by Renata Sago
In 2016, when Jaime Swygert was preparing for the Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo, one of the largest in the U.S., she imagined she’d just be sitting at a table with vendors.
But the festival — one of the largest in the U.S. — became fertile ground for an idea she had: a way to meaningfully connect people of color to food.
An employee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time, “I found that there were all these job opportunities for young people to get into farming in the science side of it — soil science, engineering — all sorts of positions where students were coming back to work on their breaks,” says Swygert, a Black woman. “But I wasn’t seeing that any of them looked like us.”
Three years later, Swygert opened the Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion at the Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo as a space for the city’s Black communities to connect with local farmers, gardeners, university researchers of color, and one another.
Part farmers’ market, part nutrition lab and part jobs fair, the pavilion is a way to change Black Buffalonians’ relationship to food by helping them understand where it comes from, how to prepare it in healthy ways and how to get involved in cultivating it. The goal, Swygert says, is to help people use food as medicine to help heal not only themselves but their community.
“There are food demonstrations, so there’s chefs and nutritionists who do healthy cooking in the community and will pick a recipe — something they can share with the community — to show everyone how to do it quickly and have it still taste great,” says Swygert, founder and chair of the Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion and a vice president for Citi, the New York-based national bank. “We do a children’s activity where the children are able to reconnect with the soil and start to heal the trauma that has come between us and the soil.”
For partner organizations, such as Food for the Spirit, a nonprofit organization working for racial healing, ecological justice, and equitable food systems, and the Buffalo Food Equity Network, the Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion is part of a larger effort to strengthen a statewide network to address economic, health, and environmental issues in communities of color. It encourages collaboration year-round for long-time Buffalo residents and newcomers.
We have real work that we’ve been doing in terms of building our relationships and developing that deep trust and camaraderie.
REBEKAH WILLIAMS
“I was born and raised [in Buffalo] as a Black mixed-race woman,” says Rebekah Williams, who co-founded Food for the Spirit in 2018 and is a member of the Buffalo Food Equity Network. When it comes to growing and producing food, “I was very aware of tokenization that went on” with the marginalization of minority voices.
The Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion fills an important void, Williams says: “There were a lot of phenomenal organizers in Black Buffalo doing work in their communities, but there was no space where we were all coming together.”
Food for the Spirit cultivates relationships with local residents, master gardeners, authors, and students at the University at Buffalo Food Systems Planning and Healthiest Communities Lab, a university-sponsored institute that researches and helps promote equitable access to healthy, sustainably-produced food.
The vision is for these conversations to inform local research, which eventually shapes policies and approaches toward local commerce: from what foods are included on school lunch menus to how to cultivate and tend to community farms.
“Research is important because it’s how I even came upon the understanding that there was a problem,” says Swygert, who is also a member of Food for the Spirit and the Buffalo Food Equity Network. “[It] can be used to highlight the areas where healing is needed. It also just connects us on how we can go about beginning our journeys of healing. UB Food Lab students — their published findings actually include input from Buffalo Food Equity Network members.”
According to the latest data available from the USDA, in 2017, food producers who identified as Black “either alone or in combination with another race” accounted for just 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million producers. New York was one of the top states for producers age 35 and younger. They accounted for .7% of the country’s producers.
These numbers show that collaboration and relationship building is essential for Black producers to maintain their place in the industry. Williams admits that working together is not easy, especially when people have different perspectives, socioeconomic statuses, and responses to the effects of actions from past generations.
“For myself as a Black woman doing cultural and identity-based organizing, I don’t feel like it’s my place to organize Native American people or Asian people,” says Williams, who is adamant about working with — not in the place of — organizers of other races and ethnicities. “We have real work that we’ve been doing in terms of building our relationships and developing that deep trust and camaraderie.”
This year’s Agricultural Pavilion was part of the 49th annual Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo.
