About Us

Planting Justice is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA dedicated to food justice, economic justice, and sustainable local food systems. We are the first organization of our kind to combine ecological training and urban food production with a grassroots door-to-door organizing model that will vastly increase our educational community outreach, help us to recruit volunteers, decentralize our fundraising sources, and provide local jobs that also train young community organizers.

We bring community members together to create replicable, energy- and water-efficient gardens that demonstrate how it is possible to grow a complete nutritional diet – including the production of fruit, vegetables, fish, eggs, nuts, edible mushrooms, goat milk, herbs, jam, honey, and meat – right where 80% of U.S. residents live: in the city. Whereas edible landscaping and Permaculture have thus far been available only to those who can pay a premium for it, our organizational model enables us to empower economically disadvantaged communities to transform empty lots, paved backyards, and grass lawns into productive organic gardens that serve as living classrooms for community members to practice Urban Permaculture and bio-intensive gardening techniques.

Check out this terrific video to see us in action!

Also, we just completed our Echoing Green Fellowship Application, and they ask some really great questions.  We've decided to post our answers here for anyone who is interested in reading them. Please wish us luck...we could really scale up our work with this fellowship!

Q: What is your new, innovative idea to create lasting social change? Be clear, specific,
and jargon-free in your answer

A: Planting Justice is a food justice organization, a door-to-door canvass, and an edible landscaping
company that provides experiential educational opportunities through growing and celebrating food
in community. We combine the best principles and practices of community organizing with those of
biodiverse, intensive urban food production to inspire and employ people to transform barren land
into educational models for sustainable urban food systems at local schools, religious institutions,
neighbor's yards, empty city lots, and public land. Our peer-to-peer educational programs use food,
culture, arts and music to instill an ethic of earth stewardship and people care, while mentoring
those with few economic opportunities for a future in ecological entrepreneurship steeped in social
justice, community empowerment, and health equity. Innovative, diverse income streams will ensure
our financial independence and create jobs in direct-to-consumer food and compost production,
community organizing, and edible landscaping, with the proceeds directly financing our non-profit
projects growing and providing healthy affordable food with low-income people who structurally lack
access to it.

Q: What drew you to this issue? When and how did you come up with your idea?

A: We believe that all people, rich and poor, deserve healthy food, clean water, and dignified jobs,
and that we all have a responsibility to live in ways that regenerate rather than threaten the web of
life supporting humanity. In June 2008 we started an edible landscaping and ecological design
company called the Backyard Food Project with a mission to make elite environmental services
affordable and accessible to low-income urban residents. From the start, we realized we could raise
funds and awareness door-to-door in order to build community food projects with communities who
lack access to enough healthy food and can't afford the cost of landscaping or expensive
sustainability courses and products. We also created 40 urban permaculture gardens in the East Bay
for full-paying clients that recycled greywater, integrated urban animal husbandry, produced
thousands of pounds of fruits, vegetables, eggs, honey, meat, herbs and edible mushrooms, and
paid our bills. The high demand for our services convinced us that we could scale up this work by
organizing an income-generating nonprofit that could create jobs and local food security without
over-relying on foundations for our survival.

Q: As specifically as possible, demonstrate the need for your organization. Use statistics
and references

A: Living wage jobs and affordable healthy foods are severely limited in U.S. inner cities. 33.9% of CA
Bay Area residents and nearly 39% of people of color in the Bay Area cannot afford enough healthy
food (Building Local Bay Area Economy 2006). 90% of U.S. black children will be on food stamps at
some point during their childhood (USA Today, 11/2/09). Students of color with whom we grow food
complain of illness after eating the “crunchy meat and green corndogs” served at school. With
recent unemployment rates as high as they’ve been in decades (17% in Oakland according to the
CEDA), and higher food prices at inner-city convenience stores compared to suburban supermarkets
(Chung and Myers 1999), it is no surprise people of color suffer disproportionately from heart
disease, diabetes, hypertension and stroke (Berton 1999). However, Cultivating the Commons has
identified 1,400 acres at 495 publicly owned sites in Oakland suitable for urban agriculture, the
Oakland Food Policy Council has the ear of city government, and Planting Justice is on the ground
building tangible and replicable solutions that confront these food inequalities in innovative and
ecologically sustanainable ways!

Q: What’s the root cause of this problem? How does your idea tackle this root cause?

A: The centralization and industrialization of the food system in the U.S. has not only severely
harmed local economies and small businesses, but it’s also the premier reason why most low-income
urban residents do not have access to an affordable and nutritious diet. Two generations ago,
Oakland and other inner-cities survived on locally-owned businesses in the food and beverage
industry that supplied whole foods (no pun intended) and jobs where empty lots now lie. Just ten
companies supply more than half the food and drink now sold in the U.S. (Shorto, 2004) and the
millions of dollars that would otherwise circulate in the community are mined out. Former industrial
cities like Oakland and Detroit, with their thousands of paved and fallow acres, are fertile breeding
ground for a revolution in urban food production that connects ecological sustainability to social
justice. Our vision for a grassroots community-led effort that creates jobs for urban youth, former
inmates, and other marginalized communities in urban food production ensures that this revolution
is directed by, held accountable to, and supportive of those who are most affected by parallel food
and economic inequities.

Q: Help Echoing Green visualize what your organization will do. Describe the specific
programs that your organization will engage in to deliver your long-term outcomes

A: Urban residents may first hear about Planting Justice on the steps of their front door, when a
Planting Justice canvasser asks them to participate in collective action to help create and sustain
community food projects. They'll be invited to donate and to engage in our free and low-cost
educational programs, learning experientially with their neighbors to design, build, and maintain
cutting-edge sustainable food systems as part of our Urban Food Forest Program. As a trainee they
can discover opportunities for exciting living-wage jobs in our edible landscaping department or as a
technician producing myriad value-added products such as compost, worm castings, sustainably
produced tilapia and salad greens, organic liquid fertilizers, plant starters, etc. Our Green Jobs
program will give former inmates, youth of color, and other marginalized urban residents the skills
and paid opportunities to create productive and life-giving sources of wealth and health for
themselves and their communities. All are welcome to access free and low-cost healthy foods at
community farmstands and participate in regular cooking demos and grub-parties to celebrate our
collective ingenuity and creativity.

Q: Describe your long-term desired outcomes. How will you measure your progress
toward these outcomes?
A: We mean to contribute to and support a radical shift in the way our country feeds itself, away
from an export-oriented monocultural agriculture towards one that rewards farmers (both urban and
rural) for regenerating natural resources and making organic produce affordable to even the most
economically disenfranchised among us. We will measure our effectiveness in our reach. We are
building a franchise prototype in Oakland – our dream in microcosm, an incubator where creativity is
nursed by pragmatism and operations manuals can be built for replication outwards. We then expect
to open canvass offices and begin implementing collaborative community food projects in LA,
Detroit, and D.C. in the next three to five years. We’ll create permanent training centers and
demonstration sites that will give inspiration, job-training, tangible solutions, and abundant food for
decades and decades to come. We’ll create jobs at all stages in the food system: production,
value-added processing, and retail. We will quantify our progress by tracking numbers of jobs we
create, people we train, collaborations we forge, pounds of food we produce, doors we knock on, and
members and volunteers we recruit.

Q: Innovation is important to Echoing Green. Explain how your idea is truly innovative.
Identify other organizations that are addressing this issue and how your approach is
different and has the potential to be more effective

A: While there are a number of wonderful community organizations addressing food justice issues in
Oakland – such as People’s Grocery, City Slicker Farms, Oakland Food Connection, and HOPE
Collaborative – Planting Justice is the only one that incorporates direct door-to-door community
outreach and ecological landscaping as tools to generate income and jobs. We designed our unique
marriage between grassroots organizing, for-profit landscaping, and urban food justice in response
to Haleh's research on the Oakland food justice movement that uncovered an uncomfortable
economic dependence on foundations, lackluster grassroots outreach, and a reliance on volunteer
labor in lieu of many paid positions for economically marginalized community members. Our
cutting-edge landscaping service enables us to fully fund one beautiful and productive garden with a
low-income family for every two full-paying clients who hire our team! And our canvass program
enables us, in any U.S. City, to build the broad participation, awareness, and community buy-in we
need to build a sovereign organization that can create tangible solutions for food justice and
economic justice in U.S. cities.

Q: Building a new organization is challenging. How are you entrepreneurial? Describe
your skills and experiences that demonstrate you can lead a start-up organization

A: Haleh and Gavin started Backyard Food Project together with a craigslist ad, less than $1000 and
just enough tools (and friends with tools) to turn a profit in our first year of business. We salvaged
local materials and built 40 innovative and productive gardens to pay our bills while we worked
full-time as volunteers to set up Planting Justice. When we needed funding for projects with people
who couldn’t pay for them, we organized our friends with canvassing experience to raise donations
and volunteers house by house. Since April 2009 we’ve incorporated Planting Justice, completed our
own state and federal tax exemption applications, written an income generating business plan for
our nonprofit corporation, and recruited 21 incredibly talented and diverse board members from
inside and outside the local food justice movement to form a broad coalition. We’ve organized our
board into 15 distinct committees of 3-8 board members each, to efficiently channel their positive
energy towards specific aspects of the work we need to do to fulfill our mission and expand our
reach. We now have over 500 volunteers, 200 donors, and 1000 supporters who are just waiting for
us to call on them!

Q: Why are you uniquely qualified to lead your specific organization? Describe your
experience working with this issue and population

A: Our planet and our community are calling for commonsense solutions that address the linked
climate, food, and economic crises. Our unique skill-sets as permaculture teachers/designers, social
entrepreneurs, and community organizers are desperately needed. Since March 2009 we’ve worked
with 35 enthusiastic inmates 2-3 times/month at San Quentin Prison, helping our guys to design and
build a 1600 sq. ft. organic vegetable garden right on the medium-security yard to prepare them for
post-release job opportunities in our organization. At Explore Middle School in East Oakland, Planting
Justice brings low-income community members together to transform a grassy slope into a perennial
food forest that will give students, their families, and neighbors thousands of pounds of produce
every year for decades. In April 2009 we dug water-harvesting swales and planted 30 fruit trees on
contour with 80 students, and each week since we’ve led an after-school garden course with ten 6th
grade girls and a youth-group called West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered. Together we are
developing an empowering eco-arts curriculum as we grow food and explore eco-entrepreneurship,
nutrition, and social justice.

Q: How much money have you fundraised to date? Who is your largest funder and what is
the size of their grant? Provide an estimate of your total budget for each of the next two
fiscal years

A: The 200 donors we canvassed door-to-door contributed $7500, our rooftop nursery generated
$2000 in profits, and our largest grant was $1,000 from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
This money has funded our San Quentin garden, our school gardens, our rooftop nursery, and the
purchase of a big diesel work truck. Planting Justice has grown quickly with very little funding and an
all-volunteer staff; imagine what we can do when we hire our teams to work full-time! In the next two
years, we plan to hire a team of 3-5 Canvassers, a Canvass Director, 1 or 2 teams of 3 Edible
Landscapers, an Outreach Director, and an Executive Director. The canvass team will fund
themselves, with extra income going to fund our non-profit projects, tools, general expenses. After
paying our landscapers $15-25/hour, the edible landscape program will generate an extra
$3600/month per team based on 30 hour work weeks, money which will also fund our non-profit
projects, help us purchase land, and fund capital projects that will generate income from various
value-added products. For the next 2 years we plan to spend $300,000 per year and generate
roughly $300,000 per year, not including grants!

Q: Why is co-leadership a superior model for your organization, compared to a single
leader model?

A: All social movements, no matter how large, are propelled by small groups of committed people
taking action together. We are certain that our success as a grassroots organization is a direct
function of our ability to build community, and thus far our partnership together has been a
cornerstone in our community. Gavin is deeply impacted by a simple lesson given to him by an elder
permaculture teacher, and that is this: “No matter what it is you are looking to change in the world,
you must first find one other person who matches your passion and commitment. These two bring
ten, and those ten turn into a hundred.” A co-leadership model in our organization sets an example
and demonstrates our commitment to decentralized ownership, democratized leadership,
collaboration, and cooperation – ideals that have attracted our unusually large and diverse board. In
fact, we are cultivating our entire board to join us as co-leaders, to ensure that we build something
that outlasts any of us individually. Our model is an inherent acknowledgement that “no man is an
island,” that no one person can go it alone, that only communities of committed people, working
together, can heal the present.

Q: How do you know each other? Describe the history of your relationship, including any
shared work experiences and how you decided to create this organization together

A: Haleh and Gavin are each other’s very best friends. We have built a special kind of trust that can
only come through shared joys and sufferings, the day in and day out of being there, sacrificing,
giving, and receiving. We have lived together and worked together since 2006 in very close quarters,
and have spent practically every day together since we first met in 2005. We immediately connected
through our shared commitment to working for peace and human rights, we supported one another
through frustrating years of anti-war organizing, and we encouraged each other to find new ways to
articulate and create tangible models of what we are for, rather than solely fighting what we are
against. This is the spirit that bore Planting Justice, a child we conceived together out of our love for
and commitment to one another and to social justice and systemic change. It is this partnership and
shared commitment that attracts and inspires our community of friends to join us in extended family,
to join us in daring to believe that building productive gardens in community are radical acts of love
and antidotes to violence, war, and exploitation.

Q: In a co-leadership model, titles help people understand what each partner does. What
will your titles be? What will each of you do within your organization?

A: As our Outreach Director, Haleh will 1) hire and manage a team of door-to-door canvassers 2)
manage donor relations 3) spearhead our volunteer outreach and coordinate community events 4)
work with multiple board committees to expand Planting Justice’s web outreach via artistic and
educational multimedia 5) work with board to publish print media, and reach out to local and
national print and radio media, and 6) help to generate awareness of our programs and find new
projects. As the first President of our all-volunteer Board of Directors, she will preside at board
meetings, execute deeds and contracts, and supervise the affairs of the corporation and our board
committees. As the Executive Director, Gavin will 1) manage our permaculture landscaping
department and its projects 2) coordinate our educational programs and teach permaculture courses
3) work with our Board and various committees to maintain our financial health 4) research and
pursue opportunities for land, and plan and execute new capital projects, and 5) forge alliances and
build collaborative working relationships with community groups, nonprofits, churches, schools,
prisons, and other institutions to scale up our work.

Q: What is the decision-making process for your organization? When the co-leaders have
opposing views, how do you resolve the issue?

A: We honor and practice the principles and techniques of Nonviolent Communication and strive to
approach all our relations, especially when parties have opposing views, with compassion. This
practice helps us connect all our thoughts and feelings to the underlying human needs that we all
share (such as love, respect, understanding, and support), and to communicate those needs clearly
without shame or guilt. It is of utmost importance to us to give each other a safe, nonjudgmental
space to express why we feel the way we do, so that we can compromise in ways that make each
person feel good and honored in their contributions and care. With this practice of recognizing the
interconnectedness of our wants and needs, Haleh and Gavin are confident that we can reach
consensus on any issue, even on those that we initially seemed to have opposing views.
Compassionate, nonviolent communication is also upheld with our board of directors, yet rather than
seeking consensus with 23 people on every issue, our bylaws contain the procedures for majority
voting, majority action as board action, and procedures for addressing conflicts of interest.