This story was originally published by Verite News. It was produced for broadcast by WWNO/WRKF's Eva Tesfaye.
At least 100 supporters of Grow Dat Youth Farm showed up to a public meeting on City Park’s redevelopment plan Thursday to express outrage over the park’s proposal to potentially displace the farm in order to build a new road.
City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that runs day-to-day operations of the park, held the meeting at Dillard University to discuss water management in the park, one in a series of meetings being held to get community input on the park’s master plan, which is still in development.
But the discourse was dominated by Grow Dat supporters speaking out against the conservancy’s proposal to build a promenade through the middle of the park, that would bisect the land where Grow Dat currently stands. And most of the activity was centered around a large map that charted out how the conservancy plans to redevelop the park.
Members of the crowd needled executive-level staff from the conservancy with questions about the proposed road, suggested other areas where the road could be built and chanted for the conservancy’s CEO and president, Cara Lambright, to speak to the meeting attendees, which she eventually did.
“I don’t want this part to change,” said Kristen Shelby, an alumni of Grow Dat’s youth leadership program, said while pointing to the land where Grow Dat is located. Then she motioned to the part of the map showing that Bayou Oaks At City Park, a golf course with a far larger footprint than the farm, will be left undisturbed by the proposed road. “There’s a lot of golf course and a little bit of Grow Dat.”
After hearing from a number of Grow Dat supporters, Randy Odinet, vice president and chief planning officer for the conservancy, responded to the group.
“I understand why you don’t want [the road],” he said.
But supporters of the farm — including participants in its youth leadership program, staffers and other members of the farm’s extended community — said they felt the conservancy doesn’t understand why they want the farm to remain where it is.
They said they are concerned that if the conservancy forces Grow Dat to relocate, it would deal a major blow to the farm, which has produced approximately 450,000 pounds of food for sale and donation in metropolitan New Orleans since it was founded in 2012. At the meeting they said that moving the farm would reduce food access in the city and affect the organization’s capacity to run its educational program, which teaches teenagers agricultural, professional and interpersonal skills.
“It makes me pretty sad that people want to cut off that accessibility to people who maybe can’t drive to a park,” said Joyce Ejiaga, a 17-year-old who’s in her second year working at Grow Dat. “And it’s a big and important farm. It’s really important to the youth. It sparks a lot of job opportunities for people who aren’t white.”
Really hard decisions
Later in the meeting, Lambright, the president and CEO of City Park Conservancy, came out to speak to the crowd. She told Verite News that the conservancy cares about Grow Dat’s mission, but that it is probable that they are going to displace the group in favor of the new road.
“It’s a 1,300-acre park that every single nonprofit would like a piece of,” Lambright said. “These are really hard decisions as a park operator, but we love urban farming and their mission.”
She said, though, that the conservancy is prioritizing a roadway to connect the north and south sides of the park, and has not found a good alternative location for it.
But there were plenty of suggestions for how to increase access to the park and connectivity around it from those who went to the meeting, including creating more bike and walking paths, routing the promenade through the golf course and building more paths from the existing roads – Marconi Drive and Wisner Boulevard – which form the east and west borders of the park.
“We’re at a master planning level of where we think things should be,” Odinet told the crowd early on in the meeting, suggesting that the park’s plans could change.
Still, even the potential of relocating Grow Dat was upsetting for many who came to the meeting. Some voiced concern that the conservancy is making decisions that will negatively impact low-income and Black youth in favor of making the park more tourism-friendly.
“You could show young Black people learning how to provide food for themselves without having to rely on rich people instead of making these changes to benefit tourists,” said Alaina Carter, the assistant principal at New Harmony High School, pleading her case with Odinet.
She was one of several local educators in attendance who worried about losing a community resource for their students. Several students from New Harmony have participated in Grow Dat’s youth leadership program and classes from the school, which is located on Esplanade Avenue just outside City Park, regularly take field trips to the farm.
Even if the farm were offered an alternative site within the park, relocation could have adverse effects on the organization, several supporters said at the meeting. They would have to plan for relocation and eventually cultivate new land, which takes several years. This would all take away from the organization’s ability to put on its youth programming.
And there are aspects of Grow Dat’s relationship with the land they’re on that is harder to replicate in a new place. Several attendees said they were concerned about what would happen to a memorial garden built for Belle Adelman-Cannon — a participant in the youth leadership program who died after being struck by a bus while leaving the farm last June if the farm had to relocate.
“You’re going to kill my kid all over again,” said Laura Adelman-Cannon, Belle’s mother. “There’s no reason there needs to be a road over the land that has a memorial garden for my dead child.”
When Verite News asked Lambright for a response to attendees’ concerns over the memorial garden at the end of the meeting, she said the conservancy was devastated by the accident, but that she didn’t know what would happen with the garden. “My ears are full of information right now,” she said.
Staying engaged
In the lead-up to Thursday’s public meeting over the past week, opponents of the road announced that they had formed a support organization for the farm, called Friends of Grow Dat. The group wants to advocate for the preservation of the farm and its programming so Grow Dat’s leadership and youth participants can spend their time running the organization.
“The staff, the youth [and] the board of Grow Dat, they’re focused on doing the good work of feeding our city, giving our youth amazing opportunities … and storing carbon in the soil,” said Marguerite Green, a member of Friends of Grow Dat. “They have their hands full…and so we wanted to take some of the weight off of them and show up for them the way they show up for us.”
Members of the new group showed up in the dozens to the meeting wearing Friends of Grow Dat t-shirts and were among those pressing City Park leadership for answers. Toward the end of the meeting, Lambright agreed to hold a public meeting focused solely on how to preserve the farm, which received cheers and applause. A date and time hasn’t been set for that meeting.
Thursday’s meeting was the third of six meetings that the conservancy had scheduled to discuss the master plan. The next meeting is scheduled for May.
Callie Rubbins-Breen, co-executive director of Grow Dat, said it was amazing to see so many supporters at the meeting, and she hopes people will stay engaged. She said Grow Dat wants to meet with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., the New York-based landscape architecture firm that developed the master plan, and Lambright to discuss how the farm can stay in their current location for the long term.
“Grow Dat has been working to engage our young folks in this process, which we will continue to do,” she wrote in an email to Verite on Friday. “[City Park] will be hosting youth focus groups at a variety of schools and youth groups across the city. We will encourage the young folks in our programs to get involved in this process and we hope [City Park] reaches out to Grow Dat young folks specifically.”
This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
