FOOD AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE 2002
"Building Capacity for Community-Based Food Systems"
Englewood, Colorado
22-24 April 2002

Building Social and Community Strength: The Role of Faith Based Communities
Brother David Andrews, CSC
Executive Director, National Catholic Rural Life Conference

Faith based communities have been involved for a long time in food assistance, agricultural policy, environmental concerns. There is a new energy around sustainable development, spirituality, food, farm, nutrition, environmental policy which can be identified in grassroots activities, theological statements, the encouragement of local food systems. This workshop will identify some new forces of healing and creativity in faith community initiatives, suggest ways of broadening awareness, collaboration across parallel paths, mutual support for effective action.

CASES

Ascension Episcopal Church, Stillwater, Minnesota and First Presbyterian Church of Stillwater contribute toward the purchase of shares for two CSA farms for low-income families and a residential facility for AIDS patients.

First United Methodist Church, Stillwater, Minnesota: created "Mission Garden" where church members (6) sell homegrown produce after services to parishioners with proceeds going to mission projects and local emergency needs.

Grace University Lutheran, Minneapolis; White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church, White Bear Lake, Minnesota: approximately 20 families support CSA. Food not picked up at a neighborhood drop off site is donated to a women’s shelter or food pantry.

Guardian Angels Church, Lake Elmo; Mayflower Community Congregational Church, Minneapolis; Redeemer Lutheran Church, Winona: members started a garden on church-owned land with food distributed to a local food pantry for elderly and low-income families. Up to 50 parishioners participate in gardening, harvesting, and distributing produce.

Judson Memorial Baptist Church, Lutheran Church of Christ the Redeemer, Minneapolis: with church leadership, members subscribed to CSA.

Saint Joan of Arc, Minneapolis: established a community garden in partnership with a CSA farm that provides seedlings, compost and support.

Trinity Presbyterian Church, Woodbury, MN: volunteer to support CSA at the Minnesota Zoo which provides work for inner-city youth and produce for their families; and purchased a share of a CSA donated to a food pantry.

First Universalist Church of Minneapolis: the church supports the transportation of inner-city youth to work at a CSA with produce sold at a youth neighborhood market.

Wayzata Community Church, Wayzata, Minnesota: 15 families support a CSA.

Central Presbyterian, Trinity Presbyterian of South Washington County, Mayflower community Congregational Church and Minnehaha United Church of Christ sponsor soup gatherings where church members and families feast on organic meals while learning about healthy food choices from CSA farmers. Funds are raised for low-income families in Minneapolis.

Edgemont Solar Greenhouse, Dayton, OH: a Marianist Catholic brother developed a 125-plot community garden in a public housing development now includes three large solar greenhouses, employs three full-time and up to 20 part-time assistants providing fresh vegetables, bedding plants and house plants.

Anderson Hills United Methodist Church, Cincinnati, OH: Twnety church members and a Scout troop raise 2 1/2 tons of food on 1300-sq. ft. garden behind the church with donations of food preferred by recipients going to a regional, inner-city food bank. Bedding plants are donated by a horticultural therapy program and seeds purchased wholesale from the civic Garden Center which runs the community gardening program in town.

Upper Sand Mountain Parish, Sylvania, AL: 17 Methodist churches organized to provide self-sufficiency programs conduct a gleaning program with a statewide network of volunteers and truckers who can quickly coordinate a load of fresh produce with a recipient agency. A "Gardens’ of Plenty" program provides seeds and fertilizer to an estimated 2,000 neighbors who live off the produce and share excess with less fortunate people. Turned an abandoned church into a cannery preserving gleaned produce for wider distribution and providing employment. Plan to start a coop to grow, process, and sell high quality organic produce.

Genesis Farm, Blairstown, NJ: 140-acre ecological learning and resource center owned by the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, NJ educate people about the environment and their relationship to the earth by providing courses in natural foods cooking, environmental education and permaculture, and sponsorship of a community supported bio-dynamic garden.

Michaela Farm; Sisters of St. Francis, Oldenburg, IN: A 300-acre organic farm including diversified organic garden, greenhouse, beehives, demonstration gardens, and nut and fruit tree orchard. Its Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program expected to serve close to 200 households in 2002.

White Violet Center for Eco-Justice; Sisters of Providence, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, IN: On 1200 acres, the Center fosters a way of living that recognizes the interdependence of all creation and includes a community supported agriculture garden and greenhouse on two acres, seven acres of antique-apple orchards and berry patches, beehives, and fleece-producing alpacas that the Sisters spin for yarn and fiber.

Heartland Farm and Spirituality Center, Pawnee Rock, Kansas: an intentional ecumenical Christian community of men, women, and youth – religious and lay – working for an interdependent healing of the earth and care of persons. They are sponsored by the Dominican Sisters of Great Bend, and located on an 80-acre site the development of which is based on ecological principles and permacultural design including an organic garden. The community, 75 percent self-supporting, raises organic chickens and has a 20-family community supported agriculture program.

Sisters Hill Farm, Sisters of Charity New York, Mount St. Vincent-on-Hudson, Bronx, NY: This Community Supported Agriculture project was organized as a way for caring for the land in a sustainable way. The 2001 season will provide 100 varieties of 30 different organic vegetables for approximately 120 shareholders. Local shareholders pick up their vegetables at the farm weekly and produce is delivered to the Motherhouse in the Bronx for New York City shareholders. Among the project’s goals are to share 25% of the harvest with people who are poor and to help restore the lost connection between people and agriculture by providing an opportunity for members to be directly connected to how their food is grown.

EarthConnection, Cincinnati, OH: a center for learning and reflection about living lightly on Earth. The solar-heated and energy efficient office named La Casa del Sol is a revitalized chicken coop. The center has implemented a permaculture demonstration project and 16 raised garden beds that, with the help of volunteers provides fresh, organic vegetables for low-income residents in the area.


COMMENTARY
There are literally thousands of faith-based activities such as described above operating throughout the United States. In addition there are University based programs such as the Economics Institute at Loyola University New Orleans where Richard McCarthy has developed three successful farmers markets linking producers, restaurants, consumers in the New Orleans area, initiating and promoting ecologically sound economic development.

Catholic universities have been encouraged to do local food systems development such as this by the Vatican in an official document (Ex Corde Ecclesiae) which calls for programs in defense of nature, development, and cultural understanding: "In its service to society, a Catholic university will relate especially to the academic, cultural and scientific world of the region in which it is located. Original forms of dialogue and collaboration are to be encouraged between the Catholic universities and other universities of a nation on behalf of development, of understanding between cultures and of the defense of nature in accordance with an awareness of the international ecological situation." (37)

What can we learn about the patterns developing among faith-based communities and local food systems? I believe there are several lessons. There are in fact an astounding number of creative practices in sustainable agriculture and sustainable community practices demonstrating a willingness to learn how to live within the limits and possibilities imposed by their place and circumstances. Most of the practices are sustained by convictions about a religious presence in creation, about nature as an indispensable teacher, and about the necessity of consulting the genius of the place at work in the ecosystem where they find themselves. While landscape, acreage, and geographic conditions vary greatly, most of the faith communities derive both physical and spiritual sustenance from their lands, which include everything from uplands and wetlands to woodland and prairie, to grain and forage cropland and pastures, to gardens and orchards and lakes. Throughout these faith-based communities it is clear that there is intentional effort to restore, care for, and live well from the lands. So, there is a framework that reveres nature's own integrity motivating these faith-based community efforts.

There is ample evidence in the efforts of faith-based communities that they are not only trying to be gentle with earth and self-sustaining but also to reach out to others in their region. Many want to participate in the "CSA" movement which can help form an extended community of where they both satisfy needs and of engage in building community. The community will be human and biotic.

The image of web of life is relevant here. This image comes from many sources, native peoples prime among them. The Appalachian Catholic bishops pastoral letter: "At Home in the Web of Life," the American Bishops' pastoral: "Renewing the Earth": all speak of a web of life. The image of web points to the interconnectedness of the cosmos and its constituent parts. The elements of the web are interconnected and interdependent.
The Bishops say in "Renewing the Earth", "the web of life is one." The web of life image points to building the capacity of the food system locally. The image of web or sustainable communities is an attempt to display the interconnectedness of things: especially of people and nature, and to advocate a vision that works to defend nature and community in the larger context of the global situation….where war and recession combine with the globalization dynamic in such a way as to fracture and fragment the intricate and delicate webs of life here at home and in localities around the world.

Only place-based identification can provide the motivation to self-impose the disciplines needed in participatory self-government, common actions, common identifications, common exercise of freedom in support of a common good. Top-down schemes ultimately suggest that administrative specialists and organizational planners can anticipate not only what people’s ideas, needs, and desires will be but when they will have them. They know better what the soil, water, plant and animal life deserves, needs or requires in that place. When citizens are denied opportunities for self-determination, they are stripped of the conditions by which humans actuate their potential and they become mere objects of administration. When citizens are free and encouraged to engage in successively more significant acts of self and community realization, they will also participate in appropriate stewardship of their land, water, and air.

Jane Jacobs in her book "The Nature of Economies" gives a clear argument to support this vision of ecological complexity conjoined with economic complexity in the web of life when she writes: "I began thinking about settlements’ economies as instances of natural energy-flow [and realized] that imports came in at the receiving end of their conduits, exports left at the discharge end, and the interesting question was what went on within the conduits (2000, 53). This is the same question that Walter Goldschmidt was dealing with concretely in the 1940s when he studied the towns of Arvin and Denuba.

When we review Jacobs' analysis we find that what "goes on within the conduit" is the complex interdependent patterns of working, producing, trading, and living that characterize each particular settlement. She argues that theories and policies intent upon promoting development have focussed too much upon introducing external inputs – such as large grants and loans – and too little upon existing webs of complexity and the means needed for differentiating and diversifying patterns that already exist. The result of input theories, she argues, has been devastation both of economic and natural ecologies. Here Jacobs is incorporating her earlier work on the dynamics of urban economies (1969, 1985) into the more comprehending world-view linking natural and human orders.

Each "web of life" deserves fuller appreciation than is provided in a model of the economy based solely on efficiency. A global economy that depends on consuming environmental resources faster than they can be regenerated destroys its own resource base. A global economy that displaces the functions of households and communities destroys the social and cultural fabric, threatens the local web of life with the cult of efficiency and a culture of death.

Land-based faith-based communities act as a moral force within their regions. They are concerned with making the practical connections between spirituality, environmental and community renewal. They have a public role for just and sustainable living within their regions. In "Conserving Communities" from Another Turn of the Crank, Wendell Berry writes: "As we all know, we have much to answer for in our use of this continent from the beginning, but in the last half century we have added to our desecration of nature a deliberate destruction of our rural communities."

We are now obviously facing the possibilities of a world that the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own enrichment -- and, incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment of the rest of us. This will be a world in which the cultures that preserve nature and rural life simply will be disallowed. It will be, as our experience already shows, a post-agricultural world. But as we now begin to see, you cannot have a post-agricultural world that is not also post-democratic, post religious, post natural--in other words, it will be post-human, contrary to the best that we have meant by "humanity"… The aims of the community party really are only two: the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities. "

These are values which faith-based communities support enthusiastically. This is why faith-based communities are building community capacity and strength out of their own spiritual convictions, physical resources, and dynamic of creativity, healing, outreach and engagement with the land and the people of the land.