Mainstreaming Food Justice: Interview with Aaron De La Cerda, Acta Non Verba
Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) is based in an East Oakland neighborhood that is classified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a “food desert” with limited access to fresh produce. Through an amazing array of camps, after school programs, and urban farms, ANV provides educational programs, economic empowerment, and access to green, safe spaces and healthy food to children, youth, and families in the community. ANV was founded, and is mainly led, by women of color.
Blue Heart’s Lindley Mease had the honor of speaking with Aaron De La Cerda, ANV’s Farm Manager & Educator, as he (and his dog) gave a virtual tour of one of the program’s urban farms.
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley Mease: Can you tell me a little bit about how you came into this work?
Aaron De La Cerda: I’m from Fresno, California, in Central Valley. That’s where I got my start in this whole thing. I think it was third grade. We had agriculture class, and it was really interesting. It kind of planted the seed, and that was growing in the background. In college, I got really active in the community, and I thought I wanted to be in politics. I found out real quick that, no, that wasn’t it. My interest was more just to make an impact with people. I moved out here to Oakland to work with young people, and I came full circle. I combined my love for plants and outdoors with young people. I started working with ANV more than four years ago, doing urban farming. We do a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, we have a summer camp that’s one of our flagship programs, and we do community field trips. We did the summer camp virtually last summer, and it was really cool that it worked. We also have an after school program for the kids in the neighborhood.
[Showing the urban farm site] So, here’s our farm…
Lindley Mease: That’s so beautiful! Wow. What is it that you all are seeking to do in the world? What’s the change that you’re hoping to make?
Aaron De La Cerda: We really aim to make this normal. It really ought to be, for kids. We have a lot of different growing styles. It’s reflective of the community that’s around here. We’re just trying to work with the community and make it easier for our residents to participate in the food system, for the community to feel like they have agency in what they eat, what they put in their bodies. We don’t pretend to be able to feed everybody, but we can work with them so they learn more about what they are feeding themselves, and how to grow it.
Hey, drop it! Sorry, it’s my dog eating things….
Lindley Mease: I know how that is. Oh, what a cutie!
Aaron De La Cerda: He gets to come to work with me every day. It’s funny. The kids will say hi to him, and then, you know, sometimes they’ll say hi to me.
We’re really aiming to help people understand where food comes from, the impact it has on our bodies and our health, and on our communities. We talk about what it looks like to own a grocery store, not as an individual but as a group, as a community. We’re in partnership with The DEEP Grocery Cooperative. They’re getting close to opening their grocery store that’s been in the works for about a year and a half now. So that’s going to be really cool.
Kids are the future, so you start with them, and loop in their parents. Hopefully when they get to be older, then they’ll be a little more ready to make wise decisions. I know I definitely didn’t eat the healthiest growing up. There was a lot I didn’t know. Even though I was really into plants my whole life, I didn’t know what I was eating. I went and grabbed sugary things in the corner store and that was that. I grew up eating donuts and Mountain Dew and that was Saturday morning, you know?
It’s our mission to educate kids around food and food systems, show them opportunities for agency, and empower them, not just with knowledge but financially as well. All the money we make off the CSA program goes into savings accounts that we set up with youth who participate. It’s used for educational purposes: if they need a tutor, if they want to pick up an instrument, whatever education might look like for them. That way, they have every opportunity to participate.
Lindley Mease: Is there a story that really illuminates what you’ve been talking about?
Aaron De La Cerda: One of our neighbors, I think she’s a sophomore now…. that’s crazy, I think I met her when she was just getting into middle school! It’s really cool to hear updates from her. When she sees the farm open, she comes out and brings her little sister. She’s always eager to help. It makes you really happy. The last time I saw her was in early December. She was out here and she was telling me about an event. They always do this thing at her school, where you bring a food that’s representative of what you eat at home and something you like. She said, “Well, you always give me the kale so I shared that with them.” Her classmates were asking her, “Oh you farm? You grow?” and she said, “No, I’m not a farmer.” And I said, “But you are!” By the end of it, I was shifting her mindset, that this is her farm. You’re shifting that mindset of what it means to be a farmer, a grower, in the food system. It was really cool.
Lindley Mease: You’ve been describing the direct impact your programs have on kids. Do you connect your work to movements, and movement building?
Aaron De La Cerda: Good question. I would say not formally. As much as I see a need, and where we can fit in, I think with what we’ve been building, that’s kept us plenty busy with the number of youth in the summer camps and the three farms and the CSA and the after school program. There’s groups that we know are aligned with our mission, our morals, and how we operate. We show support where we can. But as far as policy, I haven’t been able to get too deep into it. We are a food justice organization. We’re more direct action. We put messaging out there, but it’s less about naming the cause than just doing the work. That’s our name, Acta Non Verba.
Lindley Mease: That’s a good point. Do you have a dream of how your work could look like in five years? What’s your vision of what that would be?
Aaron De La Cerda: Heck yeah! We would definitely have ten-plus acres, wherever that can fit, a large-scale farm. [Right now] it’s all raised beds, and different styles of planting. It would be cool to have room to implement something on a larger scale, and for the kids and community to be present to build that out. I can just imagine it really taking off, if we’re able to scale up.
If we had a farm, we’d have a store, cooperatively owned by black and brown folk, so there’s a way to get the food to the people. It’s providing the food we need, it’s healthy, they’re learning about where it’s coming from, and they can be involved in that. And on the back end, it’s providing economic opportunity, not just in working at the grocery store, but everything along the way, from sourcing seeds to transportation to deliveries, there’s so many things that go into the food system that people can be learning about, by just picking it up and running with it in their own direction. I feel like there’s a potential for people to learn in so many different ways. We get a lot of kids who don’t want to be farmers. That’s ok! Because there’s a lot more that they can learn.
And [if] we had a fleet of our own vans so we can get to the farmers markets, we can empower residents that way, too. They’d get the proceeds for taking the produce to market. Being able to deliver our own CSA bags, having a good reach there, collaborating with different community hubs…. Our CSA program has grown tremendously in the past year, it’s gotten huge, but it still has room to grow. We can make even deeper impact.
Our camp is the flagship program over the summer. We have hundreds of kids that come through. They learn not just farming, but dance, photography, podcasting, they do all kinds of fun things. It would be so cool to have a place where they go actually camp overnight. They do field trips once a week, or we used to [before the pandemic]. They’d sleep away camping only once per session. It’d be really cool to have a farm, where they can stay multiple nights with family, to get a different experience, to see what’s outside of their neighborhood.
Lindley Mease: What a beautiful vision. I love that. How is the work being resourced, and what challenges have you been seeing?
Aaron De La Cerda: It’s tough. It’s not like, “I have a product, I sell it, and I have money to choose which direction we go in.” It’s, “We have a cause, we have a mission, but funder A and B have strings tied to funding, so our mission gets tweaked just little by little.” We want to stay true to what the community needs, but we need money to be able to do that, to get the resources, to have the space, to employ my skills for the community, all the things that go into it. So that’s tough. But we’ve been really fortunate. We have a lot of great supporters.
Lindley Mease: Anything else you want to share about your work?
Aaron De La Cerda: The last thing I want to share about the program is that I’m really proud to be part of the team, really excited to be working with [ANV founder] Kelly Carlisle. What I love about her leadership style is, it really feels like we’re standing shoulder to shoulder. She doesn’t come down with “OK, I’ve made an executive decision, and this is how it’s going” and us knowing nothing about it. As soon as she thinks about a change, it’s like, “Hey, I had this idea.” There a lot of thought partnership and great communication. It feels like a family. It’s not easy work, but it makes it easy to want to do the work, because you have a family around you that’s here to support you, to help you get what you need. It’s a great environment to be in, and that makes it easier to build an environment that kids to want to be in.
Lindley Mease: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much.
