-based food
production in these eight ways, especially the last
three crosscutting ways, to achieve not only food
security, but also sovereignty (La Via Campesina,
2010). This includes striving for individual and
collective health, power, pride, strength, and sense
of belonging. For example, long-term goals that the
CBOs articulate in their collaborative pathway
models include “reclaiming, restoring, and devel-
oping food sovereignty on our reservation” (BMA,
Sutter, Hargraves, & Denning, 2017); a “stronger,
healthier, more just, and sustainable community”
(ENYF, Vigil, Hargraves, & Denning, 2017);
“increased collaborative efforts and leadership
development in the community, strengthened
community fabric” (DDF et al., 2017); “increased
representation and power of underrepresented
groups in local food system decision-making”
(WCP et al., 2017); and “increased community
connections, sense of belonging, worth and pos-
sibility” (FLV, Woodsum, Hargraves, & Denning,
2017). A transformative short-term goal named for
FLV Shares activities mentioned above is “soften-
ing lines between giver and receiver” (FLV,
Woodsum, Hargraves, & Denning, 2017).

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In two of the communities, the CBOs support
community food production to restore and share
culturally and spiritually important foods. BMA in
Wind River Indian Reservation is helping commu-
nity members restore traditional varieties of Indian
corn and re-establish chokecherries. As noted in
their collaborative pathway model, BMA is inten-
tionally supporting gardeners so that “traditional
foods and ways are brought into current commu-
nity life” (BMA et al., 2017). Gardeners supported
by ENYF! in Brooklyn grow culturally important
foods such as callaloo, long beans, and bitter
gourd. As their pathway model notes, this forms
part of that CBO’s intentional support to increase
“production of specialty crops valued by diverse
nationalities in East New York” (ENYF! et al.,
2017).
All five CBOs partners support food produc-
tion to “grow” people and community. Both WCP
and ENYF! intentionally build intergenerational,
mutually beneficial relationships by matching
teens with local elders who provide mentorship
while receiving help with their gardening
(Brangman, 2017; Daftary-Steel & Gervais, 2015).
FLV works with food-insecure communities who
define their fresh food access needs and help FLV
design their programs for growing, buying, and,
accepting donations of local, fresh fruits and
vegetables. This provides access to, as FLV
founder Gayle Woodsum puts it, “the best of
what we have,” while demonstrating a dignity-
promoting ethic of “we” as an alternative to a
charity stance of “we” give to “them” (FLV et al.,
2017; see also Poppendieck, 1998). One of DDF’s
long-term goals is to “create hope, break bonds of
dependency, build self-reliance (transformed
individual lives)” (DDF et al., 2017). As midterm
outcomes, BMA strives for “increased friendships
and socializing between people on and off the
reservation,” (BMA et. al, 2017) and WCP for
“emergence of new community food system
leaders from underrepresented communities”
(WCP et al., 2017).
However, frontline leaders in this CBO work
also know that home and community-scale food
production offers only one, important but insuf-
ficient, strategy for healing and transformation in
the face of systemic disinvestments, poverty, and
racism (Daftary-Steel, Herrera, & Porter, 2016).
For example, the community organizer who led
WCP from 2008 to 2016 shares the story of her
brother’s declining health and early death in her
digital story:
He had tried to take care of himself. He had
been growing veggies on his patio in Brook-
lyn before it was cool to be sustainable. But
trying to live on disability after work-related
injury made it impossible for him to eat well,
no matter how many tomatoes he produced.
(Sequeira, 2015, 1:39–1:58)
Another of the storytellers, a farmer at DDF,
tells of growing up in Oakland housing projects
with no access to fresh food, then learning to farm
in Ashland/Cherryland at DDF and returning to
live in the same housing. This farmer (storyteller)
notes that he can now share his food production
knowledge with his community, but that his
Oakland neighborhood still has no access to fresh
food (Rucker, 2015).
Both the potential and the limits of individuals
producing food on their own are also illustrated in
the digital story told by a leader who works with
BMA. She describes planting cucumbers for her
young nephew, who asked her to make pickles
(Potter, 2015). However, since he ate every cucum-
ber fresh as soon as it was ripe on the vine, she had
to tell him that meant no homemade pickles that
year. He asked, “we can grow some again next year,
right, aunty?” She assured him, “Yes, we can”
(Potter, 2015).
Discussion
This paper describes how and why five U.S. food
justice CBOs support community food production
as part of their larger work to improve the equity
and sustainability of their local food systems, and
to foster health and transformation. Their main
activities specific to food production involve both
directly producing food—mostly vegetables and
some fruits—and supporting others in producing
food, especially in home and community gardens.
Each CBO also supports local farmers, mostly in
minor ways. None produces food directly via
animal husbandry, though some have supported

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 179
community members who do so. Foraging and
gleaning were not part of their activities during the
time of the Food Dignity collaboration. As
articulated in their collaborative pathway models,
all of the CBOs choose and organize their activities
with and for their communities.
In addition, all five CBOs have devoted sub-
stantial resources to three crosscutting strategies
that underpin all the work they do: (1) connecting
and mentoring people and organizations; (2) pro-
moting community food systems; and (3) integrat-
ing their strategies with community (versus food) at
the center. In other words, they do community
organizing for social justice. Their production
activities are part of social change strategies for
reaching transformational goals.
If viewing this social change work within the
“warrior, builder and weaver” categories of food
system resistance, reconstruction, and connection
work outlined by one group of food system activist
and scholars (Stevenson, Ruhf, Lezberg, & Clancy,
2007, p. 33), these organizations invest most
heavily in building local food alternatives with, by,
and for their communities and in local weaving
work for strengthening and deepening civic
engagement and connectedness. Their explicit
“warrior” work is less frequent and tends towards
hyperlocal mobilizing to foster or to protect their
building work, in particular regarding land access
for food production.
Another way of illuminating the social change
work of the CBOs is to view it through the food
regime and food movement framework developed
by Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, which categorizes
food system approaches by the politics underlying
the work. They outline the range of options from
neoliberal or reformist on the “corporate food
regime” side, to progressive or radical on the “food
movements” side (2011, p. 117). In this frame-
work, the long-term goals and the organizing
activities of the CBOs range from progressive to
radical in striving for food justice and food
sovereignty.
Because the empirical literature about the work
of CBO support for community food production is
so thin, this paper adds substantially to it by simply
categorizing and characterizing activities and goals
in CBOs’ production work. These findings are
consistent with the themes of empowerment,
connectedness, and networking found in Seattle
community garden projects, for example (Hou,
Johnson, & Lawson, 2009), and with the anti-
oppression approaches of the food justice CBOs
People’s Grocery, Community Services Unlimited,
and Detroit Black Community Food Security
Network (Broad, 2016; Sbicca, 2012; White, 2011).
Two implications of this work include: (1) in
spite of having limited and mostly insecure
resources, these CBOs lead and facilitate a wide
range of food system activities in food production
and beyond in their communities; and (2) since
such CBOs are leading localization of food systems
in the U.S., conducting more collaborative research
to help understand, learn from, evaluate, and
inform their work is important for fostering com-
munity food justice and food security.
In addition, less conclusively, another implica-
tion is that a food-focused lens that academics tend
to apply (as I do in this paper to examine produc-
tion) in understanding or assessing CBO food
justice work may unduly limit the depth and accu-
racy of the view if used alone. In particular, it risks
underestimating the core but less visible cross-
cutting strategies these CBOs take to transform
their communities through food system work. If
funders, evaluators, and other external stakeholders
in these transformations do not see this organizing
work, they will neither credit nor support it. Yet
this crosscutting work in connecting, promoting,
and integrating underpins and enables the more
visible CBO activities, such as producing food.
This is obvious to the CBO leaders, but often less
so to outsiders. Consider, for example, a reflection
from a community food system funder who was at
first impatient in the face of what she realized was
“largely invisible development” of relationships,
networks, and mentoring, noting that she realized,
“it takes time to develop this web—two to three
years minimum and unless it is supported it grows
weaker” (Feenstra, 2002, pp. 104–105).
Future Research
Three important research questions within the
frame of CBO support for community food pro-
duction that this research does not address include:
(1) what are the outcomes of these CBO

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180 Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018
production support activities? (2) how and how
much are these outcomes distributed within a
community? And (3) how much do the CBO
support strategies and the community contexts
shape these outcomes?
For example, in outcomes, what impacts does
gardening have on food security? The quality of the
evidence cited in the introduction is low, and none
of the nearly two dozen garden studies included in
a meta-analysis of quantitative health results
included food security outcomes (Soga et al., 2017).
This is a question we aim to help answer in the
five-year trial with BMA and others, once it
concludes in 2020 (Blue Mountain Associates et.
al., 2017). I also outline outcomes from home and
community gardening that we found in Food
Dignity and related action research elsewhere in
this issue (Porter, 2018b).
In distribution of outcomes, who benefits
most from these production support activities?
When I sent drafts of this paper to Food Dignity
collaborators for review, Sequeira, the former
director of WCP, noted:
I suggest that you elaborate more on how
systemic racism and economic disadvantage
thwart the possible advantages gardening can
have in the lives of low-income communities
and communities of color. Such a discussion
could be framed within the context of limited
choices for low-income households to garden
—limited availability of environmentally safe
places to grow, restrictions of the use of water
needed to garden, limited educational venues
for people to conveniently access resources,
support and technical help and of course, the
lack of policies that allocate safe and unused
land for community use (e.g., land trusts). (E.
J. Sequeira, personal communication, January
6, 2017)
In the literature, results from extensive house-
hold survey data in Ohio underline Sequeira’s
observations about space and income constraints
creating barriers to home gardening (Schupp, Som
Castellano, Sharp, & Bean, 2016). The extensive
home and community gardening support that four
of the five CBO partners in Food Dignity provide
aim to help overcome both barriers, including with
minigrants and with the full financial and technical
support that FLV and BMA have been able to
offer in the gardens-for-health trials that emerged
as a next step from the Food Dignity collaboration.
Also, all five organizations work intentionally to
reduce disparities. However, the research reported
here does not assess these important questions of
distribution of benefits (Hallsworth & Wong, 2015)
nor the classist and racist contexts of the CBOs’
work (Hilchey, 2015).
Finally, how can the reach and the outcomes
of such food justice–oriented community food
production work best be supported? And what are
its limits? (Hallsworth & Wong, 2013). The grow-
ing body of evidence that supports that food gar-
dening offers substantial yields of multiple kinds,
while empowering consumers to also be producers,
suggests that their work deserves more explicit
public policy and technical support. The CBOs
investing in increasing community food production
in community farms, most notably FLV, BMA, and
DDF, are interested in conducting future action
research to support and inform that work. In addi-
tion, supporting and assessing outcomes from the
crosscutting, community-organizing strategies
employed by the CBOs and assessing their impacts
on outcomes—as opposed to outcomes from
programs that narrowly focus on direct production
activities—is an arena ripe for further research. We
could not assess this in our work because all five
CBO partners in Food Dignity did take such
organizing approaches.
Conclusion
The community-based food production activities
of these five CBOs focused mostly on producing
vegetables and fruits directly for sharing or selling
locally and on supporting community gardens and
individual gardeners. To a lesser extent, they were
involved in supporting other forms of food pro-
duction, such as honey, eggs, or added-value
processing, and in supporting local farmers. Using
community organizing strategies, they connect,
promote, and integrate all of the production and
other food justice work they do to reach trans-
formational goals of community-led food security,
public health, and equity.

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Volume 8, Supplement 1 / June 2018 181
The three crosscutting activities by each
CBO—connecting people and organizations,
promoting community food systems, and inte-
grating their activities with community (as opposed
to food) at the center—feature deeply and broadly
in all aspects of their work. The foundational and
lynchpin roles of these activities in enabling pro-
duction and other direct food system work became
clear to outsider partners only through years of this
action-research partnership, aided by the collabora-
tive pathway modeling process. We hypothesize
that making direct investments in these crosscut-
ting activities will translate into multiplying the
range and reach of outcomes in the CBOs’ hyper-
local community food production and other food
system work. We and others should support and
evaluate such strategies in future action research
collaborations. Collaborative pathway modelling
offers a framework for grounding such evaluation
in the specificity, integrated complexity, and com-
prehensiveness of the goals of the work of these
CBOs (Hargraves & Denning, 2018, in this issue).
In her digital story mentioned above, Potter
assured her nephew that they could grow more
cucumbers next year. The premise and the prom-
ise of the CBO-led food production work charac-
terized here is that the more extensive and inte-
grated our “we” is, then the more we can grow
this year, next year, and for generations to come.
Together we could all, perhaps, eat fresh cucum-
bers now and have pickles for later, too.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the action research teams of
Food Dignity and Growing Resilience, including
gardener-researchers of Team GROW and Elisa-
beth “Livy” Lewis, and especially the community-
based researchers and leaders at each CBO who
reviewed my use of our work here. Thanks also to
Monica Hargraves and Cecilia Denning for their
Collaborative Pathway Model work and for review-
ing and advising on my use of those here.
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