The Environmental Justice Garden

It was nearly 100 degrees outside. The sun was beating down on me and my coworker Julia, and the sweat from my armpits was dripping all the way down to my elbows. I was shoveling a mixture of soil, bones, eggshells, and fruit pits into a grated cylinder while Julia spun it around and around.

Although not a part of our main projects, on slower in-person workdays, Julia and I had the opportunity to help out in Valley Verde’s community garden. We learned everything from seed propagation to tomato transplanting. This morning Julia and I were working in Valley Verde’s Compost Hub, sorting the plastic and not yet decomposed naturals out of the compost.

Valley Verde’s Compost Hub is a community composting resource that allows local community members to donate their food waste to the compost bins and receive compost in return. This model is great for community members that are looking for an affordable way to add homemade compost to their own gardens! Julia and I aided in this project by scooping compost into a cylindrical tool( much like a lottery wheel); turning it until the smaller, usable bits fell into the wheelbarrow below; and tossing the leftover pieces back into the compost bin.

After nearly two hours of shoveling, turning, and wiping my sweaty forehead with my dirt speckled forearms, Julia and I had successfully sorted all the compost. Looking at our mountain of chicken bones, coconut shells, and avocado pits, I felt proud. Although sorting the compost is not a particularly unique, romantic, or even important job, it is a necessary step to the functioning of the entire garden.

In my time with Valley Verde as a Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area Fellow, I had the opportunity to plan community workshops, create advertising materials, conduct research on contacts and connections, and develop many more valuable skills. Julia and I were even given the opportunity to host our own community workshop where we shared tips for gardening inside the home and opened up conversations about the importance of food justice in San Jose. Hosting community workshops has long been a part of Valley Verde’s model, as it allows them to connect with the community at large beyond just those enrolled in their programs. By engaging with community members directly during my workshop, I expanded my knowledge on food justice and its local implications.

I was also able to develop my networking, researching, and writing skills through marketing for Valley Verde’s homeland nursery. I spread the word about Valley Verde’s seedling subscriptions and gardening kits through their network of community partners and volunteers, researched and organized Valley Verde’s potential and active partnerships to ease the team’s future marketing initiatives, created Instagram posts and fliers for use when the Homeland Nursery fully opens in the fall, and developed a Homeland Nursery Pop-up shop that allows Valley Verde to continue selling plants into the summer seasons. In my time at Valley Verde, I aimed not only to complete current marketing initiatives but to create and strengthen tools that I believe will spread the reach of the organization's programs and community network.

Even so, the experience that I had sorting the compost stuck with me the most. Maybe it was because that task subverted my expectations of the work I would be doing in my fellowship, or that it subverted my expectations of what garden work looks like in general - or maybe it was just that sorting compost challenged me physically and mentally in a way I was not used to being challenged. I still can’t say exactly why that experience stayed with me, but I know that that experience is a perfect reflection of one of the greatest lessons I learned throughout my fellowship with Valley Verde: that making change does not always look the way you expect it to.

In academia, especially at an institution like Stanford, we grow to believe that change comes in grand, exciting moments. We develop a deep understanding of the problems of modern society and that fixing them requires a series of sweeping political reforms and life-changing inventions. Throughout my experience in social change, I have struggled with this as a personal expectation. However, making change is not always romantic. Often, it is gritty, arduous, and difficult. You can spend hours, days, or years working on something that you step back and realize is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle, like spending hours sorting the compost for a garden. When I went into my fellowship experience at Valley Verde, I was carrying these expectations, assumptions, and assignments of value and influence with me. But throughout my experience working in the garden and seeing the long-term impacts of the daily, mundane task—like sorting the compost—my preconceived ideas were continuously challenged.

Valley Verde is a food sovereignty organization. I was initially drawn to working with Valley Verde because I wanted to learn more about what food sovereignty looks like in the current urban environment. I had always viewed food sovereignty as a future goal rather than an active present. When I thought of food sovereignty work, I imagined large-scale utopian changes: a future urban universe full of rooftop gardens and vertical farms, an end to the monopolization of the food economy by select corporations, and an abundance of thriving local producers and community educational farms that were free and open to every city dweller.

Although all of these elements are important to creating food sovereignty, working at Valley Verde showed me that food sovereignty is not only curated through these large scale political and structural changes. Valley Verde promotes food sovereignty by providing free programming to teach local community members how to garden at home, working directly and closely with the people they serve and providing materials from their own garden. This is a key component of environmental justice in the San Jose area, especially because so many San Jose community members are consistently left without access to affordable, accessible, and culturally preferred foods, a problem that will only worsen in a changing environment. Being able to watch and learn from this ground-up approach allowed me to view food justice from a more personal perspective, one in which the change is built through one-on-one connection and knowledge sharing rather than the influence of powerful actors.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with and meet the people that I was connected with through my fellowship at Valley Verde, and to have learned from them in the ways that I did. I often found that I learned just as much in the parts of my fellowship when I was not technically working: pausing in the middle of a meeting to taste test tomatoes that were just harvested from the garden with the Valley Verde team, potluck Tuesdays when my supervisor Lovepreet would use harvested produce and leftovers from the refrigerator to invent a kitchen sink lunch, or sorting through seeds and packing super sprouts kits while I talked and laughed with Julia. In these moments I was able to learn and appreciate the value of the relationships formed at Valley Verde that exist beyond the programs developed, the materials created, and the produce harvested.

Although there are big moments throughout the process of creating social change, the foundation for creating a better future does not exist solely in these moments, and we cannot think of environmental justice in this way if we ever want to do it successfully. After working at Valley Verde, I like to think of working in environmental justice like tending to a garden. Although there will be days where you can harvest big red tomatoes or look over a bed of freshly bloomed flowers, there will also be days spent sorting compost or transporting wheelbarrows of soil from plant bed to plant bed. However, it is this consistent, everyday push towards a better future and the connections that we make doing it that allow us the joy of harvesting the vegetables of our labor.