Our Identity
Okay. Already got ahead of myself, problemitizing Our School before even describing it.
So, what is Our School at Blair Grocery?
Is it “a resource rich-safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development?” as we state? (schoolatblairgrocery.blogspot.com/). Is it a revolution? A food revolution? Or a place to get good cheap eggs?
Is it an after school “camp” for the students in the neighborhood, to use their words? A re-occupation of the old Blair Grocery Store? Is it “a community where empowered youth engage in reflective practice with others to actualize effective, replicable environmental justice based local solutions to global problems?” (blog). Is it a group of mostly white Yankees in a mostly black, Southern neighborhood?
Is it partner to the only black dairy farmer left in Louisiana? Is it a service-learning site for hundreds of youth organizers to envision and actualize the Food Justice Summer of 2010?
Is it an independent, alternative community school? Or is it a “social experiment,” as one of our students suggested. Is it a 501(c)(3)? A compost enterprise? An urban farm? A sprout business? A weekly fresh produce market for New Testament Church? A home?
Yes.
It’s a constantly “renegotiated and recast,” enacted, evolving “identity in the making”[1] [2] that is understood differently by different people. Our neighbors across the street who have been there every day since they moved in seeing us weeding and hauling yards of compost in wheelbarrows onto the top of a colossal pile probably have a radically different impression of us than the students from NYC who spend 10 days on site undergoing workshops on community organizing, and than the restaurants uptown who buy our delicate red amaranth sprouts but have never actually been to Our School at 1740 Benton Street.
But. Across all those disparate understandings, what’s common? What ought to be commonly understood about our purpose?
1) Education. Education is at the core of everything we do. Education with an agenda. Education with an explicit agenda of humanization, justice, and growing good communities. What do we need for good communities? We need equal access to good work and the fruits of that good work. Literally, good fruit, or…
2) Good Food – the second focus of Our School.
[1] Harris, Leila. “Irrigation, gender and social geographies of the changing waterscapes of southeastern Anatolia.”
[2] Sundberg, Juanita. “Identities in the Making: conservation, gender and race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala.” Gender, Place and Culture. March 1, 2004.