Victory Garden Initiative (VGI) now has a farmhouse to go with its 1.5-acre educational farm at 220 E. Concordia Ave. in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood. The farmhouse is on the corner of Richards Street and Concordia Avenue, just steps away from the educational farm, which VGI has been tending for eight years. The farm—which has rainwater shelters and underground cisterns and engages in community composting—is part of the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge, which promotes the health of pollinators across North America.
The VGI educational farm runs the YEP! (Youth Education Program) which helps young people learn about the food system, growing food, nutrition and sustainability. The farm also supplies Community Supported Agriculture baskets to subscribers and provides space for community gardeners who want to grow food in their own beds. The farm is “beautifully productive,” according to Gretchen Mead, executive director of Victory Garden Initiative. “We have all this food that we are trying to find the most sustainable and impactful way to use. Having a building next to the farm has been on our list of things to do for a number of years now. The missing piece was that we wanted to teach people how to prepare and serve the foods [they harvested].”
The new farmhouse is the realization of a vision. VGI bought the property in April and did some minor renovations to the second floor, which will soon house their administrative offices. Mural artist Stacey Williams-Ng volunteered to paint an eye-popping, colorful wraparound mural on the drab building, which once was a corner tavern. The mural is a tribute to the women of the food movement in Milwaukee.
Renovations have yet to be made to the first floor of the 2,300-square-foot farmhouse, which will have classroom and event space. Mead expects these renovations will be finished by the end of 2018. Next year, VGI plans to install a full commercial kitchen on the first floor and open up the wall on the south side of the building to allow an outdoor event space that will be connected to the indoor space and allow for indoor-outdoor seating.
A Community of Food
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Mead says she wants to use the food from the farm to create farm-to-table events and open the farmhouse to neighbors to let them explore how it might be beneficial to them. “We’re trying to keep it a little bit flexible, although we do have a lot of ideas in mind that would fall within the realm of our mission,” she says.
In addition, Mead wants to make the first floor a community center with food. She is planning after-school programs for children whereby they can come and make their own snacks and create a take-home vegetable dish for a family meal. She hopes the new space will allow for increased partnerships with area schools and more field trips and sharing among local teachers. “We’ve done these things in the past but having the building will make it much more accessible,” Mead says.
Mead believes the new VGI farmhouse could host pop-up meals where neighborhood chefs get paid to cook meals. “We would work with them specifically to make it healthful with food from our educational farm. We know there are some amazing cooks in the neighborhood who love to cook for the community.”
She also wants to do a monthly community meal where people come to enjoy each other’s company while enjoying a bowl of soup, explaining: “I’m a big fan of having a perpetual pot of soup around. We’re still exploring the possibilities of all of that. I also think that caterers could rent the space if they wanted a kitchen to use during the day when we’re not using it. I could see pop-up meals happening here for those creative chefs who are considering starting some sort of restaurant. Increasingly, when you rent an event space, you have to go with the chosen caterer. I hope we can do something different here.”
Before starting VGI, Mead was a social worker. She grew up on a farm and came to Milwaukee to get a master’s degree in social work. “When I moved to city to get my MSW, I really saw the way that my clients were affected by the food they were eating, and that no one was talking about it,” she says. “I just really wanted to talk about the issue of food with my clients. It was almost frowned upon, because I was working with people with more chronic mental illnesses, where the sole goal is to make sure they take their medications. I just couldn’t help but wonder that, if given a different diet, some of their symptoms could have been alleviated. Many of my clients had suffered from what I would call multi-generational nutritional deficiencies.”
Gaining Access to Community Resources
Through her work at VGI and with the local food movement, Mead has personally seen people overcome physical and mental illnesses because they were eating better food. Mead is dedicated to improving the health of the community through growing, preparing and eating fresh food. “If you’re a low-income person, you’re more likely to be a minority in this community—Latino or, especially, African American. Then you’re going to have less access to resources, and you are going to buy foods that are really bad for you because you are on a limited income. That’s just how it works.”
“Our tax dollars subsidize commodity crops—soybeans and corn, primarily,” Mead continues. “It is part of an economic engine that has nothing at all to do with the health, wellness and equality of this city’s residents right now. It makes no sense to me that our tax dollars would subsidize commodity crops while the companies that are selling them are very wealthy. It’s welfare for corporations. But, because of that subsidizing, we know that the cheapest foods available are highly processed, and they’re all part of that machine. Everything that you can get really, really cheap has corn syrup and highly processed grains [in it].”
Mead says that when she started with the food movement a decade ago, she wasn’t thinking about starting an organization; she just wanted to get the word out that growing your own food was a really valuable thing to do in the city. At the beginning, she was tied into a group called Transition Milwaukee, which, she says, was responding to climate change and peak oil and preparing for an economic crash. Peak oil, incidentally, is the theorized point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum has been reached and, thereafter, it is expected to enter terminal decline.
“Part of that response was growing your own food and having it be micro-local, so you’re not dependent on fossil fuels,” she says. “That was some of the original energy. As we grew and matured and recognized issues like institutionalized racism within the food system, disparity, poverty, [as well as] a lack of resources and the knowledge needed to grow food, we really started to think about how food is not just a response to a potential economic crash, but that we need food to build resilience in all parts of Milwaukee—regardless of what that potential situation could be.”
In nine years, VGI has installed some 4,000 raised beds in Milwaukee. Victory Garden Initiative’s farm—and now farmhouse—embody the values Mead forged when she was a social worker and respond to some of her earlier concerns about health, nutrition, the environment and food justice.
