Every week Shuntrell “Trell” Hayes goes to work in Spaces of Opportunity, a community garden near her home in south Phoenix. On Sundays in high summer, she and her farming group 40 Akers start at 6:30 a.m. with weeding and harvesting. They’re reconstructing the quarter-acre plot for the fall and winter growing season.
Less than a year ago, Hayes is not sure he can distinguish an herb from a crop.
But before the coronavirus pandemic, a task she performed at the Desert Botanical Garden that helped her grow plants in the Phoenix climate. The paintings allowed him to notice the spaces of opportunity and the teams that grow food there, basically those that meet other people of color. One of them is Project Roots, a non-profit organization founded by former Phoenix Mercury player Bridget Pettis. Like 40 Akers, the nonprofit’s purpose is to teach others how to develop their own food.
This is the Hayes you would like to have in development.
As a child, I read the ingredients on the back of food containers, curious where her food came from. Now, through his paintings with 40 Akers and Project Roots, he hopes to motivate families, especially other young people, to take what they eat.
Hayes said many other people come from generations of families where no one grows food. For a first-generation African-American manufacturer like her, it’s daunting not to know where to start.
Black farmers accounted for 14% of the country’s farmers in 1920. In 2017, they accounted for less than 2%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This decrease is partly due to discriminatory USDA lending practices, according to farmers and historians.
“Having an area like 40 Akers, where it runs through African Americans and that’s primarily that, supplies an area,” Hayes said. “It’s encouraging for them to know that more of us here are developing food.”
For Hayes, it is also a way for the network to succeed on geographical and monetary barriers to biological products: foods grown without insecticides or artificial fertilizers, hormones or antibiotics.
Food deserts, spaces where citizens have limited access to new and healthy food, are not unusual in parts of south and west Phoenix, in the Republic of Arizona, in the past.
Some food justice experts, including farmer Leah Penniman, author of “Farming While Black,” use the term food apartheid, rather than food desert. Unlike a desert, which is naturally occurring, an apartheid is a system of segregation that humans created.
Many studies recommend that the value of food, not just accessibility, be vital for better public health. Many organizations that operate from opportunity spaces, or marry farmers there, supply products for free, founded on donations or low-cost to network members.
As a child, Hayes went to the Roosevelt Elementary School District, where a third of the youth live in deficient families. There are no retail grocery stores from Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods near their neighborhood, he said. Still, many other people in his network of biologics and “healthy foods” at the grocery store are expensive, Hayes said.
“Being in spaces like South Phoenix, it’s just not affordable, especially for a poor family,” Hayes said. “Having this is very important. We are now making sure that other people don’t have to wonder if they can feed their families with those healthier options. They have them here, in their aspect of the city.”
Opportunity spaces began in 2017 on vacant land belonging to the Roosevelt Elementary School District, near the northwest aspect of 7th Avenue and Vineyard Road. The 18-acre site, surrounded by homes of interest and close to elementary schools, once used for cotton cultivation, the Republic reported.
With the assistance of teams from the South Phoenix Cultivate network and the Desert Botanical Garden, organizers have turned the site into farmland so citizens can get new products at an affordable price.
For $5 a month, other people can hire a small piece of land to grow their own food. Spaces of Opportunity also supplies quarter-acre to an acre plots for amateur farms and operates a farmers market on Saturdays.
For Karla Torres, the net lawn is also an area where she can spend time with her daughters, she told The Republic in April. Torres is the program coordinator for Unlimited Potential, a nonprofit organization and a Spaces of Opportunity partner.
Torres, who in the past worked at Burger King, said it was simple for busy families, especially single parents, to embark on a fast food shop plan as a reasonable and simple dinner.
“You can see that when you pass north, there are more agricultural markets and resources for families,” Torres said. “Here, it’s complicated for other people who are in monetary trouble.”
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Stephanie Hunter, one of the first women farmers at Spaces of Opportunity, introduced 40 Akers with the project to educate others about food development. When Hunter died in April, her friend Jordanne Dempster took over the quarter-acre farm in hopes of continuing Hunter’s project.
Dempster grew up in Southern California, where he used to grow flowers with his mother, and his father took care of indoor plants in his living room. But when he met Hunter, he felt he had a black thumb. She saw Hunter’s massive kale and was terrified she couldn’t grow something like that.
But Hunter took the wing and Dempster learned to grow and harvest watermelons, kale and pumpkin. Dempster, who suffered from depression, also discovered an intellectual peace.
“Many of us want a non-violent area in this hectic world,” Dempster said. “Peace is a revolution in itself. Stephanie used to say that the freedom she had in gardening, the land she acquired, her repairs.
That’s where the call of 40 Akers comes from: the “40 acres and a mule” that the federal government promised to give to freed slaves, Dempster said.
“It was also a wonderful thing, being black women, we don’t notice in the farming game,” she added.
40 Akers consists of volunteer farmers, in addition to their spouse and co-owner Trell Hayes, who is also the harvest manager at Project Roots. They provide the culmination and vegetables they grow in the form of donations; anyone can play the organization on social media if they need food, and from 40 Akers will meet them in the garden.
For next season, they plan to grow romaine lettuce, chard, tomatoes, watermelon, onion, garlic and herbs.
Dempster, who teaches math at Maryvale, said he needs to start a tutoring program in schools once the coronavirus pandemic has subsided.
He saw the young men eat uncooked okra just because they were excited and proud to eat what they had grown themselves. If young people adopt healthy eating behavior when they are young, they can pass that behavior on to their families, he said.
“I think as people, many of us of color, we can traditionally communicate about how we have been marginalized through our food,” Dempster said. “One of the reasons we die younger is that our point of tension is higher, many of which have been resolved in the garden.”
Former WNBA player Bridget Pettis divides her time between Gary, Indiana and Phoenix, where she introduced Project Roots, a nonprofit that supplies food and teaches others how to grow their own food.
Pettis grew up in east Chicago, dining green cabbage and picking up his own green beans. His mother would take him to the orchard to pick apples. But as he got older, his nutrition shifted to more processed foods, he said.
For Pettis, returning to earth and developing his own food began as a way to look at what he was putting into his body. It is also a way to combat upper blood pressure and other fitness disorders in his circle of relatives, either his immediate circle of relatives and the African-American community, which he described as his national circle of relatives.
“I’m a former athlete,” Pettis said. “The way I look after my frame will be important.”
From 1997 to 2006, Pettis played for the Phoenix Mercury and Indiana Fever. As an assistant coach of the Phoenix Mercury, she led two WNBA titles in 2007 and 2009. She’s been the assistant coach of the Chicago Sky lately.
Project Roots is a way for other people to take strength knowing what they’re putting into their bodies, he said.
Farmers grow in areas of opportunity and on agave farms in downtown Phoenix. They then use the food they grow to feed the homeless network with a cell cooking service, deliver bags of seasonal produce, and run a donation-based booth at the Spaces of Opportunity Farmers Market.
Pettis hopes that others will be more aware that “true food comes from the earth.”
“We can have a cooler, deeper lifestyle of ourselves as people, reconnected with Mother Earth,” Pettis said. “A connection with her to remind us of our humanity.”
Details: Opportunity Spaces, 1200 W. Vineyard Road, Phoenix. facebook.com/SpacesOfOpportunity.
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