Food is a Human Right

Greetings Community,

You may have noticed us using the phrase “Food is a Human Right” more frequently as we talk about our work. This statement is simple, but deep, and deserves more attention.

It’s not only about acquiring the minimum ration of calories. The right to food includes all nutritional elements necessary for a healthy and active life, as well as the means to access them. It’s about having the resources needed for sustainable food security. It is not just about the availability of food but also about its accessibility, adequacy, quality, and cultural relevance.

The right to food is inclusive.

Food is not a privilege.
Food is not a commodity.
Food is not a weapon or a tool.

Food is one of the basic building blocks of human life. Food is essential to enjoying every other basic human right. Food brings us together, binds our communities, and celebrates our diversity.

Together, we’re reimagining a food system that upholds this right at every level. A food system that equips makers to explore their entrepreneurial dreams. Where both the compensation of growers and access for the community remain fair and adequate. Where future generations know how to have intimate interactions with the food system and where everyone is afforded the chance to grow.

The right to food is intimately connected with human dignity.

Equipping our community with the tools, resources, and knowledge to have meaningful and just interactions with the food system helps us to acknowledge and restore the human dignity within each of us. Community is at the heart of this transformational work, and I’m so grateful to be doing it in community with you.

In solidarity,

Julius

P.S. You can participate in a more just food system today, by participating in our Solidarity Share Raffle, which helps us sustain our sliding scale CSA, and ensure fresh, local produce is widely available in our community.

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Georgia Gilmore & The Club From Nowhere

By Julius Buzzard • February 18, 2026

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when formal fundraising was surveilled and criminalized, Georgia Gilmore organized something deceptively simple: a kitchen network . Known as The Club From Nowhere , Gilmore and other Black women sold pies, cakes, and home-cooked meals to quietly raise money for the movement. Their anonymity was protection. Their food was infrastructure. For over a year, as the boycott stretched on, these funds paid for carpools, gas, and daily survival. While history often centers on speeches and marches, Gilmore reminds us that revolutions are sustained behind the scenes by those who feed people, organize logistics, and keep the lights on. Her kitchen was a site of resistance. Her recipes were tools of liberation. At Growing Hope, we honor this lineage every time we invest in food entrepreneurs, incubator kitchens, and cooperative models. When food businesses are community-rooted, they do more than generate income; they fuel movements . Never underestimate what food can do. And never forget who has always been doing the work.

Fannie Lou Hamer & the Freedom Farm Cooperative

By Julius Buzzard • February 11, 2026

“If you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around.” Fannie Lou Hamer said this not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. In 1969, after being evicted from her plantation home for registering to vote, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The goal was simple and radical: Black families deserved land, food, housing, and economic independence, without having to ask permission. Freedom Farm grew vegetables, raised livestock, built homes, and supported cooperative ownership. It addressed hunger and poverty at their roots, refusing the lie that liberation could come without material security. Hamer understood what we still grapple with today: political rights mean little without food sovereignty . Voting doesn’t protect you from hunger. Legislation doesn’t replace land. Dignity requires access to the means of survival. This is why Growing Hope centers farming, education, and entrepreneurship together. Food sovereignty is not just about what’s on your plate; it’s about who controls the systems that decide who eats .

The Black Panther Party & Free Breakfast

By Julius Buzzard • February 4, 2026

In 1969, the Black Panther Party launched the Free Breakfast for Children Program , serving tens of thousands of children across the United States every single school day. Not as an act of charity, but as a declaration. The Panthers understood something the dominant systems refused to acknowledge: a hungry child cannot learn, organize, or imagine a future . Feeding children was a political act. It was protection. It was strategy. Volunteers cooked before dawn in church basements and community centers. Children were served breakfast while learning about Black history, self-determination, and collective responsibility. The state noticed and felt threatened. The FBI labeled the program “the greatest threat” to internal security, not because it was violent, but because it worked. And it worked so well that the U.S. government was forced to expand public school breakfast programs nationwide . Mutual aid didn’t just meet immediate needs; it reshaped public policy . This is food sovereignty in action: communities identifying harm, meeting their own needs with dignity, and building power in the process. At Growing Hope, we carry this legacy forward. When we insist on dignified access to food, when we support farmers markets as sites of connection and not extraction, when we center youth and Black leadership, we are walking a well-worn path. When communities feed themselves, systems change.

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