One thing this COVID-19 home confinement has done for me is to allow me the time to use my imagination again.
Busy work is a thing now, and I often catch myself thinking about what it would be like if we used the lessons from these strange days to redesign our communities, and I’m not going to lie, it leaves me feeling hopeful. My lived experience has taught me that rock bottom is the best place to start rebuilding, and I am hoping that conversations can be started about what that would look like for our neighborhoods and communities.
Imagine if we would design our neighborhoods in a way that would allow us to be self-sustaining, relying on one another, and not having to freak out during times such as this! What would that look like? I think the first step would be to put real effort into establishing communities again. The word “community” is thrown around all the time, and it usually evokes images of your neighborhood, but what if it came to be known as a feeling as well as a place? What would that look like? How can that be achieved? I don’t have the answers, but I have some thoughts.
I designed a program at my job called “Cooking Up Change.” The concept came out of conversations with two female organizing friends. It started as a conversation about how we could bring women from marginalized groups together to discuss and discover their community’s needs in a low-pressure environment. The conversation started with beauty salon-type ideas and then, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me when I reflect on it, turned to food. It made perfect sense to focus these groups around food because food is tied to human connection, whether it’s through a church fellowship dinner, a holiday meal, or a special occasion or celebration. So why wouldn’t it make sense that food should be at the center of these groups?
A Pot of Chili
During the Cooking Up Change groups, the women began by preparing a meal to be eaten before they left that day, such as chili. Once that was on to cook, they started to prep meals to be taken home at the end of the day to use later that week or to freeze until they needed it, such as beef stew. The food was good, but the conversations that took place were where the magic happened. There’s something about sitting around the table and chopping vegetables that allowed us women to relax and share our needs and the needs of our community freely. The great part of sharing with women from your community is that those conversations can then spin off to come up with solutions to the issues and you already have a group of like-minded folks beside you. It was a great organizing tool.
Skip ahead to these days of the COVID-19 commotion. If nothing else, these strange days have allowed me the chance to do a lot of thinking and imagining what my family’s new normal will be when this is all over. My family is going through some big changes right now, despite being in the middle of a national emergency, and I keep coming back to how I want to become as self-sustaining as I can when this is over.
The next thought I have is that I want to be a part of a self-sustaining community, but what would that look like? I’m stuck on the fact that, a lot of times, “community” is seen as a neighborhood, but we can redesign the intention behind the word and make “community” more of a … feeling … a feeling that we would take care of each other all the time, and not just in times of emergency but in times of stability as well.
Imagine our communities being something that we poured ourselves and our resources into when times were good so we could be secure in the fact that they were there when times weren’t so good.
A Welcome Wagon?
The first thing I think we would have to change would be the relationships within our neighborhoods. I believe, and I might be wrong because I’m basing this on my lived experience, that the days of welcoming new families to the neighborhood with a freshly baked pie are over. I mean, I’ve lived in my house for over 20 years and have never had a neighbor ask me for a cup of sugar. But in order to trust our neighbors we have to get to know our neighbors, right? So there would have to be an intentional effort put into creative ways for the neighbors to come together because, again, we have to build something that we pour ourselves and our resources into, and our relationships would be key to that. When I think of the greatest needs during a national emergency, I think of food and shelter, so what would we need to build within our communities to make sure – to trust – that our needs would be met or at least lighten the load?
Let’s think about food. One thing that we are all leaving the safety of our homes for right now is grocery shopping. So what if we could just head to our pantry or cupboard instead of the grocery store? What if we could make our own sauce from homegrown canned tomatoes? What if we had jars of fruit grown right up the street rather than imported from states days away? I know that we would have to leave for shopping trips regardless of home canned goods, but what if we didn’t have to leave as often or, more importantly to so many of us, spend as much money during these uncertain times? How can our communities address these needs?
Well, what would it look like if the community was truly a part of community gardens? What if the community garden was designed in a way that would allow for everyone to benefit from it? What if we began to plan community events around these gardens, inviting everyone to participate from start to finish, regardless of their time, financial, and/or skill constraints?
Gardening
I know that it’s unrealistic to believe that everyone will participate all the time, but right now I would give anything for the chance to take my family outside and dig in the dirt, especially if it was for something that would benefit my family! I don’t have any experience with community gardening, but I have been told once that I would have to pay a set amount of dollars for using the water, which seemed fair, but the garden wasn’t within walking distance of my home and, because my family is always on the go, I knew it wasn’t a financial investment that I would have time to care for in order to reap the benefits, so I passed.
But what if the offer was open for me and my family to show up whenever we could and, instead of having one small plot for only ourselves, our efforts would be go into the garden as a whole, spent caring for plants that the community paid for and wasn’t worried about Neighbor A paying the $30 they could afford to buy the plants and run the water and Neighbor B only being able to swing $10 from their budget, which was still more than Neighbor C could afford.
Life Changing?
Imagine community calendars filled with farmers’ markets filled with fresh vegetables that we all prepared the soil for, planted, sowed, and then harvested. Imagine the community coming together to harvest and can vegetables and fruits that would stock our pantries and help us to become more self-sustaining. And, this is what excites me the most, imagine the solutions that could be put into action to fix problems addressed while we were all in community with each other, forming and building trusting relationships with those nearest to us; the ones who we should be able to rely on the most.
I see this as life changing. If communities were more invested in its people then its people would be more invested in the communities, and that would open a whole new world of opportunities for growth and improvement…and it would, undoubtedly, cook up change.
Stay well. Wash your hands. And your vegetables.
Onward,
Amy Jo
(Note: SNAP recipients can purchase garden seeds and plants with their EBT cards. Reach out and let me know what it would take for you to start using a small portion of that benefit to grow and preserve your own food. I’m always talking to folks who are looking for a way to get SNAP recipients involved in addressing food insecurity. Imagine what a blessing it would be during these uncertain times to have a cabinet full of food that we-every single one of us- grew and preserved ourselves!)
