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Panel Calls For ‘Paradigm Shift’ In Virginia School-to-Prison Pipeline

VCU CNS | March 24, 2021

Topics: Commonwealth institute for Fiscal Analysis, department of youth rehabilitation services, Jennifer McClellan, Legal Aid Justice Center, redlining, RISE for Youth, Rodney Robinson, school to prison pipeline, University of Richmond, Virginia commonwealth university, Virginia Poverty Law Center

University of Richmond’s School of Law held a six-hour symposium recently about the school-to-prison pipeline and ways students of color are kept at a disadvantage by zero tolerance policies and overpolicing of school grounds.

Schools have become places of trauma for students of color and help reinforce centuries of systemic racism by driving students into the criminal justice system, according to speakers at a recent University of Richmond symposium. 

The UR School of Law hosted a six-hour event via Zoom with four presentations, nine panelists, and over 200 attendees. The event featured UR law students, educators, social justice advocates, and activists. 

Suspension and expulsion are used disproportionately against Black students, other students of color, and those with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Those punishments, along with arrests at school, often lead to students having a criminal record, according to the NAACP. The trend is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Julie McConnell, a UR law professor, said the origins of the school-to-prison pipeline is decades old. McConnell is the director of the university’s Children’s Defense Clinic, a program where law students represent indigent children in court.

School to Prison Pipeline Symposium panelists: Valerie L’Herrou (pictured top left), Allison Gilbreath (pictured top right), Doron Samuel-Siegel (pictured middle left), Kevin Woodson (pictured middle right), Cassie Powell (pictured bottom)

The school-to-prison pipeline has been an issue for many years, but it began to take hold during the “superpredator era” in the 1990s, following incidents such as the Columbine High School shooting, McConnell said. The superpredator theory centered around fear there was going to be a wave of violent kids threatening communities and schools. The theory popularized strict zero tolerance policies in schools.

“We would automatically suspend and expel kids who got in trouble in school for very minor offenses in many cases,” McConnell said. 

She referenced a 2015 incident in South Carolina when a school resource officer tossed a student across a classroom after she refused to surrender her cellphone.

Zero tolerance policies mandate predetermined punishments for certain offenses in schools, including the possession of a weapon, alcohol, or drugs, according to Shared Justice. Minor offenses often punishable by suspension or expulsion include disorderly conduct and insubordination.

McConnell and other speakers discussed how punitive policies often drive students into incarceration, as some offenses previously handled within schools are now dealt with by juvenile courts. McConnell said suspending minors results in higher rates of dropout, mental health problems, delinquency and substance abuse issues. 

Virginia lawmakers have worked to return punishment back to the schools. Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, sponsored two measures that passed the Virginia General Assembly last year. Students cannot be charged with disorderly conduct during school, on buses, or at school-sponsored events. School principals no longer have to report student acts that constitute a misdemeanor to law enforcement, such as an assault on school property, including on a bus or at a school-sponsored event.

Valerie Slater, executive director for the RISE for Youth Coalition, said there are disproportionate rates of suspension in Virginia. RISE for Youth is a campaign focused on dismantling the youth prison model.

Black youths from ages 15 to 17 made up 21 percent of the state’s overall population during the 2016-2017 school year, but they accounted for 57 percent of youths suspended statewide, according to a 2019 Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis and RISE for Youth report. Black teens also made up 49 percent of Virginia minors reported to juvenile courts by school authorities and 54 percent of minors detained in local jails, according to the same report.

The country’s history of racial bias and discriminatory practices have enabled the school-to-prison pipeline, speakers said.

One panel focused on Richmond’s history of segregated housing trends, such as the illegal practice of redlining. That is when creditworthy applicants are denied housing loans based on the applicants’ race or neighborhood where they lived. White students as a result were concentrated in wealthier suburban areas and Black students in underprivileged urban centers, said panelist Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“We can easily see the vestiges of this history just in the way that we assign students to schools,” said panelist Kathy Mendes, a research assistant at the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis. 

Mendes said children of color from under-resourced areas often attend schools with insufficient resources. 

Panelist Rachael Deane, legal director of Legal Aid Justice Center’s JustChildren program, said communities of color are “incredibly over-policed.” Community policing of these areas spills into schools, exposing children of color to constant surveillance by school resource officers, Deane said. 

Heavy policing in schools does not effectively prevent juvenile delinquency, speakers said. Zero tolerance policies fail to consider the mental well-being of disadvantaged children. Children with behavioral problems may experience external stressors such as high rates of neighborhood crime, domestic violence, and extreme poverty.

“If you never got into the issue of why a student was fighting, then you are doing nothing but delaying another fight after suspending them,” said Rodney Robinson, winner of the 2019 National Teacher of the Year award. Robinson is a 19-year teaching veteran of Richmond Public Schools.

Rodney Robinson, 2019 National Teacher of the Year. Photo via Council of Chief State School Officers

Schools need to replace school resource officers with mental health counselors, and teach students how to cope with trauma rather than driving them out of schools, Robinson said. 

Robinson said he witnessed the severity of the school-to-prison pipeline issue while teaching convicted juveniles at Virgie Binford Education Center. He said there is a need for reformative school programs. 

“To me it wasn’t about the school-to-prison pipeline, it’s a school-to-cemetery pipeline,” Robinson said. “Because if you’re failing these kids, and they’re not graduating, and they’re ending up in such horrible conditions, then eventually they will end up a victim of street violence.”

Educator bias against students of color needs to be eliminated, Robinson said. He said teachers should understand how their privilege may affect how they view students.

Valerie L’Herrou, a Virginia Poverty Law Center staff attorney, said she feels “hopeful” about recent racial justice protests. L’Herrou said the protests showed more people are open to reexamining their privilege and role in maintaining racist structures. 

Siegel-Hawley and other speakers proposed altering schools’ rezoning criteria in order to fully desegregate Richmond communities. 

Slater encouraged leaders to focus on the “roots” over the “symptoms” of the school-to-prison pipeline, and to create programs to permanently rehabilitate children and communities. 

Educational funding needs to be equally distributed throughout the commonwealth, Slater said. She also proposed expanding the definition of school resource officers to include other forms of support such as credible messengers. Credible messengers are individuals who have passed through the justice system, transformed their lives and provide preventative support to at-risk youth, according to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. 

“It is time for a paradigm shift in Virginia,” Slater said. “It is time to realize that a healthy, thriving community is the greatest deterrent to justice system involvement.”

Written by Christina Amano Dolan, Capital News Service. Top Photo: “Prison Bars Jail Cell” by JobsForFelonsHub, CC BY 2.0, via CNS. 

Bringing Greenery To Richmond’s Hottest Neighborhoods

David Tran | October 7, 2020

Topics: Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Greening Southside Richmond Project, Groundwork RVA, heat islands, redlining, Redlining in Richmond, Richmond Department of Parks Recreation and Community Facilities, Southside Releaf

The Greening Southside Richmond Project is looking to tackle the issues of extreme heat and socioeconomic disparities caused by racist, discriminatory housing practices in Richmond’s vulnerable neighborhoods — one tree at a time.

On a hot summer afternoon in Richmond, one may find plenty of shade to relax under at the Lombardy & Park Avenue Triangle, or while taking a stroll around The Fan or the Museum District. 

That is not the case for all of Richmond. Immediately south of the James River, there is a noticeable absence of trees in parks and neighborhoods, and a sea of heat-absorbing asphalt blanketed throughout the area. 

A new initiative, Greening Southside Richmond Project, is planning to plant more than 650 trees in Southside neighborhoods vulnerable to extreme heat — which is linked to decades of racist housing policies — by the end of 2023.

The project organizers, which is composed of local environmental groups, Richmond city officials, and other local partners, said in a press release that the trees will help cool down neighborhoods, reduce electricity bills, and decrease stress levels. The trees also can absorb polluted runoff when it rains, reducing risks of pollution and flooding.

Approximately 250 of the 650 trees will be planted throughout Southside, said Ann Jurcyzk, Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia Director of Outreach and Advocacy. The rest of the trees will be distributed to residents to plant in their own backyards.

Photo via Kenny Fletcher/Chesapeake Bay Foundation

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Chesapeake Bay, is one of the organizations leading the greening initiative. In past years, it has worked in Southside in efforts of improving water quality in neighborhoods such as Broad Rock.

Through these past initiatives, CBF developed relationships with local partners, Jurcyzk said, and wanted to further foster such relationships to ensure that the project will best meet the community’s needs.

“The hope is that residents, through the outreach that [the Greening project] is going to do, they’ll understand that trees reduce particulate matter, and reduce the asthma rates in the city,” Jurcyzk said.

As part of the Greening Southside initiative, Southside Releaf, a community organization that is dedicated to addressing environmental disparities in Richmond’s Southside, will work closely with Southside residents; it will hold free workshops on tree care and conservation landscaping.

Through Groundwork RVA’s Green Workforce Program — another partner of the Greening Southside project — local youth and high school graduates are able partake in hands-on training for environmental jobs through planting and landscaping, which Jurcyzk said is an important part of the outreach.

“I think that [kids] have this innate appreciation for things that are alive,” she said.“It just sparks their curiosity. We want to reach people with a message: trees are for healthy communities.”

Delby Mejia and Ezri Chavarria and kids plant trees at Branch’s Baptist Church in 2018. (Photo via Kenny Fletcher/Chesapeake Bay Foundation)

The City of Richmond Department Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities is helping identity sites to plant the 250 trees as well as monitor the growth of them. 

The department has a number of recreation facilities and parks in mind, said Michael Gee, Operations and Labor Crew Chief for the Southern District. Some include Hickory Hill Community Center, Swansboro Playground, and T.B. Smith Community Center.

Facilities were prioritized based on its lack of tree canopy coverage. In addition to helping reduce extreme heat, the department’s goal is to increase these spaces’ aesthetic beauty. 

“A football field can get pretty hot in September and October, especially in the city,” Gee said. “So giving folks a place to get a bit of a break from the heat was something that we’ve been talking about for a while.”

Gee’s role is to ensure the trees are suited for the sites and the surrounding area it is planted on, such as the right soil, sunshade, and soil moisture. It can be something as simple as making sure a tree with thorns is not next to a bench, or a tree that produces a lot of plant litter is not near a roadway.

As part of the Greening Southside project, CBF also is working with Branch’s Baptist Church to transform parts of its parking lot into greenery. This is not the first time the organization has worked with the church to remove its asphalt; in the past, CBF helped to reduce the stormwater runoff by planting trees.

Oscar Contreas, a deacon Branch’s Baptist Church, said he is excited to be working with CBF again because of the benefits it will bring to not only the church, but the surrounding community as well.

“One of the nice things about this project [is] that the community will come together,” he said. “When you plant a tree or make an area green, you’ll see the progress. So as you drive by [the church], you know you were a part of it, and I think that that creates community.”

Parts of the church’s parking lot as well as their unused basketball court will be turned into a green space to provide shade and to cool down the area.

Louise Seals of Richmond Tree Stewards demonstrates tree planting techniques at Branch’s Baptist Church in 2018. (Photo by Kenny Fletcher/Chesapeake Bay Foundation)

The addition of a green space to the church, Contreas said, can be a model for other Southside churches and businesses to mitigate the long-term effects of historical racist policies.

These racist housing policies, such as redlining — a systemic practice of denying mortgage loans and other investment to areas deemed “declining” or  “hazardous” — have led to racial socioeconomic disparities in neighborhoods, such as more heat-absorbing concrete and fewer trees, the project organizers said; these neighborhoods were majority-Black and Hispanic.

The act of negligence contributed to historical inequities and a cycle of divestment, as reported by the New York Times. White neighborhoods had the leverage to lobby city governments for green spaces, while Black neighborhoods were often targets for city planners to build industries and warehouses, often with a lot of asphalt and little vegetation.

Former redlined areas can be up to 13 degrees hotter than their non-redlined counterparts in the same city, according to a study by the Science Museum of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Portland State University.

Heat waves can be more dangerous for these hot neighborhoods, increasing heat-related illness. According to research by the Science Museum of Virginia, Richmond is an urban heat island, with the warmest ZIP codes having the highest rates of heat-related ambulance calls.

CBF received a small watershed grant of $227, 467 for the Greening Southside Richmond Project from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It also received $80,000 in additional funds from local supporters. Jurczyk said the kickoff meeting for the project is planned for Dec. 2020.

Top Photo: Branch’s Baptist Church members plant an oak tree in the playground in 2018. (Photo by Kenny Fletcher)

Legislators Continue to Address High Eviction Rates in Virginia

VCU CNS | October 2, 2019

Topics: eviction crisis, eviction rates, Jackson Ward, Jennifer McClellan, Matthew Desmond, racist housing policies, redlining, RVA Eviction Lab, Six Points Innovation Center, vcu, VCU Common Book, Virginia commonwealth university, Virginia Poverty Law Center

One in ten Richmonders who rent faced eviction notices in 2016. We all know this is a problem, and Virginia’s legislators are searching for ways to fix it.

Scholars, lawyers and lawmakers are still grappling with high eviction rates in Virginia and how to enact solutions. A panel Thursday at Virginia Commonwealth University addressed the Eviction Lab at Princeton University’s findings that five cities in Virginia ranked in the top 10 for national eviction rates, including Richmond, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk and Chesapeake.

The local eviction rates ranged from 11.4 percent in Richmond to 7.9 percent in Chesapeake. The rate represents the number of evictions per 100 rental homes in an area. 

About 150 people attended the event, which included three panelists: Six Points Innovation Center director Jackie Washington, Virginia Poverty Law Center attorney Phil Storey, and Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond.  

From left: Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, Jackie Washington, Phil Storey, and moderator Megan Pauly at “Eviction Beyond the Numbers: Community Impacts and Policy Landscape of Housing Instability” (Photo by VCU CNS)

McClellan highlighted seven bills that passed the recent General Assembly session and were signed into law. The legislation included bills that made written leases required, reduced the number of eviction cases a landlord could file, created the opportunity for tenants to submit unpaid rent and fees prior to eviction, and allowed tenants to recover their possessions.

“This is not really a partisan issue,” McClellan said. “Where there is disagreement, it’s really sort of the landlords versus tenants, and I don’t mean to say that all landlords are bad or all landlords are predatory.” Of the seven housing laws signed by the governor last session, four were introduced by Democrats and three by Republicans.

McClellan also said in a phone interview after the event that more bills to address eviction, including a bill to address the habitability of a rental property, are in the drafting and planning stages now.   

Though legislators passed a flurry of bills last session to reform landlord and tenant laws, Storey said “way too many people are on the knife’s edge because of the way the system is designed.”

Much of the discussion at the panel held at VCU’s W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts centered around how tenants fall behind on rent payments.  

“Two-thirds of the people who call our hotline are behind on rent, with the average caller being around two and a half months back,” Storey said. 

Storey also said that on average their clients are paying 58 percent of their monthly gross income to rent, with some paying as much as 70 percent.

Panelists also discussed the link between discriminatory housing policies and the eviction rate today, which according to the RVA Eviction Lab increases as the share of the African American population in a neighborhood increases. Washington highlighted historic redlining in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood, where banks would avoid making real estate investments based on neighborhood demographics, as “an intentionally racist housing policy.”

“If we don’t connect the dots from historic housing policy, then we just might miss it,” Washington said. “But those who experience it will never miss it. Folks of color will always know that it’s racist.”

Storey agreed, saying that “things that seem sort of natural and immutable are often not, and are based in some pretty ugly root causes.”  

Dr. Benjamin Teresa, co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab, introduced the panel “Eviction Beyond the Numbers: Community Impacts and Policy Landscape of Housing Instability” (Photo by VCU CNS)

The panel was sponsored by VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, VCU University College, and Virginia’s home for Public Media. The panelists were introduced by Benjamin Teresa and Kathryn Howell, co-directors of the RVA Eviction Lab at VCU, which opened this year and provides eviction data and research.  

“One of the goals of the lab is to do research that is relevant to Richmond and other cities in Virginia, as well as outside of the state,” Teresa said.

The panel was connected to this year’s VCU Common Book, a program that selects a new book each year for incoming freshmen. The initiative is intended to foster awareness and engagement around important issues.

Incoming freshmen received a copy of Evicted, a book by Matthew Desmond, the founder of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Freshman-level courses incorporate the book into coursework and discussion. Desmond is scheduled to visit VCU on Oct. 16.

Candidates from many Virginia House and Senate districts will have a chance to weigh in on evictions at a forum on Oct. 10. Candidates from 11 House districts and from six Senate districts have been invited to participate, though the list of confirmed attendees has not been released yet.

The event will be moderated by VPM and held at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Written by Jason Boleman, Capital News Service. Top Photo: Attendees marked where they live on eviction maps of Richmond neighborhoods in the lobby of the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts. Photo via VCU CNS

Fighting For Food Justice In A Gentrified Richmond

Cat Modlin-Jackson | April 23, 2019

Topics: community gardens, Duron Chavis, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center, Leonard Githinji, Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, McDonough Community Garden, Randolph Farm, redlining, Richmond Food Justice Alliance, Richmond Food Justice Corridor, urban agriculture, Virginia State University

You’ve seen the community gardens, the small farms springing up in the city, the folks standing out on the side of busy streets sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s harvest. Some of these spaces are emerging in areas where families have to travel several miles before reaching a grocery store. But what’s striking about a lot of these green spaces is not their urban existence; it’s the people taking care of the land.

Across the city, gardens have emerged in communities of color, but the stewards don’t always match the neighborhood demographic. Without representation and community ownership, are these spaces making the food system more equitable? Not according to food justice activists like Duron Chavis, Manager of Community Engagement at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

Since 2002, Chavis has served as a community advocate in the Richmond metro region. When Chavis graduated from Virginia State University with a degree in mass communications, he had no idea he’d become a champion of regional food justice. He became invested after meeting farmers through starting Happily Natural Day, a festival he founded in 2003 while working at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia.

Almost ten years later, in 2012, Chavis started the McDonough Community Garden in Southside. He had just moved to that part of the neighborhood and he was eager to grow. He spent a great deal of time talking to his neighbors and working with the city to transform an underutilized plot of land into a community garden through the city’s Richmond Grows Gardens program. He toiled in the garden after work and on weekends, taking care to engage with folks who walked by. Chavis has since moved from the neighborhood, but seven years later, the McDonough Garden is still a place where folks can grow, congregate, listen to music, and revel in the outdoors.

“It’s everybody’s space,” he says.

As an urban agriculturalist, Chavis’s goal is to realize equitable food systems by way of education, communication, and collaboration.

Food justice, says Chavis, necessitates equity and ownership. It’s not just about building gardens; it’s about empowering communities with the tools to take control of their own food system, which includes helping establish grow-spaces.

“What [food justice] means to me is that communities have ownership of the means of production, distribution, consumption, processing, and waste management,” he explains.

Duron Chavis.

Chavis is a busy man. In addition to coordinating a community storytelling project that will showcase the work of urban agriculturalists, Chavis spent the last weeks of winter reviewing applications for the fourth cohort of the Lewis Ginter Urban Gardener training program, an initiative that teaches aspiring gardeners how to both build relationships and develop green spaces in communities. The group will work with two faith-based organizations and the Richmond Association of Black Social Workers to create an agricultural space on the border of Richmond’s East End and Henrico.

The review process is selective. Only 16 people are chosen from a pool of more than 40 applicants. Chavis strives to create as inclusive a team as possible, which means taking into account applicants’ race, gender, sexuality, religious perspective, ability, income, and education. Given the importance of establishing trust when doing community work, garden program applicants who are from the neighborhood are given priority.

“We try to make sure the cohort has as much difference as possible, so that when people are in the room, they get the experience of having to build community across difference,” says Chavis. “[This] is important because it’s a skill to be able to work with people who don’t have your shared lived experience.”

The Lewis Ginter Urban Gardener training program is designed to probe the systemic disparities that have perpetuated food insecurity in neighborhoods and households across the country.

“My conversation is about racial equity,” says Chavis.

“For the Ginter Urban Gardener program, the first thing we talk about is race and place,” he says. “It’s not just that they don’t have grocery stores, it’s also that they don’t have affordable housing. It’s also that these areas have high levels of police intervention. There are also places with high eviction rates. All of this is about racism and focusing on the urban center.”

McDonough Community Garden.

Injustice rooted in redlining, poverty, and gentrification

Today in Richmond, it’s easy to find cheap or free garden land in areas with lower property values, which tend to be in communities of color. Perhaps that’s why predominately white-run organizations have established farms in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Church Hill and Manchester.

Food grown in these spaces may or may not be an alternative to the grocery store for residents with lower incomes. But the lack of accessible fresh food from nearby grocery stores is only part of the problem in food-insecure areas. The history of racism and poverty that beleaguers these neighborhoods is as much a part of the picture as the land in the frame.

Chavis says food justice goes beyond building gardens in so-called food deserts, which the USDA defines as areas where fresh and healthful foods are inaccessible. It means having conversations about the history of why and how power has been stripped from communities.

To understand the relationship between urban agriculture, gentrification, and food sovereignty, we have to step back to the 1930s, when redlining effectively made it impossible for Black families to get home loans and amass wealth. As a result, few could afford to purchase, rehabilitate or repair their home, explains Brian Koziol, Director of Research and Policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia. Even after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal in 1968, white flight and systemic racism served to perpetuate the wealth gap that exists today between whites and people of color.

Due to the increase in wealth disparities, explains Koziol, “people in poverty aren’t able to maintain property. And without access to credit, there’s no ability to maintain and reinvest in property.”

This was further exacerbated by the years leading up to the housing crisis, when the percentage of subprime loans to African American households was 28 percent higher than those to white households, says Koziol.

In 2009, the wealth gap between white and African American households was $236,000, according to a longitudinal study conducted at the Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy. Researchers found that years of home ownership were the foremost contributor to a racial wealth gap that had increased by 178% since 1989. Per the study, “Residential segregation by government design has a long legacy in this country and underpins many of the challenges African-American families face in buying homes and increasing equity.”

In Richmond, 86 percent of communities redlined with the label “hazardous” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s remain low-to-moderate income; 90 percent of these neighborhoods have majority-minority populations, according to researchers at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“Historically, over time, people of color in this country have been a vehicle for wealth extraction, either through labor or paying rent,” Koziol explains. “Systemically, it’s an issue of keeping people in a state of poverty through wealth extraction and resource extraction.”

“In terms of property values, what we’re seeing now is gentrification in a number of neighborhoods that have historically been redlined and disinvested,” he adds. “Those property values are going up so, without really beating around the bush, property values are, by and large, tied to whiteness.”

Chavis says this history is ignored by many white-run non-profits operating in communities of color.

“Right now in Richmond we don’t have food justice,” he says. “We have a lot of representatives of communities that are not from those areas making a lot of money off of increasing access to healthy food… none of them are doing work around racial equity, explicitly or intentionally.”

Food justice goes beyond food

In order for change to be realized, there has to be a shift in narrative, says Art Burton, founder of Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center and the Food Justice Corridor. “Food justice is about opportunities, not problems,” he offers.

Since 2015 Burton has overseen the Food Justice Corridor, a stretch of land that encompasses four public housing communities in the East End and an expanse running northwest between Mechanicsville Turnpike and Creighton Road. The corridor operates in a space that some would label a food desert, but Burton, who’s been farming since childhood, takes issue with that term.

“Maybe we have an issue with people not knowing the importance of eating healthy. Maybe we have an issue with people not knowing how to access healthy foods. But we don’t have a food desert,” said Burton in a TED Talk.

The term ‘food desert’ “implies that nothing can grow there and that it’s a recurring problem, and that’s not what these spaces are,” adds Victoria Lynn, of the Richmond Food Justice Alliance, a partner organization within the Food Justice Corridor. The resources are often there, say Lynn and Burton — sometimes it’s just a matter of making those connections.

That’s what the Food Justice Corridor has set out to do: facilitate access for food in a way that goes beyond putting vegetables in the refrigerator. The idea is to promote a “culture of health” by helping people connect with resources that can alleviate inequities deeply rooted in systemic racism. That includes access to housing, alternatives to youth incarceration, and means for reentry after incarceration.

“This is about ownership,” says Burton. “It’s not about all that’s wrong.”

Urban agriculture, says Burton, is just one mechanism used to facilitate an equitable food system. “It’s a community engagement tool,” he explains.

Burton acknowledges competition for funding in the field of urban agriculture non-profits. Larger, well connected organizations make it difficult for grassroots non-profits like Kinfolk to compete for funding. “The money is running laterally to well funded white organizations,” he explains. That’s why Burton, who has worked as a community organizer for decades, is working to streamline a coalition of Black-run non-profits across the city. “We have to get all of the organizations [to spread] the same message of what we’re doing and why.”

Dr. Leonard Githinji on VSU’s Randolph Farm.

What will it take to realize a food-just Richmond?

Chavis is excited about the opportunities flourishing across the region. He points to Burton and Lynn’s work, as well as that unfolding at Virginia State University, where Dr. Leonard Githinji runs a Sustainable Urban Agriculture Certificate Program on the university’s Randolph Farm.

“Food justice is a situation where everybody should have access to affordable, fresh food wherever they are,” says Githinji in a greenhouse. Under that hot roof, students will learn permaculture fundamentals like aquaculture. They’ll raise chickens and orchards. And, if Githinji has his druthers, they’ll take away skills that they can use to promote food access and security in their communities.

“This is how you build community,” says Chavis. “Give people access to the resources and work with them, support them, and watch them figure it out on their own.”

All photos by Cat Modlin-Jackson. Top Photo: Food growing in a greenhouse on Randolph Farm.

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