Worcester Speaks #10: Grace Sliwoski
"Green space and the ability to grow food are a part of those good things that we want for everyone."
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Grace Sliwoski is director of programs at the Regional Environmental Council, or the REC (which I learned mid-interview is pronounced “R-E-C,” not “rec”), an comprehensive engine for food justice (including food-related joy) around the city that includes both static and mobile farmer’s markets. We spoke on Zoom for 35 minutes, so I’ve condensed our conversation quite a bit. Grace got us started by sharing the history of the REC:
Grace: We were founded in 1972. A group of citizens in Worcester came together to file a lawsuit against the city of Worcester over the location of a landfill that was going to be sited in Green Hill Park, which they felt was an equity issue. It was, and still is, a low-income neighborhood. They came together and formed under this name for the purpose of this lawsuit, which was actually unsuccessful. Fun Worcester fact: There is a landfill and there is trash in Green Hill Park, but it's buried. The folks who kind of coalesced around this moment decided to keep organizing and working together around environmental justice issues in the city of Worcester. Some of the folks involved really worked on cleaning Lake Quinsigamond. They worked to bring municipal recycling to the city of Worcester. And another component of that work that really picked up a lot of energy in the 1990s was around lead poisoning.
At the same time there were folks involved who were kind of looking at the other side of the coin of environmental equity. Environmental justice is about sharing the burdens of problems in our environment in a way that is fair and also ensuring that the good things in the environment are accessed in a way that is fair. Green space and the ability to grow food are a part of those good things that we want for everyone. That's sort of how the REC started to see community gardens as urban environmental justice work.
Liz: People around Worcester know REC from maybe a farmer's market or the plant sale, but could you briefly describe the full breadth of what you do?
The first is the Community and School Gardens Network, which is our oldest food-based program. And we support a network of over 80 community and school gardens in the city of Worcester. It's free to be a member in our network. We don't own any of the land of the gardens. Many of them are located in public housing or nonprofit organizations that serve different clients. Some of them are neighborhood gardens, some of them are urban farms. The other half are school gardens, the majority of which are in Worcester Public Schools. We give away 10,000 seedlings every spring to all the gardens in our network. That's what our plant sale pays for.
The second is our youth program, YouthGROW. That's actually how I came to the organization. That program works with high school-age youth in Worcester. All of the young people who work with us are paid an hourly wage and they maintain several farm sites. We have a farm site here at our office, the YouthGROW Farm. We also have a raised bed youth garden in Grant Square Park and a rooftop garden in Polar Park, the WooSox Farms. They build job skills, they learn how to grow food.
And then the third is the Community and Mobile Farmers Market program. This program was founded to address some real gaps in the food system in Main South, specifically for folks being able to access not just fresh produce, but fresh produce that was affordable. Since we started operating farmer's markets, it's always been a core value that we've offered resources for folks who are paying with SNAP. This is something that we privately fundraised for for many years, but now the majority of the customers who shop with us use a program called the Healthy Incentives Program, which is funded at the state level. If you receive SNAP, you are automatically enrolled in HIP, so you get an automatic refund when you shop at eligible farmer's markets, farm stands, and CSAs.
But a lot of people can't get to a farmer's market easily where they can use their benefits. So this is where the mobile farmer's market comes in. It's exactly what it sounds like. Like an ice cream truck but with vegetables. We have 13 weekly stops in Worcester, including Out To Lunch. And then we are also in Webster and Southbridge. And then we coordinate the Beaver Brook Farmer's Market on Fridays and the University Park market on Saturdays. And at those two markets, we don't sell food. We get the permits, we help with promotion, we try to bring community and family resources, voter registration, earn a bike, kind of complimentary partnerships.
The first time I had an apartment where I could grow a garden, my neighbor put his head over the fence and was like, does the grocery store not have all the vegetables that you would want? I acted like he was kidding even though he wasn't. How would you explain why people garden?
First of all, I would say that most folks who are gardening in our network are not subsistence gardeners. And so they're interested in eating the food they grow and some folks are really skilled and can produce a lot of food, but you know, urban growers, you're gonna be supplementing the food you grow with food you buy. So that can't be the only reason that you're doing it. Going to the youngest age group we work with, preschoolers, I really see just the incredible benefit for young children in being able to be outside in nature. We've heard from Head Start teachers that there's almost nothing that you can do in the garden that is not aligned with preschool curriculum because they need to be figuring out how to interact with the world, how to touch things, how to count, how to smell, how to recognize food.
We hear a lot about the garden being an important space for socialization and relationships and connecting to folks. I think we really saw that during the pandemic, where people were experiencing the impacts of isolation and the garden was a safe space where people can be outside, where people can develop relationships that cross language barriers, that cross age gaps, that cross cultural barriers. I tried to do a focus group last fall with some of the older adults at Elm Park Towers and I was asking them questions indoors with an interpreter and just getting nothing. And then we went outside to the garden and we walked together and we did not speak the same language, but I got so much more.
And I would also highlight gardens as peacemaking spaces. My parents are the founders of the Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker and the street that I grew up on, Mason Street, had a lot of urban blight. My dad did a series of murals on the boarded up windows of the laundromat building and then there was a vacant lot space where he got permission—I think he got permission? Maybe he didn't—but we had a renegade garden there. Personally it made me feel good to see beautiful things on the street that I lived on. And I think the research bears that out, when they talk about the violence and disorder that people see in these spaces. I think gardens are such a brave act of pushing back against that in a positive way. My parents and other people on the street worked on bringing in art and gardens as a way to take those spaces back and to show that they were cared for, that the people who lived in the community were invested in them.
I would love to hear about how the different options in the plant sale reflect the diversity of the city.
Some of the cultural crops that you see offered are a reflection of our community gardeners. We have a number of community gardeners from Nepal and Bhutan [at] some of the larger format gardens who have made specific requests. Our farm coordinator Tom, his mom's side of the family is from Puerto Rico, so he's been really interested in trying to cultivate some more Caribbean crops to see if we can adapt them for the New England growing season. And this isn't sold at the plant sale, but aji dulce is a pepper that's pretty popular in different Caribbean cuisines and we've grown those on the YouthGROW farm and they don't even make it to the mobile market. People who live in the neighborhood will come and pick them up here. Valeria, our farm mentor, is from Burundi and so she has a lot of expertise in crops that are popular there, but there's a lot of crossover between the crops that they use there and also in Brazil and some of the other communities where there's large populations in Worcester.
There are a lot of farmer’s markets (that are wonderful) where you can buy things like alpaca wool mittens and fancy jam, and then there are markets where you can buy a giant sack of potatoes and onions and carrots and actually get your groceries. And I appreciate the latter so much. I’d like to hear about REC’s commitment to accessibility and food justice in the choices you make for your markets.
When we first started operating farmer's markets, we wrestled a lot—continue to wrestle—with the challenge of how to make these projects sustainable for farmers, and helpful and affordable for the community. Because we know farmers are not getting rich and that it's important for them to be paid a fair price for the work that they're doing, for the food that they're growing. And also that many, many people in our community are not purchasing fresh produce, not because they don't want to purchase it or because they don't know how to prepare it, but because it is unaffordable and they're making impossible choices with budgets that don't provide enough. That customer base, low-income folks who are purchasing their groceries, it's not a tourist experience. They purchase large quantities of food, they're great customers. Everyone is welcome to shop at our farmer's markets and we want our farmer's markets to be successful and thriving.
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