2024: Growing Community, Growing Together
Dear Friends and Comrades,
First and foremost: thank you for your incredible support for Planting Justice as we create replicable and scalable solutions to the interconnected and systemic climate, racial, land, food, economic, and environmental injustices we face!
Perhaps we should feel flattered, but the Trump Administration and its allies have named Planting Justice specifically as an example of “woke" and “radical" organizations whose funding should be cut. The Center for Renewing America, led by Trump’s Budget Director Russ Vought, highlighted 20 federal budget items in 2022 and 2023 that should be targeted and defunded during a second Trump term, and Planting Justice was listed by name in both budget proposals!
We know PJ's model and impact is earning national attention, for good reason. We've created a model that employs–and creates leadership opportunities for– formerly incarcerated people and others most impacted by systemic injustice to transform their neighborhoods and local food systems. With over 50 current staff making living wages, an incredible amount of transformative work gets done at PJ every day.
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In 2024 alone:
- Our Food Sovereignty Youth Leadership Program hired over 80 Oakland youth for paid internships and offered our food justice/urban ag curriculum to 2,000 at-risk high school students.
- Our 2-acre East Oakland nursery propagated over 30,000 trees of 1500 varieties (making it the largest collection of organic fruit trees in North America!) and facilitated the planting of 780 free fruit trees for Sobrante Park residents in immediate proximity to our nursery, which sits in the lowest income neighborhood in Oakland.
- Our 3-acre Aquaponics Farm is under construction in collaboration with UC Davis to grow 150,000 pounds of organic produce per year and incubate a worker-owned cooperative that will facilitate land/business ownership and asset building for East Oakland residents.
- Our 4-acre Mother Farm has more than 2,000 fruit trees of 1,000 rare varieties in the ground, making it the most biodiverse urban farm in the U.S.
- Our Good Table project is set to open in 2025 as the first combined pay-what-you-can cafe, incubator kitchen, retail nursery, and community center in the nation.
However, with the results of recent national elections, we are very concerned about our ability to complete our current projects and sustain our work over the next four years.
The appointment of pro-profit and anti-science officials to federal departments such as the Interior, Health & Human Services, USDA, and the EPA means that federal grant money might disappear. We know the federal government is not a reliable long-term ally, and we also know this is the critical moment for us to reach out to our mighty community of current and future donors to make sure PJ can survive these next four years. With PJ in the sights of Russ Vought and the Trump Administration, our goal is to raise $1.3 million by March 2025 to replace the federal funding PJ has at risk.
In times like these, we turn to Patron Saint of PJ Queen Audre Lorde, who reminds us that our survival is a promise, and a radical act. That our survival as individuals, especially now, is even more dependent than ever on the strength of our communities. PJ's physical sites, such as our East Oakland Nursery, Aquaponics Farm & Training Center in Sobrante Park, our Mother Farm, The Good Table Café & Nursery, and weekly Farmers Market in El Sobrante all provide the kind of tangible mutual support and shared experiences of solidarity that will get us through these times. We know we will survive, together, and also that in order to thrive, we will all need each other.
So thank you for your support! Whether financial, in-kind, volunteering your time and energy, or by spreading the word about our work–it’s an honor and a privilege to grow amazing plants, people, and community with you, and we can’t wait to see what we grow together in the next year, the next four years, and the decades to come.
We bury our seeds and wait,
Winter blocks the road,
Flowers are taken prisoner underground,
But then green justice tenders a spear.
–Rumi
There are many ways to support Planting Justice!
You can make a one time, monthly, quarterly, or annual donation. Planting Justice is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with an EIN of 27-0334905 all donations are 100% tax deductible.
Planting Justice also accepts Stock Donations!
Receiving Institution: Charles Schwab & Co.
1945 Northwestern Drive
El Paso, TX 79912
Receiving Account Number: 8239-5748
Receiving Account Name: Planting Justice
DTC Clearing Number: 0164, Code
Not able to contribute financially? No problem! There are still many ways to support us, such as volunteering or sharing our work. Every bit helps and we appreciate your support!
