Growing Freedom Down North: Addressing Intersecting Health Inequities through Community Gardening in North Philadelphia

Research Project Description

Growing Freedom Down North brings together two social scientists and a mission-driven business entrepreneur to build the foundation of an independent food system in the Strawberry Mansion community of North Philadelphia. Together we strive to address intersecting issues of health equity, including disrupting pathways to prison and increasing access to fresh, quality food in an urban food desert.

Our efforts will culminate in the creation of a community garden in collaboration with local residents, including young people and formerly incarcerated residents. The community garden will be located on a leased parcel of land adjacent to the Strawberry Mansion Learning Center, a neighborhood education and resource center. This will facilitate our vision to show the health and educational utility of cultivating vacant/abandoned lots to serve the health equity needs of the Strawberry Mansion community. We will document our efforts in a case study that combines surveying, ethnographic interviewing, and body mapping to capture lived and embodied experiences of foodways and their connections to safety and well-being. Structural racism manifests in urban food deserts as inaccessibility to infrastructure and policies that guide the cultivation and development of land.

A community garden that centers community experience and prioritizes racial equity is our countervailing system. We aim to provide a model for other communities by studying the strategies, challenges, and impacts of community gardening on residents' perceptions and experiences of safety and well-being. We will establish a grounded theory and scalable praxis for addressing intersecting issues of health equity.