Where You At?

Ayanfe Jamison’s current role is the Garden Manager at Growing Hope in Ypsilanti, Michigan, but her roots in agroecology, permaculture, and food sovereignty are far deeper than her current role. She grew up in a very intergenerational environment in East Tennessee, watching her older relatives work the earth, engaging in subsistence farming and traditional skills such as making pickles and homemade wine. However, her mother wanted her to pursue more “professional” skills and “move up” through education, so these ancestral skills were not passed on to Ayanfe. Since then, she has spent the past 30 years seeking out knowledge and understanding of the practices she grew up surrounded by.

As part of her lifelong education process, Ayanfe spent an “eco urban year” as an honors student at Miami Dade College, where her cohort lived together, made meals together, and maintained a garden together. Each Tuesday, one person was responsible for preparing a vegan meal, and their “class” was their dinner time. They read texts on deep ecology from writers such as Wendell Berry. As much as Ayanfe enjoyed the subject, she was deeply bothered by the fact that the “world literature” collection didn’t include any Black authors. She pushed back, and new material was introduced.

To this day, she treasures her heavily-annotated copy of Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture. Edited by Lorraine Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John P. O’Grady, this was Ayanfe’s first real exposure to ecological literature written from perspectives that resonated with her. One of her favorite pieces in the collection is “Touching the Earth,” by bell hooks. Another favorite is “Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz,” which aims to raise people’s awareness of how much they really know, or don’t know, about the place they call home. Through questions such as “Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap” and “How long is the growing season where you live?” quiz-takers are scored on a scale from “You have your head up your ass” to “You not only know where you’re at, you know where it’s at.”

This kind of straight-speaking evaluation is typical of Ayanfe. One of her continuous sources of frustration is that almost all of the “rewilding” she has engaged in as an adult has been dependent on learning skills from White folks–skills which she recognizes as part of her heritage, such as cob construction (building with mud and straw) and permaculture. When she first started rewilding, her friends were all “earthy crunchy white kids that lived teepees, school buses, and yurts” and who didn’t need to make money to sustain themselves. Ayanfe became focused on finding a way to reintroduce rewilding practices to people of color in ways that were realistic and acknowledged and respected the origins of these practices.

One of the ways Ayanfe passes on this knowledge is through running the Home Vegetable Garden program at Growing Hope. The program is focused on working-class folks in Ypsilanti and provides the materials and knowledge needed to have a robust home vegetable garden. Ayanfe and her interns (when she has them) install raised beds at people’s homes, and by the time they leave, they have a garden assembled, filled with soil, and with starter plants. Participants also receive seed packets and additional plant starts throughout the year. People who qualify for food assistance programs are prioritized, but other factors that are considered for program selection are whether there are seniors or children in the household, whether anyone in the household has a disability, the income scale of the household, and the racial demographics of the household. Participants in the program are able to grow whatever they would like to, and do whatever they want with it, whether that’s personal consumption, selling, or giving away the produce to the community, or feeding it to pets. This freedom is essential to the program's role in promoting food sovereignty.

To Ayanfe, food sovereignty means that food is a human right that cannot be bestowed or revoked. This includes the right not just to have access to food, but access and agency over your personal food system. Food assistance programs such as SNAP and WIC often do not provide options for people with different dietary restrictions, and when she was receiving benefits as a vegan, she felt like she had no agency over her food choices. Food sovereignty isn’t about just having access to whatever food the government determines you deserve, but about having the freedom to decide what kinds of food are appropriate or not appropriate for you and your household, freedom to use food as medicine, and the freedom, knowledge, and capacity to grow your own food and medicine. For Ayanfe, the Home Vegetable Garden program is an important route to providing community members with this kind of no-strings-attached sovereignty.

This post is part of a series by Emma Rose Hardy, a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan and the Rackham Local Food Systems Intern at Growing Hope. The series aims to highlight the essential role that SNAP and other food assistance programs play in the Washtenaw County local food system.

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From Dream to Legacy

By Julius Buzzard • July 1, 2026

Introducing the growing hope accelerator kitchen!

Return of the Tuesday Market

By Julius Buzzard • June 1, 2026

Beloved community, June is alive in Ypsilanti, and so are we! The farm is buzzing with pollinators, heavy with the first fruits of the season, keeping the produce cart full, and tended by caring hands, sowing hope along with each seed. At the same time, the MarketPlace is filling back up with color and noise with the joy of neighbors who have looked forward to the market all winter. We have so much to celebrate this season! Namely, the Tuesday Farmers Market is back! Starting tomorrow (June 2), the Ypsilanti Farmers Market will run not only on Saturday mornings, but also every Tuesday from 3 to 7 pm, through August, right here at the Ypsilanti Farmers MarketPlace. That means every week we’ll have two opportunities to invest in our local food system while building the community care that makes a market special. This matters more than it might seem on the surface. Many community members have shared that while they love the Ypsilanti Farmers Market, want to support local farmers and makers, and believe in local food, Saturday mornings simply do not work for their lifestyles. Saturday mornings may be reserved for overtime shifts or soccer games, or to recover from a week that didn’t seem to give anything back. For some, they can only get the financial assistance or translation services needed to fully participate on a weekday. For many of our neighbors, Saturday mornings are simply not free. Access can only be actualized when every community member experiences it. It’s as much about time as it is about proximity. We've always said that the Ypsilanti Farmers Market is for everyone in our community, and the Tuesday market is our effort to live that out more fully. The Ypsilanti Farmers Market, in each step toward the future, is a step toward a living vision we have built together. Toward a vision of the Ypsilanti Farmers MarketPlace as a community food hub, an anchor in the life of our city and of our local food system. A place where neighbors come together, build community, and leave united; all while gathering around food. The Ypsilanti Farmers Market is not purely about simple transactions. It’s about practicing what it looks like for a community to feed itself. It nurtures spaces where farmers can move their harvest and where small businesses can grow. The Ypsilanti Farmers MarketPlace is fostering that mid-week run-in with a neighbor, reminding us that we are not alone. We are grateful to the farmers, vendors, and partners who said yes to this. And we are grateful to our entire market team, who make it possible week after week, with devotion and creativity that continues to humble me. This spring, our Teen Leadership Program launched our second Seed Library, located at the Ypsilanti Farmers MarketPlace, which is available to the community at every market. Because everyone deserves a chance to grow. Seeds hold within them the agricultural knowledge of generations, the food traditions of all of humankind. When we talk about seed sovereignty, we are not simply speaking about the practical reality of who controls the global seed supply (the four corporations that control 60% of the seed and pesticide supply). Rather, it goes a level deeper into the question of who and what gets to be remembered. "Farmers are literally archivists of the land." -Abena Offeh-Gyimah Seeds are stories. They are living reminders of all the ancestors who walked before us. When we save and share seeds, we are practicing reciprocity with Mother Earth, and with one another. The seed library that our teens built is just the beginning. Our hope is that it grows into a circular system . We dream of a future where the seed library at the farm and MarketPlace are filled with self-labeled packets of seeds saved from the harvest of our community. We dream of a food future that sits in the hands of the very community that tends it. This is seed rematriation in practice, and I’m excited to grow with you. In solidarity, Julius P.S. Your support makes this food system possible, whether it is financial, volunteer, or saving seeds; we’re in this together. Keep an eye out for future newsletters for a hands-on seed-saving workshop later this year.

Food is A Right and Community is Medicine

By Julius Buzzard • May 1, 2026

Beloved community, May has arrived, and Southeast Michigan has exhaled into spring. As seedlings begin to sprout and Mother Earth does her thing, After a long winter of waiting, there is something deep inside each of us that leans toward the light. And I think it’s crucial that we lean into that light after so much darkness. That we lean into what it means to reach towards what we need and deserve, not simply an act of grace, but as a right of every living organism. This spring, I want to lean into the right to food. Sometimes, the most radical ideas are also the simplest. The right to food means every person, regardless of zip code, income, skin color, or the circumstances of their birth, has the inherent right to access sufficient, safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food. And it doesn’t start at the dinner table. It incorporates the farmer who needs land to grow, the farmworker who deserves a living wage, and the maker who wants to build the food business of their ancestors' dreams. The right to food means that spaces such as the Ypsilanti Farmers MarketPlace and Growing Hope Urban Farm are part of community infrastructure. The right to food is a whole-systems claim that urges us to stop seeing hunger as a distribution issue and instead recognize it as an issue of who is invited to the table. This is not a novel idea. The right to food has been recognized in international law since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined it as part of every person's right to an adequate standard of living. It was further codified in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which is legally binding for 172 countries. Notably, our country has been missing from that list. While enough food is produced to feed everyone, and still, up to 720 million people experience hunger, and 2.6 billion cannot afford a healthy diet. Today, one in seven residents in Washtenaw County questions where their next meal will come from. This represents a failure of will, not imagination. It’s the result of systems that treat food as a commodity rather than a birthright. But we don’t have to accept that as the finish line. There are multiple states and communities within our country that have codified the right to food, and we’d love for you to join us in advancing and declaring this right in our community. By treating food insecurity as a rights violation rather than a personal failing, we shift the policy debate from political aspiration to human obligation. It’s this shift, from charity to solidarity, that lines the foundation of Growing Hope’s work. Just a few days ago, we sent a group of staff, partners, and volunteers to Lansing to walk through the doors of power and speak with honesty and humility. We talked about what the right to food means on the ground. We talked about what we believe Michigan can do. We advocated for systems that uphold the right to food for every aspect of the food system. Importantly, we left knowing that we are not alone in this. Across the country, community organizers are rallying around this core principle. As one organizer stated, “We need to state the obvious right now, because the systems we relied on are being eroded very actively." We are not growing gardens. We are growing self-determination. We are growing community. We are Growing Hope. I said at the beginning that food is a right, and I believe that with everything in me. Unfortunately, rights don't enforce themselves. They require community to join together, to ensure accountability, and to be a continual reminder of what we are committed to. This is the community we are building. We invest and believe so deeply in this viewpoint for one simple reason, which feels more true now than ever before: community is medicine. Together we share some ailments, but our collective resources are innumerable. And while we don’t know where we’ll end up on the other side of the change and chaos swirling around us, we can be certain that we’ll arrive together. Proximity and hope are foundational building blocks for a community of healing. This is the type of community that demands systems of care that uphold our basic human rights, while sharing its resources to meet our collective needs. Together, we are growing food. We are gathering. We are ensuring the right to food. And we are healing one another through community. We are watching the systems we have long depended on fray at the edges in real time. We are responding, in unison, saying: we are not waiting for permission to be fed. That is the work. Thank you for being part of it. In solidarity, Julius P.S. The right to food is more than a principle. It's a promise we make to one another. You can read our Right to Food Declaration, add your name, and share your story (with a chance to win a $50 gift card) at growinghope.net/righttofood .

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