Former Juvenile Inmates Are Earning Double Minimum Wage to Grow Crops — and Business Skills

To many residents of the historically black neighborhoods on Atlanta’s westside, Abiodun Henderson is both local savior and master storyteller. Better known as Miss Abbey, Atlantans drizzle her original hot sauce recipe — which she developed after watching YouTube videos — on their food, and they lean in close when she tells stories of her family’s roots in Liberia and Trinidad.
And when there’s a problem, they go to her. The 36-year-old mother heard about local farmers’ struggles to find enough farmhands to work their land. At the same time, Henderson watched as hordes of young people in her community came home from prison or jail, and went right back in after struggling to find a job with a stable, livable wage.
A lightbulb went off and Henderson, who previously oversaw a community garden in Atlanta’s Westview neighborhood, combined her knowledge of urban farming with a passion for increasing economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth. The result became Gangstas to Growers, an agribusiness training program for formerly incarcerated youth between the ages of 18 and 24. 
Launched in 2016, the three-month program equips participants not just with farming and gardening know-how, but also the ins and outs of running a business. There’s a heavy focus on personal development, too, and on any given day the young adults might hear from experts on topics such as financial literacy, environmental sustainability, nutritional cooking, and criminal justice. In between morning yoga sessions and evening seminars, the trainees spend their afternoons at black-owned farms, digging, planting and harvesting crops for which they’re paid $15 an hour — more than twice Georgia’s minimum wage.  
“We take care of the folks in these neighborhoods and change how these young people in these neighborhoods act,” Henderson told NationSwell, “and get them to be examples for the younger people coming up.”
Across the country, a black American is five times more likely to be jailed by the time they turn 21 compared to their white counterparts. And in Georgia, black residents make up nearly two-thirds of the prison population, compared to only 30% of the state’s population. Recidivism is a problem throughout Atlanta — where the youth recidivism rate is 65%. One of the main reasons people end up back in jail is a lack of employment
To date, Henderson and Gangstas to Growers have worked with 15 young adults. When they finish the program, she helps connect them to jobs and fellowships in the food and agriculture industries. While several graduates have indeed gone on to work in the food industry, others have applied their new skills to other fields, like construction. 
Henderson stressed that hers is a grassroots movement, not a nonprofit or a charity. All her work designing the Gangsta program and recruiting young people to apply for it starts from the ground up. 
But that attitude has also put her work at risk. “I never thought of funding first,” she said. “I thought of programming first.” She received a $10,000 emergency grant from a local nonprofit in 2016, but that was quickly spent. To help ease the financial burden, her team began making, bottling and marketing Henderson’s hot sauce recipe, which the trainees named Sweet Sol. A fiery concoction of habanero and cayenne peppers along with ingredients like lavender, turmeric and muscovado sugar, Sweet Sol is sold for $10 a bottle at Atlanta farmers markets and for $12 online
Though the city pays the $15 hourly wages through its workforce development program, there are still bills to pay. Last year Gangstas to Growers participants had to rely on Uber to get out to the farms, so a van is high on the wishlist. And with the lofty goal of training another 500 young Atlantans by 2025, Henderson needs all the support she can get.
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Henderson has activism in her blood. Raised in Brooklyn by her immigrant mother and a father who, as she has described, was a “rank-and-file Black Panther member,” she started the long journey to Gangstas and Growers when she was connected to Occupy the Hood, an extension of the Occupy movement of 2011 that sought to expose the hold major banks and corporations have on the democratic process. 
Through Occupy the Hood, which in part focused on increasing access to nutritional food in low-income minority communities, Henderson was provided with the resources and connections to put those ideals in action in her own neighborhood. After getting approval from local leaders in 2012 to run operations at the newly hatched community garden in Westview, she started a summer camp for area kids and taught them how to grow produce. Then came the idea for Gangstas to Growers a few years later. “We see this work as really shifting neighborhoods.” Henderson said.
For Raekwon Smith, the program helped him shift his attitude and embrace a straighter path. After finishing his stint at Gangstas to Growers, he earned a fellowship with a youth development program. Now he’s working in construction. 
And for Derriontae Trent, the lessons he learned from farming went deeper than harvesting the fruits and vegetables he planted.
“I was so used to seeing death that I didn’t know how it’d feel to see something grow,” Trent told Politico. “To see plants grow full of life, from something I control, it’s probably the best feeling in the world.”
Trent also learned about political justice and systematic oppression. He’s now working with other organizations in Atlanta to raise Georgia’s minimum wage and fighting gentrification in his neighborhood. “He is young and ready,” Henderson said.
But as she also pointed out, “You never really leave. It’s a life program.” Trent can still be found cooking hot sauce in the industrial kitchen on the weekends, and Smith still sells bottles of Sweet Sol at local farmers markets. 
“They’ve become organizers and come up with solutions for their own neighborhoods,” Henderson said of Smith and Trent.
“We have to share our privilege and empower these young black folks,” Henderson said. “And saturate the local food movement — and every movement — with the hood.”
More: To Build a Healthier City, Atlanta Is Opening Its Schoolyards to Everyone 

See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman

“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”

For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.

Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.

One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”

“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.

Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.

And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”