What is Food Apartheid?
According to national organizer Dara Cooper, food apartheid is “The systematic destruction of Black self-determination to control our food (including land, resource theft and discrimination), a hyper-saturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing, and a blatantly discriminatory corporate-controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes of all times. Many tend to use the term “food desert,” however food apartheid is a much more accurate representation of the structural racialized inequities perpetuated through our current system.”
The term food apartheid was coined by community farmer and national food justice organizer, Karen Washington. To read more about why we say “food apartheid”, and not “food deserts” check out this article here.
Home Farm Installations
Feed yourself and your community.
Lead volunteers helping with a home farm installation.
Farm at Home
Free Home Farm garden beds are prioritized for those most affected by food apartheid and are available on a first-come-first-serve basis. For folx not impacted by food apartheid, sliding scale options for payment are available.
We are done with home farm installations for 2020 and are finishing up with some families on our waitlist for Spring 2021. We are not accepting any requests for home farms moving forward. Our people are still in crisis! We need to #CancelRent.
The Process:
Request
Form > Schedule consultation via Calendly + Email
Consultation
Crop Planning + Soil Tests + Site Inspection
Installation
Scheduled via Calendly, Email + Phone
Support
Online Resources
Invite to Mobilize platform
Sliding Scale Classes + Workshops
Events
Troubleshooting + Assistance
We met our 2020 Home Farms Fundraising Campaign Goal!
In Summer 2019, we installed 25 Home Farms in the Greater New Haven area. Due to the amount of grant money we received for this campaign, families after the first 25 applicants had to be waitlisted. In addition to our 2019 Home Farm campaign, hundreds of children throughout New Haven learned about food justice, urban farming and cooking intuitively through our partnerships with other groups locally. Our 2020 Home Farm goals were to:
1. Complete a minimum of 100 Home Farm garden beds during the spring/summer of 2020.
2. Have at least 30 regular volunteers help us execute our Home Farm installations.
3. Visit completed home farm projects at least 1 time during the growing season for troubleshooting support.
4. Host bi-weekly workshops, educating our home farmers and community members about growing food in urban environments and cooking from the garden.
Housing is a Human right!
We started home farms to provide all folks experiencing food apartheid with an opportunity to reconnect to land stewardship, gardening, empowerment, and self-determination through growing their own food for themselves and their families / loved ones. These folx specifically prioritized Black and Brown poor and working-class people, the elderly, children, disabled people, queer folx, and non-“nuclear family” households.
That means that the community members who were on our hearts and minds when we started this campaign in the first place have been losing their jobs and virtually all income as well as their housing since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic shut-downs in March 2020. That being said, we stand in solidarity with our beloved neighbors, and in the spirit and legacy of care work that has always been a part of all historically marginalized and global majority communities, we will not be continuing with home farms.
For more information on how and where to find assistance with housing support, please click the buttons below to follow the Cancel Rent CT Coalition on social media.