Food — from where it grows, to where it goes, all of it matters to our bodies and our communities. We begin October with a conversation about how farmers are creating equitable food systems inside cities, from urban agriculture to worker-owned cooperatives.
Karen is a board member and former president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition, a group that was founded to preserve community gardens. She also co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization of volunteers committed to building networks and community support for growers in both urban and rural settings. She is known for making an intervention about using the term ‘food apartheid’ instead of food deserts to describe lack of nutrition and health resources in underserved communities.
Ysanet Batista is a queer Black-Dominican woman, born in Harlem, NY and raised in between the Dominican Republic and Hialeah, FL. She is one of four women of color who founded and run Woke Foods, a food service cooperative “that taps into the healing traditions of Dominican and other Afro-Carribean food to create recipes, host cooking classes..” and more.
Susan Chin, FAIA, Hon. ASLA, leads the Design Trust for Public Space, a nationally recognized incubator that transforms and evolves the city’s landscape with public agencies and community collaborators since 1995. She has overseen key projects, such as Five Borough Farm, Making Midtown, Under the Elevated and Laying the Groundwork.
