In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across the Portland Metro area, and the world, have become increasingly isolated. A veil of loneliness and uncertainty blanked over many people across our city. The opportunity to work, volunteer, and even grow within one’s community diminished, and continues to be limited.
As people who have experienced this isolation throughout most of the pandemic, registering back into school gave us, Liz Haig-May (Science major) and Sean Brady (Chemistry major), an opportunity to reconnect with our community. We both enrolled in an University Studies senior capstone that partners with the Wombyn’s Wellness Garden (WWG). The WWG, founded and run by Roberta Eaglehorse-Ortiz (Oglala Lakota/Yomba Shoshone), is a garden space at the Oregon Food Bank in NE Portland where Roberta grows medicine and provides a healing space for the Portland native community and more. This capstone, which focuses on the themes of food justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability leadership, allowed us to be physically present at WWG with our classmates once a week for part of the fall term. This was the first major instance since the pandemic hit our shores in which we no longer felt isolated from our broader community. Physically working in the garden and learning how food can be a driving force in the work for social justice became increasingly influential in how we saw our roles within our community and the overall food system from a local to global scale.
We were not alone in this realization, as our peers in the course were also learning about how the food we consume and cultivate has an impact our communities. “This course has given us the building blocks we all need to continue fighting the good fight in ensuring our world and our communities are taken care of,” said Nicole, a Public Health major. Food, in essence, is a building block for any sustainable and healthy community. Through education and working within the community, we start to pave the way to place power back into people hands, creating potential pathways towards food sovereignty.
Balkhiis, a Psychology major, echoed this sentiment eloquently: “Power is within someone who is capable of growing their own food and building a community around it.” Educating communities on how to become independent from dominant, unsustainable food systems allows people to not only grow food, but to grow and build relationships with one other. And during a time where we are so isolated from one another, this is exactly what we need to reconnect and begin rebuilding healthy communities.
This class is making us better people. It is always important to know what struggles your fellow humans deal with, especially if you do not experience those struggles yourself. Each person who learns this is one more person who can help bring others together as a community. Massive change is difficult but that does not mean we cannot reach that change person by person.
Our course instructor, Megan Schneider, explained that: “In the reckoning that is 2020, I hope we all come away with the knowledge that we must shift our essential modus operandi - in the way we work towards sustainability, in the way we work towards justice, in the way we live, and in the way we teach and learn. As the BLM movement over the summer showed us yet again, we must learn from and meaningfully engage marginalized voices to move forward in our work to create a better world. The philosophy of this course centers around creating a community of learners that intends to flatten the hierarchy that exists in classrooms, a hierarchy which mimics unsustainable power dynamics in the real world.” The instructor, teaching assistant, community partner, and students all become co-learners and teachers in our attempt to understand the complexity of sustainability and justice work through the central theme of food. Working with Roberta of the WWG, who generously shared her wisdom as an Indigenous woman during her time as a co-teacher, immeasurably enriched our learning as students. She echoed our enjoyment saying, “As part of a University Studies capstone, which intends to provide real-world opportunities to learn and apply their knowledge, it’s wonderful to see the students become self-authored learners and self-directed sustainability leaders eager to make an impact in their community.”
We know people may feel discouraged from engaging with their community, simply because we feel like there are too many problems. How can a single person fight food scarcity? It is an intimidating and discouraging thought. While the goal is massive change, every little bit helps. Every person donating even a few hours of their time will chip away at the inequalities we face as humans. Jillian, an Anthropology major, agreed that everyone can do their part: “My job helping [Roberta] clean her plot of land may have been small,” she explained, “but for the future, it will play a bigger part in the community.” We cannot create large-scale sustainable change alone, but every little bit and each person helps move towards that goal.