Cascadia Portal

The mission of Planting Justice is to democratize access to affordable, nutritious food by empowering disenfranchised urban residents with the skills, inspiration, and paid opportunities we need to maximize food production and natural beauty in our neighborhoods.

 

We need jobs, but not jobs that disempower us and degrade our sense of self-worth.  We need food, but not food that makes us sick with diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.  We need solutions, not those that promise false hope, or hope deferred to another place and time, but solutions we can taste, smell, feel, and eat.  Solutions that we create together, using our own minds, bodies, and spirits, that empower us to provide for our own basic needs and those of our family, friends, and neighbors.  We can transform our neighborhoods, one school, one backyard, one church, one empty lot at a time, from concrete jungles into incredibly productive and educational organic gardens, that integrate urban-friendly livestock to provide for a complete nutritional diet, and at the same time create living-wage jobs that give us pride in ourselves and our communities.  It takes Organizing and a vision that works with nature instead of against it.  Planting Justice has the vision, one that combines the tactics of sustained grassroots organizing with those of ecological design and urban permaculture, that can provide living models that address food justice, economic justice, and environmental justice simultaneously.  Our youth need a world that values them, supports them and empowers them, that gives them the tools and the opportunities to create their own solutions to the many faces of oppression and hardships they face.  Let's get to work, and then forget that it is work, for what we do is what we love, and it is beautiful.