University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

(USC Thesis Other)

Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

FOOD IS THE MEDIUM:

FOOD MOVEMENTS, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND
THE COMMUNICATION ECOLOGY APPROACH

by

Garrett M. Broad

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Garrett M. Broad
ii
DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Bisaga
&
to the many other great teachers who taught me how to think.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The guidance and support of countless friends, colleagues, teachers and family
members has been integral to the development of this project. I am lucky to have been
able to connect with and learn from so many intelligent, passionate and dedicated people
over the years. This means, of course, that I could never name each and every one of
them in these brief remarks. I will do my best in the following pages, knowing that there
will certainly be some oversights.
First, my parents, Mindy Fineberg Broad and Spencer Broad, established the
foundation upon which I have been able to build a life and career of my own. I thank
them both for their unwavering confidence in my abilities, and for the value system that
they instilled in me from an early age. Countless other family members, both living and
no longer with us, served as role models and inspirations. I am proud to carry on a
tradition of learning and teaching established by my grandfather, Lester Broad. I am also
indebted to my grandmother, Sylvia Fineberg, whose belief in justice and equality helped
to shape my political philosophy before I even knew what a political philosophy was. My
brother, Matthew Broad, has always been my most trusted friend, and his influence on
my intellectual life cannot be overstated.
In writing this dissertation, I had the honor to build upon the work of my advisor,
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach. I am afraid that only those who have had the pleasure to
collaborate with Sandra would be able to understand just how remarkable a scholar and
person she is. I will be forever grateful for the investment she made in my graduate
education, and I will always benefit from what I have learned under her mentorship. This
iv
work also took shape under the direction of Sarah Banet-Weiser and Andrew Lakoff,
both of whom are brilliant scholars and generous teachers whose insights helped me turn
my disparate ideas into a cohesive project.
I am enormously grateful to the faculty, staff, and students at the University of
Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Enrolling in
the doctoral program at USC Annenberg was undoubtedly the best decision I have ever
made. I thank Dean Ernest J. Wilson, G. Thomas Goodnight and Larry Gross for their
leadership and support. Along with Peter Clarke, Larry Gross also served on my
qualifying exams committee, and I thank them both for pushing my thinking forward in
productive ways. I also thank Alison Trope, a great mentor in the classroom, as well as
Imre Meszaros, Anne Marie Campian and Billie Shotlow, among other dedicated staff
members, for keeping Annenberg going on a daily basis. Special thanks, as well, to Paul
Lichterman, whose year-long ethnographic methods seminar in the Department of
Sociology formed the initial basis of this project.
Research team members with the Metamorphosis Project – past and present –
have been extremely important colleagues and collaborators. I also have great
appreciation for the entire PhD office, especially members of the incoming cohort of
2008, with whom I have made bonds of friendship that will last well beyond our graduate
careers. At the risk of leaving someone out, my appreciation goes out to those with whom
I worked most closely, including Inna Arzumanova, Beth Boser, Evan Brody, Nancy
Chen, Carmen Gonzalez, Martin Hilbert, Lori Kido Lopez, Julien Mailland, Evelyn
Moreno, Allie Noyes, Katherine Ognyanova, Tania Picasso, Minhee Son, Benjamin
Stokes, and George Villanueva.
v
As a scholar-activist focused on food issues in Los Angeles, I am grateful to
have come in contact with so many amazing folks involved in urban agriculture,
community development and youth empowerment across the city. A heartfelt thanks is in
order to the staff of the organization I pseudonymously refer to as Neighborhood United
in this dissertation. You know who you are, and you should know, as well, that this
project would not exist without your passion for food justice. Thank you for allowing me
to learn from your work. I also thank the dozens and dozens of other organizers,
practitioners and residents who allowed me to interview and collaborate with them over
these last several years. The insights gained from these interactions have shaped who I
am as a researcher, as an activist and as a person.
I could keep going, but a few hundred pages remain even without a lengthy set of
acknowledgements. I will finish with two final notes of appreciation. First, thanks to
Janelle Stetz, my wonderful companion and, I think it is safe to say, my biggest fan.
Finally, thanks to Richard D. Heffner, a great mentor and friend who has always pushed
me to ask important questions and to seek good answers.

vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... viii
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... ix
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ x
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Methods, Materials and Engaged Scholarship ................................................................ 8
Overview of the Dissertation ........................................................................................ 14
CHAPTER 1: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE
NETWORKED COMMUNICATION ECOLOGY APPROACH ............ 18
Theories of Social Movements: Structure and Identity ................................................ 19
A Networked Approach to Social Movement Studies .................................................. 24
Toward Multi-Level, Qualitative Network Analysis .................................................... 30
A Communication Ecology Approach to Social Movements ....................................... 33
The Advanced Liberal Context ..................................................................................... 46
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 58
CHAPTER 2: CRISIS AND RESPONSE IN THE FOOD SYSTEM –
FROM THE GLOBAL TO THE LOCAL ................................................. 59
From Subsistence to “Conventional” Agriculture ........................................................ 61
Risks of Corporate Consolidation in the Food System ................................................. 70
Environmental Health and Safety Risks in Industrial Food.......................................... 73
Problems of Consumption in the Industrial Food System ............................................ 77
The Communication Ecologies of Alternative Food Movements ................................ 80
Sympathetic Critiques of Alternative Food Movements .............................................. 89
The Communication Ecology Approach and the Study of Food Movements .............. 94
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 97
CHAPTER 3: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO
COMMUNITY-BASED FOOD INJUSTICE ........................................... 99
Food Injustice in South Los Angeles .......................................................................... 100
Teaching Gardens and the American Heart Association Come to South LA ............. 103
Groundswell Gets Kids to Eat Their Veggies ............................................................. 118
Neighborhood United Builds From the Ground Up in South Central LA .................. 131
vii
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 144
CHAPTER 4: FROM THE BLACK PANTHERS TO THE USDA .............................. 148
The Black Panther Party: All Power to the People ..................................................... 151
The Black Panther Party: Serving the People, Body and Soul ................................... 154
The Southern California Chapter of the BPP .............................................................. 157
The New Panther Vanguard and Neighborhood United ............................................. 160
Food Justice, Community Food Assessment and Liberal Governmentality ............... 168
The Role of the CFA in the Work of Neighborhood United ...................................... 176
Food Justice and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex ................................................. 181
Setting Priorities and Constructing Boundaries in Funding and Partnerships ............ 189
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 197
CHAPTER 5: FOOD JUSTICE ORGANIZING AND
THE NEIGHBORHOOD COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE . 200
Communication Infrastructure Theory and the Ecology of Community Organizing . 202
Connecting with the Community – Youth Development & Neighborhood Education
..................................................................................................................................... 206
Growing Healthy .................................................................................................................. 208
From the Ground Up ........................................................................................................... 212
Community Knowledge and Cultural Difference in the Garden Gateway Workshops ........ 216
A Celebration Of and By the Community – Earth Day .............................................. 222
Growing Good Food in the Heart of South LA .......................................................... 229
Creating a Sustainable Social Enterprise .................................................................... 237
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 244
CHAPTER 6: THE FOOD JUSTICE MOVEMENT –
EXTENDING BEYOND THE LOCAL .................................................. 247
The Organizational Communication Ecology and the Broader Storytelling System . 249
Youth Food Justice – A National Network for Change .............................................. 252
The Hathor Collective – An International Network for Social Innovation ................ 260
The Potentials and Perils of Policy and Politics ......................................................... 269
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 275
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 279
Primary Contributions of the Dissertation .................................................................. 281
Beyond Food Justice: Thoughts for Scholars and Practitioners ................................. 292
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 297
viii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: General Overview of Dominant Food Production Practices Over Time ............ 65
Table 2: The Corporate Food Regime and Alternative Food Movements ........................ 84
Table 3: Four Types of “Alternative Food Projects” ........................................................ 87
Table 4: Summary of Comparisons Across Three Alternative Food Initiatives'
Organizational Communication Ecologies ..................................................................... 145
Table 5: Foundational communication ecological influences on philosophy and practice
of Neighborhood United ................................................................................................. 167
Table 6: Community Food Assessment Outcomes and Associated Liberal Governmental
Goals ............................................................................................................................... 175
Table 7: Elements of NU's organizational communication ecology that guide its
philosophy and action as a food justice non-profit organization .................................... 188
Table 8: Organizational Value Priorities and Related Boundaries Constructed by
Neighborhood United...................................................................................................... 190

ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of the
Teaching Gardens ........................................................................................................... 105
Figure 2: Theory of Change Model for the Teaching Gardens ....................................... 110
Figure 3: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of
Groundswell .................................................................................................................... 121
Figure 4: Theory of Change Model for Groundswell ..................................................... 127
Figure 5: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of
Neighborhood United...................................................................................................... 133
Figure 6: Theory of Change Model for Neighborhood United ....................................... 138
Figure 7: Conceptual Model of Communication Infrastructure Theory ......................... 202

x
ABSTRACT

Amidst the many problems of the industrialized food system, issues related to
food justice have emerged as particularly salient in many low-income and ethnic minority
communities across the United States. This dissertation explores the potentials and
pitfalls that arise as a result of contemporary American food justice efforts. It offers up
the communication ecology approach, and the related method of networked ethnography,
as valuable tools for understanding both why and how food justice organizations go about
advancing their social justice goals through food-related activities. The project highlights
the efforts of a specific South Los Angeles food justice organization – Neighborhood
United – as an illustrative case study. Neighborhood United is treated as a central node
within a complex network of communicative interactions – that is, actions that include
not only the daily practices of the organization and its staff, but also its history, its
sources of funding, its media use, and its many partnerships in agricultural production,
food distribution and urban community development. Ultimately, the theoretical and
methodological orientation of the dissertation leads to several key conclusions about the
processes through which community-based social change might be realized. It details the
complexity that emerges when an organization must work to balance the interests of its
sometimes contradictory network partners. At the same time, the research demonstrates
how these complicated networked formations are actually central to shaping a
community-based politics of possibility for today's urban social justice movements.

1
INTRODUCTION

This dissertation project took shape at a time when issues related to food,
agriculture and nutrition were receiving a nearly unprecedented level of public and media
attention. In documentary films and on network television, in bestselling books and in the
halls of the White House, a discursive explosion related to food issues was underway.
The topics of discussion varied widely – some called attention to epidemics of diet-
related disease, others implored viewers to discover the joys of eating like a “foodie”,
while still others sounded an alarm about the environmental destructiveness of
industrialized agricultural practice (Frye & Bruner, 2013; Hope Alkon & Agyeman,
2011). Soon, I found myself immersed in learning about both the problems and emerging
solutions related to the contemporary food system. Indeed, food production, distribution
and consumption became a focal point of my work as both a researcher in the field of
communication and media studies, as well as in my citizen and activist efforts to promote
community health and social justice in the city of Los Angeles.
It was through these intersecting scholar-activist roles that the idea for this
dissertation emerged. I found that much of what I was seeing on the ground – as I
worked, for instance, as a volunteer with grassroots food and urban agriculture
organizations, and helped to found a community garden in my own neighborhood – did
not match much of what I was seeing in the high profile food-related productions that
were garnering significant media attention. In popular media, solutions to the nutritional,
environmental and social problems of the food system often came across as utterly
simple, and generally solvable through basic individual consumer choices. If we could
simply get the general public to understand the importance of healthy eating, pop culture
advocates suggested – perhaps by having young boys and girls taste a tomato grown from
2
their own school garden – we would all be well on our way toward health and
sustainability. At the grassroots level, by contrast, I began to take stock of an entirely
different narrative, and I soon came to hear the term food justice used to describe a
different type of approach for improving the health of the food system.
The advocates for food justice that I came in contact with argued that the
problems of the food system were not simple at all, but were actually connected to other
systemic social, economic and racial injustices. Food-related initiatives, they suggested,
could be used as a tool to develop a set of community-based solutions, solutions that
might help transform those very political and economic systems that had historically
oppressed low-income and ethnic minority communities across the United States and
around the world. While food justice advocates employed some of the same strategies
that were featured in popular media portrayals – building gardens, providing nutrition
education, and so on – they did so in the purpose of a much larger cause. They situated
food as a medium for a broader social justice project toward which they were
fundamentally committed.
At this point in these introductory comments, it must be noted that the promotion
of social change toward social justice is a fundamental building block of my scholar-
activism. With the use of the term social change, I refer to any significant alteration to an
enduring social structure of society, as well as to the underlying cultural value systems
that legitimate those social structures. With respect to social justice, researchers Basok,
Ilcan and Noonan (2006) provided a useful definition of that term, describing social
justice as, “an equitable distribution of fundamental resources and respect for human
dignity and diversity, such that no minority group’s life interests and struggles are
undermined and that forms of political interaction enable all groups to voice their
3
concerns for change” (p. 267). With this in mind, then, social change toward social
justice would therefore entail alterations to social structures and value systems that lead
to a more equitable distribution of fundamental resources and respect for human dignity
and diversity.
Indeed, I agree with Harvey (2009) that social justice is a normative concept, and
I take a normative stance that social justice can and should be promoted through both
academic scholarship and practice. As I became more and more involved in scholarship
and activism related to food, several key questions related to this concept came forth.
What does social justice have to do with the food system anyway? Further, can food
actually be used as an effective medium to promote the types of broader social change
goals that food justice advocates espoused?
As will be outlined in detail in subsequent chapters, the contemporary food
system is the site of significant social injustice on a number of counts. The dominant
norms of the industrial food system are ultimately environmentally destructive;
exploitative of farmers, workers and animals; and inequitable, such that low-income and
ethnic minority communities, in particular, lack access to high quality and affordable
foods. Yet, for many of those engaged in developing alternatives to dominant practices of
the industrial food system – including those featured prominently in popular media
discussions – the issue of social justice has rarely been an explicit priority of their
activities (Allen, 2008; Guthman, Morris & Allen, 2006; Slocum, 2007). Instead, many of
these “alternative food initiatives” have generally benefited mostly white and
economically secure consumers, not the low-income communities of color that
experience the brunt of social injustice in the food system (Slocum, 2007; Guthman,
4
2011). Was food justice an anomaly, I wondered, or something that was a growing force
in the broader conversation around problems and solutions in the food system?
I delved deeper into the literature and found that food justice had indeed emerged
as a counter-force, not only to the problems of the industrial food system, but also to
those alternative food initiatives that tended to not place social justice concerns in a place
of primacy. Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) defined food justice as, “ensuring that the benefits
and risks of where, what, and how food is grown and produced, transported and
distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly” (6). Hope Alkon and Agyeman
(2011) added that such efforts must remain, “firmly rooted in the low-income
communities and communities of color that suffer from inequalities embedded in the food
system” (7).
However, the more I looked into discussions of food justice efforts, including a
number of case studies of specific food justice initiatives, I began to levy a familiar
complaint – the solutions proffered were overly simplified, and did not match what I was
seeing on the ground. Too often, I felt, case studies of people-of-color-led food justice
efforts leaned toward a general romanticizing of community-based activity. Notably, such
accounts did little to situate the efforts of non-profit food justice organizations within a
realistic political and economic landscape, instead tending to imply that these
community-based food justice efforts somehow operated independent of any external
influences or supports. As I reflected on what I was seeing at the grassroots level, I saw
quite a different train of events, noticing that food justice organizations were partnering
with hosts of individuals and groups, many of whom were from outside of the local
community. Such partnerships, it seemed, were central to the advancement of food justice
organizations’ goals, but substantive accounts of these collaborative actions were
5
noticeably absent from the literature. From there, I wondered, what insights might we
miss – as both scholars and activists trying to evaluate whether and how food could be
used as a medium to advance social justice – when we failed to tell this full story?
I set out, then, to create a project that would paint what I saw as a more nuanced
and holistic portrait of the opportunities and constraints that community-based food
justice organizations encountered in their contemporary organizing efforts. What took
shape was a work that blended ethnographic participant-observation with an
interdisciplinary set of theoretical frameworks – including studies of social movements,
theories of liberal governmentality, and research on communication networks, to name a
few. As will be outlined in detail in subsequent sections, I built upon the work of Ball-
Rokeach (2012) and others in order to develop a communication ecology approach to
studying food justice efforts. This entailed an in-depth qualitative exploration into the
multi-level and temporal communicative relationships and partnerships of organizations
that were engaged in food justice work.
I argue that the communication ecology approach represents a valuable tool for
understanding both why and how food justice organizations go about advancing their
social justice goals through food-related activities. Subsequent chapters of this work
establish the utility of this approach through both theoretical and empirical strategies.
Notably, I go on to provide a concrete display of the value of the approach through a
comparison of the organizational communication ecologies of three different
organizations – at the time of my fieldwork, each of these groups was engaged in food-
related work in South Los Angeles, a geographic site of significant historical social,
economic, environmental and food injustice. From there, several chapters of the
dissertation delve deep into the organizational communication ecology of a specific
6
empirical case – that of Neighborhood United
1
, a South Los Angeles-based food justice
organization that offers an illustrative case worthy of in-depth exploration. As will be
outlined in full, Neighborhood United is a multicultural organization that claims its roots
as the non-profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party; today, it operates a
variety of food justice programs, including several that focus on urban agriculture, youth
development and community education. Through the latter part of this dissertation,
Neighborhood United is treated as a central node within a complex network of
communicative interactions – that is, actions that include not only the daily practices of
the organization and its staff, but also its history, its sources of funding, its media use,
and its many partnerships in urban agricultural production, food distribution and
community development. Together, these research efforts demonstrate both the value and
flexibility of using communication ecologies, and a related networked ethnographic
approach, as primary theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding social
change efforts.
Ultimately, with this networked ethnographic focus in place, I point to the
complexity that emerges when an organization like Neighborhood United works to
advance its long-standing mission of social and racial justice, all while engaged in
networked partnerships and interactions with a variety of public, private, and non-profit
groups, as well as with citizens and volunteers of different social, ethnic and economic
backgrounds. I argue that these complicated networked formations are part and parcel of
community-based action within our contemporary liberal political and economic climate.
Further, I suggest that there is great generative potential that can emerge from the very
ambivalence that these sometimes contradictory connections bring to the fore.

1
Neighborhood United is a pseudonym, a decision that will be elaborated upon in greater detail below.
7
With the organizational communication ecologies of Neighborhood United and
other alternative food organizations as case studies, the central research questions of this
project unfold as follows. Fundamentally, I ask, to what extent can social justice be
realized through the types of community-based food justice efforts in which groups like
Neighborhood United are engaged? Further, what is the relationship between a liberal
capitalist political and economic context, on one hand, and these types of food justice
efforts, on the other? Can food justice emerge from within these systems, or is a sharper
break from dominant political and economic structures necessary in order for social
justice to emerge through alternative food initiatives? How do food justice organizations
navigate this complicated landscape? Undergirding all of this, I also ask, what
methodological framework is best equipped to allow for a grounded analysis of the
complex sets of partnerships, communicative relationships and storytelling practices that
food justice organizations depend upon to advance their social justice goals?
The aims of the dissertation, then, are multifold. In one sense, I work to develop a
methodological approach for the study of networked food justice action. This approach, I
believe, has utility not only in the study of food justice, but for qualitative researchers
interested in investigating the work of any number of social movement activities. Further,
the dissertation also provides empirical insights into the processes of advancing
community-based food justice activism in the contemporary moment. It seeks to
understand the strategies employed, the challenges faced, and the potential future of food
justice organizations today. These insights too, I suggest, have utility beyond the domain
of food, and should be worthwhile to researchers and practitioners interested in the
broader promotion of social justice moving forward.
8
Methods, Materials and Engaged Scholarship
This dissertation is qualitative in nature, and draws upon extensive ethnographic
participant observation, interviewing, document analysis and historical methods. The
extended case method of ethnography, outlined by Burawoy (1998), was used as a guide
for research and analysis. The extended case method puts empirical case study research
into a dialogic relationship with pre-existing theory In such an approach, the researcher is
enmeshed as a participant in the activities of those under study, and is engaged in a
reflexive dialogue with the main actors, as well as with theory. Instead of entering the
field from the perspective of grounded theory, for instance, in which pre-existing theory
is jettisoned and the object of the research is to generate new theory based on a
representative case, the extended case method aims to build upon and elaborate existing
theory. As Burawoy (1998) described, the extended case method ultimately, “applies
reflexive science to ethnography in order to extract the general from the unique, to move
from the 'micro' to the 'macro,' and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the
future, all by building on preexisting theory” (5).
The network of Neighborhood United serves as a primary case study for this
work, but I also take time throughout the dissertation to draw comparisons with other
organizations engaged in various efforts to improve the food system. This operates, at
least in part, as a way to distinguish both the uniqueness and representativeness of
Neighborhood United from within this broader context. This style of comparison
represents another key aspect of the extended case method. As Burawoy (1998) argued,
positivist science tends to use comparison as a means to seek out common patterns
among diverse cases in order to discount context in the observation of a phenomenon.
The extended case method, by contrast, does not seek to reduce cases to instances of
9
general law, but attempts to make each case work in connection with other cases. In this
sense, it is acceptable for one case to be significantly more developed than another, and
to still put them in conversation as a way to attribute the source of differences to
characteristics of the cases under study.
My involvement with Neighborhood United goes back several years, when I first
attended an informational and fundraising event hosted by the group in South LA. From
that time, I intermittently served as a volunteer for various projects and attended a
number of their sponsored events. I developed a more formal research relationship with
the group approximately a year later, at which time the organization agreed to allow me
in to focus on their work as a case study for my ethnographic research. Our interactions
were approved by the University of Southern California’s Office for the Protection of
Human Subjects and the University Park Institutional Review Board. It is on account of
this agreement that the names of individuals and organizations highlighted in my
ethnographic work are kept anonymous.
2

The fieldwork and interviews that form the foundation of this project took place
over the course of approximately two and a half years. Throughout this process, my
research approach was informed by a theoretical and practical commitment to methods of
engaged scholarship. With the use of the term engaged scholarship, I refer to academic
work that actively engages research participants through community-based and
participatory methods. Research coming from this general orientation goes by any
number of names, including action research, community-based participatory research,
public scholarship and participatory action research (Burawoy, 2005; Stoecker 1999).

2
In truth, many of the research participants asked if their real names could be used in this dissertation, but I
was unable to do this on account of the IRB agreement. Maintaining this anonymity through the work, all
while describing certain established historical elements of Neighborhood United’s activities – notably, their
place as the non-profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party – has proved to be a challenge.
10
The aim of engaged scholarship, as I practice this approach, is to produce scholarly
knowledge while simultaneously conducting research that might help research
participants advance, facilitate, and reflect upon their own social change efforts. This
engaged approach differs from some of the traditional standards in American academia,
which has often called for a sharp break between researcher and research subjects. Those
who follow this engaged methodology, however, believe that a collaborative research
practice is ethically sound and can serve as a foundation for the production of scholarly
insights that would be difficult to garner through a more neutral observational approach
(Burawoy, 2005; Simpson & Seibold, 2008). Indeed, given my own positionality as a
white, middle-class male who never lived in South Los Angeles, it is my contention that
an engaged scholarship approach offered the only possible avenue through which I could
conduct research that was simultaneously respectful and insightful.
Therefore, as an engaged scholar and social justice ally, I served in a variety of
capacities with Neighborhood United during my multiple years of fieldwork. I worked as
a volunteer in their urban farms and in gardening workshops, sat on the organizing
committee for several of their sponsored events, assisted in writing specific portions of
grant applications, and contributed to door-to-door outreach efforts, among other
activities. With that said, I was never on the payroll of the organization, and remained
transparent throughout the fieldwork that I was there to serve a dual role as both
researcher and contributor to the group. Further, while I certainly came to focus upon
Neighborhood United as a central case study because I saw great value in the food justice
work that they were advancing, this dissertation was never intended to serve as public
relations for the organization. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, this project not only points
to the successful strategies employed by the organization in its efforts, but also describes
11
some of the central obstacles that it faced while advancing its overall mission. Ultimately,
honest transparency with my research collaborators allowed me to develop a level of
critical distance that proved to be fundamental in maintaining the integrity of this
scholarly project.
I kept consistent notes of my ethnographic participant observation, through both
the use of an audio recorder and transcribed fieldnotes. In addition, my involvement with
the organization allowed me to collect countless documents, flyers, and reports that
further informed the research process. Further, over twenty in-depth interviews were
conducted with Neighborhood United staff, board members, interns, partners and
volunteers, as well as with other individuals from organizations highlighted in this
project’s comparative case studies. These interviews ranged anywhere from thirty-five
minutes to one and a half hours, with each audio recorded and transcribed.
Fieldnotes, interview transcripts and documents were then analyzed through an
iterative constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2000). That is, during and after the
process of ethnography, transcripts were read and audio notes were listened to on
multiple occasions. From there, recurring or theoretically relevant moments of meaning
were noted, thematic categories were inductively coded, and these categories were then
consolidated until several primary themes remained. These themes were put into
conversation with several guiding theories for the project, and went onto form the basis
of the chapters that follow. In addition, at multiple occasions during the fieldwork and
writing process, I shared my ideas with members of Neighborhood United through
research briefs, conversations and presentations. The feedback received from these
interactions was built back into the analytical process moving forward.
12
Before moving onto an overview of the dissertation, several additional comments
regarding the research site are worth noting. Much of the empirical work in this project is
centered in the area broadly defined as South Los Angeles, alternately referred to as
South Central. The Los Angeles Times describes South Los Angeles as a region of 28
neighborhoods, encompassing a population of nearly 800,000 people over the space of
over 51 square miles (Los Angeles Times, n.d.). As I have described in other work,
including in Broad and Gonzalez (Under Review) and Broad et al. (Under Review), the
densely populated area has experienced significant demographic shifts in recent decades.
In the first half of the 20
th
century, the community was primarily made up of non-
Hispanic White residents, along with a significant Japanese American population and
enclaves of African American residents. During World War II, these Japanese Americans
were forcibly removed and placed into internment camps; upon their return, many left the
South Los Angeles area for other sections of the city (Cheng & Yang, 1996). Over the
course of the next few decades, the area became home to the highest concentration of
African Americans in Los Angeles County, at the same time as the White population
receded (Ong et al., 2008). In the late-20th century, an influx of immigrants from Mexico
and Central America once again transformed the ethnic makeup of the area. Between
1990 and 2000, one-quarter of the African American population moved out of South LA,
while the Latino population expanded by almost a third (Myers, 2002). By the end of the
first decade of the 21
st
century, the demographics of South Los Angeles included a
residential population that was nearly two-thirds Latino and approximately one-third
African American (Ong et al., 2008; Sanchez & Ito, 2011; US Census, 2012).
For decades, the residents of South Los Angeles have endured life amidst poorly
functioning public institutions, systemic disinvestment and discrimination, and high rates
13
of gang-related violence. It is best known in the mediated and public mind, perhaps, as a
site of significant upheaval during the civil unrest following the Rodney King verdict in
1992, as well as the Watts Rebellion of 1965 (Matei & Ball-Rokeach, 2005). Decades
after those events, levels of poverty and unemployment in the community still far exceed
the averages across the city of Los Angeles, the state of California and the United States
in general. In 2009, the estimated poverty rate for South LA residents was just under
30%, while the percentage of adults over the age of 25 without a high school degree was
over 50% (Sanchez & Ito, 2011). Residents in the community also suffer
disproportionately from chronic diseases that include heart disease, diabetes, obesity and
stroke (Park, Watson & Galloway-Gilliam, 2008).
Despite all of the negative indicators – and there are several more that could be
cited – through it all, South LA has also proved to be a space of resilience, artistic
creativity and collective resistance. The area has a long history of multi-racial community
organizing and activism on a number of social, economic and environmental justice
issues (Pulido, 1996). Today, there are countless organizations engaged in efforts to
improve the health and well-being of local residents through community organizing,
advocacy and institution building (Broad et al., Under Review). While ever-cognizant of
the downsides of the everyday social realities in their neighborhood, residents and
community practitioners in South LA are also able to point to a number of past and
present success stories that demonstrate the capacity of the area to thrive in the face of
systemic social injustice. With food justice as a focal area, the dissertation that follows
provides an exploration into these very processes.
14
Overview of the Dissertation
To begin my investigation into movements that aim to achieve food justice,
Chapter 1 commences with a targeted review of research approaches to understanding
social movement formations, activities and outcomes. In doing so, I call attention to the
value of networked concepts for understanding how these social movement processes
operate (Castells, 2009; Diani, 1992; Diani, 2003). However, I suggest that previous
networked approaches to social movement studies have not fully explored qualitative
research approaches, nor have they focused their gaze at the meso- or neighborhood-level
of analysis, where a great deal of contemporary social justice organizing takes place. I
draw from and expand upon the communication ecology approach (Ball-Rokeach et al.,
2012), an ecological model of communication dynamics, to chart out the theoretical and
methodological foundation of the empirical project to follow. Finally, I situate this multi-
level approach to the study of social movement activity within the macro-level political
and economic contexts of advanced liberalism (Rose, 1999), a critical theoretical
scaffolding that plays a major role in shaping the politics of possibility for community-
based social justice organizations.
Chapter 2 turns its attention to the global industrial food system. It is intended as a
primer, of sorts, that briefly outlines major moments in agricultural history and leads up
to the present industrial model. I describe several of the major risks to human,
environmental and non-human health that have emerged in the contemporary food system
across levels of production, distribution and consumption. From there, I outline the rise of
the varied “alternative food movements” that have taken shape in response to these
interlocking crises in the food system, including but not limited to food justice efforts.
The chapter concludes with an explanation of the value that the communication ecology
15
approach brings to the study of food movements, broadly speaking, and to food justice, in
particular.
In Chapter 3, the communication ecology approach is put into action through a
comparison of the organizational communication ecologies of three different
organizations, all of whom were engaged in efforts to tackle food injustice in South Los
Angeles. An explication and visualization of the organizational communication ecologies
of these groups compares and contrasts their histories, their philosophical visions for
change, their communication and media strategies, as well as their sources of funding and
support, among other areas. Through this comparative project, I argue that, on account of
its commitment to race-conscious social justice, Neighborhood United offers an example
of a community-based food justice organization whose organizational communication
ecology deserves a fuller networked ethnographic treatment.
Chapter 4 begins the deeper dive into the network of Neighborhood United. Its
central question asks: how it is possible that an organization with its roots as the non-
profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party can now depend on funding
from a variety of public and private supporters that hardly share the same vision of race-
conscious social transformation? I begin with a discussion of the Black Panther Party and
its system of community programs in the 1970s, then track how Neighborhood United
developed into a “fundable project” focused on food justice issues into the 21
st
century. I
outline the organization’s strategy for maintaining its priorities and setting boundaries as
it became engaged in these complicated networked activities.
In Chapter 5, I draw heavily from Communication Infrastructure Theory (Ball-
Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006) to examine how
Neighborhood United’s communication ecology works to motivate change at the
16
community level in South Los Angeles. I provide a set of brief, intersecting case studies
of key community-based programs operated by Neighborhood United. With a focus on
the power of neighborhood storytelling to reshape community-level values and
institutions, I point to some of the organization’s successes in their efforts to, as they put
it, “build a sustainable food system from the ground up in South Central LA, while
training local youth, creating real jobs and building the local economy.” At the same
time, I continue to point to the ways in which their community-based activity depends
upon the support of numerous “allies” who are not themselves of the local community, as
well as describe those elements of their communication ecology that have constrained
their ability to motivate community-based change at a broader scale.
Chapter 6 moves beyond the local community to describe Neighborhood United’s
involvement in regional, national and international networks of food justice and social
justice activism. I again outline several brief case studies as a way to explore how
Neighborhood United actively constructs its organizational communication ecology in
order to build solidarity with like-minded groups and individuals, and from there to
influence macro-level storytelling systems that shape broader cultural values and social
structures. I point to the challenges and opportunities that engagement in these extra-local
networks brings into the work of groups like Neighborhood United, and suggest that the
cultivation of such connections represents a necessary arena for growth if community-
based food justice advocates hope to maximize their impact in the years to come.
Finally, in the Conclusion, I summarize the key theoretical, empirical and
methodological contributions of the dissertation project. I point to areas for future
research for those interested in food justice and other social change efforts. I also point to
17
the utility that the findings might have for practitioners engaged in everyday struggles for
social justice.

18
CHAPTER 1
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND
THE NETWORKED COMMUNICATION ECOLOGY APPROACH

This dissertation project is an investigation into contemporary US-based
alternative food movements – that is, social movement efforts that seek to transform the
US food system into one that promotes greater economic, environmental, community-
level and individual health. Its primary focus highlights a specific type of alternative food
movement effort – community-based initiatives that attempt to advance food justice. The
aims of the project are both empirical and methodological. To what extent, I ask, can
racial and social justice be achieved through food justice organizing? Further, what
qualitative research approach is best suited for a grounded analysis of these food justice
efforts?
These guiding questions lead to several literatures that are reviewed in this
opening chapter. First, I outline some of the key theoretical and methodological
frameworks that have guided research into the formation and practices of social
movements. From there, I introduce the communication ecology approach and networked
ethnography as theoretical and methodological frameworks that allow for a textured
understanding of social movement activity. I conclude this chapter with thoughts on the
broader political and economic contexts of contemporary liberalism in which today's
social movements are situated. This scaffolding is important as a way to understand the
politics of possibility that exist for those involved in movements to achieve community-
based food justice. The empirical chapters that follow are therefore motivated by my
interest in providing contributions to the study of food justice, social movements, and to
19
scholarship that investigates the nature of social change during the age of contemporary
liberalism.
Theories of Social Movements: Structure and Identity
The study of social movements has long stood as one of the most active arenas of
academic research, with work in this domain coming from across a variety of humanistic
and social science disciplines. Throughout the last several decades, in particular, scholars
have worked to develop, explore, refine, and in many cases discard a multitude of
theoretical frameworks that have contributed to the ever-growing field of social
movement studies. These theories have generally attempted to describe and predict three
main processes – the formation of social movements, the activities of these social
movements, and the ultimate outcomes that result from these social movement activities
(Walder, 2009). Given the voluminous breadth of the field in question, this chapter makes
no attempt to survey the entire literature on the topic. Instead, this initial section reviews
some of the key threads of research that, in either direct or indirect ways, have served to
inform the theoretical and methodological approach taken in this project. It draws from
structural, identity-focused, and network-based theories of social movements as a way to
lead into a discussion of the communication ecology approach – the theoretical
framework that then serves as the primary guide for the dissertation.
As Polletta (2008) summarized, through the 1960s, collective behavior models
were central to the discussion of social movements. Working in part from Marxist-
derived frameworks, the starting point for this work was often an investigation into the
nature of public discontent that could lay the groundwork for change movements. Many
of these theories stressed the importance of charismatic leaders who had the ability to
parlay the impacts of systemic strain, deprivation and oppression of the public into (often
20
irrational, from the perspective of many social scientists) protest movements and actions
that would confront dominant political systems. With key proponents coming from the
Chicago School (Blumer, 1951; Turner & Killian, 1957), the approach of collective
behavior research was mostly social psychological, and collective action was seen to take
root only when a constructed “generalized belief” was held by the masses. The influence
of pre-established organization was downplayed in these accounts, as collective behavior
theory was generally “geared to the central message that movements break from pre-
existing organization and that movement organizations are always in a state of emerging
and becoming” (Morris & Herring, 1984, 15).
Smelser (1962) defined collective behavior as, “mobilization on the basis of a
belief which redefines social action” (8). He shared with Chicago School theorists the
view that a cognitive “generalized belief” was the guide to social movement activities.
Yet, his interests in identifying “the specific structural conditions that make it possible to
predict and explain the occurrence of specific forms of collective behavior” (Morris &
Herring,1984, 17) represented a significant break from other collective behavior theorists.
His work was key in setting the stage for the types of research questions that would guide
social movement studies in the near future. Indeed, in the 1970s, the questions being
asked by many social movement researchers shifted from a primary investigation into the
political orientation of mobilized groups – the “why” – to a more structuralist
perspective that focused on the processes of mobilization itself – the “how” (Walder,
2009).
Structuralist perspectives tended to argue that social movements emerged when
rationally acting individuals and groups acted to advance their own interests. Researchers
who took this perspective were mostly interested in examining the organizational and
21
political processes that facilitated these actions (Morris & Herring, 1984). Prominent
among these structurally-oriented approaches was that of resource mobilization theory
(McCarthy & Zald, 1973, 1977), a framework that emphasized, “the resources, beyond
membership consciousness and manpower, that may become available to potential
movements” (McCarthy & Zald, 1973, 1). Resource mobilization researchers did not
deny the existence of grievances in the process of social movement activity, but saw
discontent as basically present in any society. Instead, their work stressed, “the structural
conditions that facilitate the expression of grievances” (1, emphasis added). Working
from this structural foundation, McCarthy & Zald (1977) defined a social movement as a,
“set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preference for changing
some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society” (1218).
Work in this vein consistently assumed that participation in social movements was a
rational decision made by actors, and the focus of most research analyzed the activities of
major social movement organizations in their attempts to mobilize resources and to make
demands. Researchers have argued that these resources are generally accrued from
affluent individuals and organizations that support social movement organizations in their
quest to alter the functioning of the state.
Resource mobilization gained a foothold as a primary theoretical perspective
through which social movement activity was studied, and it remains influential to this
day. Despite this prominence, it was criticized from the start for taking little account of
social and cultural situations, for assuming that social movement actors operate in
inherently rational and instrumental ways, and for highlighting the nation-state as the sole
target of social change efforts (Nash, 2001). With these criticisms in mind, a number of
researchers continued to explore alternative social constructionist avenues that could
22
address gaps in earlier collective behavior research, as well as in the increasingly
dominant structuralist approach (Klandermans, 1992). The challenge for this work was to
“award culture a substantial role without treating it as free-floating, independent of the
organizational agendas and self-interested political actors which it actually has force;
without treating activists as strategic dopes or ideological dupes; and without abandoning
the effort to operationalize success in terms of measurable impacts” (Polletta, 2008, 79).
A diverse set of research approaches have attempted to take structural dynamics into
account
3
, but to also explore the role of culture and collective identity in collective action
mobilization processes, in the activities of social movement actors, and in the outcomes
of social movements – both envisioned and realized.
Work by researchers like David Snow and Robert Benford, for instance, which
focused on framing processes in collective action, attempted to meet this challenge of
synthesis. Still concerned with the ways in which social movement organizations
mobilized support and recruited participants, they differed from resource mobilization
theory in their increased emphasis on meaning. Their approach conceived of movement
actors as “signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of
meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” (Benford & Snow,
2000, 613). In this domain, social movement actors were seen to interact with media,
local governments and the state to develop collective action frames that could function as,
“action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and
campaigns of social movement organizations” (614). A wide body of scholarship has
taken up frame analysis as a way to understand the processes of mobilizing ideas and
meanings en route to effecting (or countering) social change.

3 In this sense, structural dynamics might include social movement organizations' recruitment
infrastructure, as well as the organizations' relationships to outside supporters, funders, and political actors,
among others.
23
Theorists of New Social Movements (NSMs) provided a much more direct
challenge to the assumptions of the structuralist resource mobilization theory than did
researchers like Benford and Snow. At the same time, these scholars also looked to build
upon concepts derived from Marxist-inspired understandings of collective behavior, but
with an eye toward reformulating them for application in the contemporary age. NSM
theorists argued that profound changes in post-industrialism led to fundamentally
different movements from that of the industrial period. No longer was class struggle the
prime determinant of movement building, but rather recognition for new lifestyles and
identities (as in actions around gay rights, feminism, and peace) was sought through
participation in these efforts (Polletta & Jasper, 2001).
Alberto Melucci, for instance, saw social movements as social constructions in
themselves, grounded in a notion of collective identity, what he defined as, “an
interactive and shared definition produced by several individuals (or groups at a more
complex level) and concerned with the orientations of action and the field of
opportunities and constraints in which the action takes place” (Melucci, 1995, 44). Much
of the thrust of the NSM argument was that there was something uniquely new about the
contemporary context that gave rise to new movements and required new theory.
Pichardo (1997) and others pushed back against the truly novel character of NSMs, but
still, he suggested that the “principal contributions of the NSM perspective are its
emphases on identity, culture, and the role of the civic sphere – aspects of social
movements that have been largely overlooked” (425). Countering instrumental theories
that saw changes to the nation-state as the only outcome worth considering, researchers
of the NSM tradition saw cultural value-based change as vital in its own right. Still, as
Polletta and Jasper (2001) articulated, while changing identities had often been a primary
24
goal among a number of post-industrial movements, it had not necessarily proved to be
the sole outcome of such efforts. Reviewing a number of recent identity-based change
movements, they argued, “Rather than viewing collective identity exclusively as a kind of
cultural movement impact, separated from the domain of institutional impacts like legal
reform and policy change, these analyses point to the ways in which newly prominent or
reformulated identities can transform the institutional political playing field” (297). The
bottom line takeaway, then, is that there is a good deal of overlap between the types of
movements that scholars of resource mobilization and NSMs took as their object of
study. Additional attempts at synthesis that draw from the insights of both seem to be in
order.
A Networked Approach to Social Movement Studies
One of the factors that likely exacerbated the disjunction between the theoretical
frameworks outlined above is based in their methodological approaches. Indeed, it is
important to note that the methods of social movement research have been heavily
influenced by the types of theories driving the scholarship, and vice versa. Resource
mobilization theory's focus called for quantitative and qualitative research that analyzed
how social movement organizations went about recruiting participants, how movement
groups grew in stature and scope, and how they ultimately influenced political and legal
structures. Framing analysis supplemented this approach by urging researchers to explore
the ways that meaning, signification and communication influenced social movement
activities. New Social Movement theories, on the other hand, encouraged research that
would delve deep into the cultural battles at play in social movement processes, and
would therefore investigate the ways in which identity politics shaped the philosophies
and activities of individuals and organizations.
25
Klandermans (1992) reviewed a number of social constructionist approaches to
social movement theory – including frame analysis and collective identity research – and
argued that such approaches provided a useful counter to the instrumental logic of
resource mobilization theory. Yet, Klandermans still found these frameworks lacking a
key element in their understanding of the symbolic aspects of mobilization, a
characteristic that he suggested was fundamentally a methodological one. He argued that
they failed to combine an analysis of behavior at both the collective and individual levels.
Such a critique could surely be levied against resource mobilization theory as well, which
tended to focus almost exclusively on the activities of social movements at the level of
the social movement organization (SMO). Any understanding of social movement
activity, Klandermans suggested, required multi-level analysis that looked at the links
between and among individuals, organizations, and broader structures.
In suggesting a methodological approach for multi-level analysis, Klandermans
drew from Curtis and Zurcher (1973) to argue for greater attention to the “multi-
organizational fields” in which social movement activities were embedded. In an early
work that helped to shape what would develop into a networked understanding of social
movement activities, those authors suggested that inter-organizational processes could be
identified at overlapping meso- and micro-levels. First, at the organizational level,
“networks are established by joint activities, staff, boards of directors, target clientele,
resources, etc,” and second, at the individual level, “networks are established by multiple
affiliations of members” (53). Klandermans defined the multi-organizational field as the
“total possible number of organizations with which the movement organization might
establish specific links” (95). This included, first, the supportive links – referred to as an
organization's alliance system; second, the representatives and allies of the challenged
26
political system, as well as members of countermovement organizations, were theorized
to be part of the organization's conflict system. Actors within a SMO's multi-
organizational field need not be identified as movement organizations themselves
(although they are likely to be present and be key players), but could be from any number
of other organizations – youth, businesses, consumers, community advocates, political
parties, governmental institutions, and more.
An early example of research that took seriously the concept of multi-
organizational fields was Fernandez and McAdam (1988). They asserted that ties among
organizations were an important avenue through which resources and personnel could be
brought to bear by social movement organizations. Those researchers derived their data
from the applications of students from both the University of California at Berkeley and
the University of Wisconsin at Madison who wanted to participate in the 1964
Mississippi Freedom Summer project. The applications included sections in which
students listed their other organizational affiliations, college activities, and their reasons
for volunteering. The researchers utilized quantitative network analysis
4
to develop a
model of recruitment that predicted participation on the basis of an individuals' structural
position within a linked multi-organizational field. They found that structural position
within the network of organizations was an important determinant for actual participation
in the social movement activity, such that those who shared previous organizational
affiliations in activist groups were more likely to participate than those who did not. This
was particularly clear in the instance of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where
there was less of a widespread history of activism around civil rights at the time than at
Berkeley.

4 Social network analysis is a set of methods that allows for an investigation into the relational aspects of
social structures (Scott, 2000). The practice allows for the visual display of networked relationships, as well
as quantitative tests that can describe network structures and predict behaviors based on those structures.
27
Research that takes stock of the multi-organizational field is indicative of a type
of multiperspectival orientation that Snow and Trom (2002) called for in case study
research of social movements. To conduct multiperspectival research, they suggested, is
to “attempt to access, secure, and link together analytically the perspectives or voices of
the range of relevant actors” (155). They pointed to Cress and Snow's (1996) examination
of the organizational fields of fifteen different homeless social movement organizations
across eight US cities. Those researchers employed a qualitative comparative analysis to
assess whether the viability of an organization was related to the types of resource
supports that they received from links in their multi-organizational field – across moral,
material, informational, and human resource dimensions. Ultimately, the researchers
found three different pathways to viability based on resources accrued through multi-
organizational networks. They saw their work as providing an empirical confirmation of
some of the underlying tenets of resource mobilization theory, but through empirical
means rather than what they saw as a general tendency toward non-validated theoretical
assertion.
The concept of multi-organizational fields was a precursor, in many ways, to what
can be termed the networked approach to the study of social movements, a
methodological and theoretical approach that has begun to take shape just in the last few
decades. Mario Diani represents one of the primary movers in terms of synthesizing
different strands of social movement research while breaking new ground in the ability to
conceptualize multiple layers of interaction in social movement activities. Diani's (1992)
definition of a social movement achieves this goal, and will serve as the primary working
definition utilized in this present work. He wrote: “A social movement is a network of
28
informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations,
engaged in political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity” (165).
As researchers have explored networked approaches to the study of social
movements, they have argued for a conceptual shift in the role of networks within social
movement analysis. As Diani (2003) outlined, networks have generally been seen as
facilitators of recruitment and participation for individuals and groups. From a network
perspective, however, networks are not treated only as preconditions and resources for
action, but also as a primary analytical tool through which social movement activities can
be documented and assessed. A networked approach is fundamentally relational, in that it
emphasizes links between and among organizations, individuals, collectives, and social
structures. Outlining its advantages over the traditional perspective of resource
mobilization theory, Diani (2003) argued that, “viewing movements as networks allows
us to get over the tendency to treat movements as organizations of a peculiar type, and
therefore to address the issue of the relationship between movements, parties, and interest
groups from a different perspective,” adding, “In these terms, 'social movement
organization' is defined not in terms of attributes, but in terms of relations” (304-5).
Speaking next to proponents of the NSM approach, he argued that the main analytical
gain from that perspective would be that, “the existence of a (new) movement is no
longer tied to the existence of distinct (new) conflictual stakes, and no specific
correspondence is expected between the two” (305).
The focus on networks in social movement research paralleled the broader
influence of networked concepts across the academic world. Castells (2000) famously
coined the “network society” moniker in his Information Age trilogy, as he charted the
influence of information technology in transforming business, politics, and society at the
29
end of the millennium: “Particularly important was its role in allowing the development
of networking as a dynamic, self-expanding form of organization of human activity,” he
wrote. “This prevailing, networking logic transforms all domains of social and economic
life” (367-368). As Castells (2009) continued to elaborate, networks have been central to
human organization throughout history, but available electronic information and
communication technologies have only recently allowed for its full deployment in the
forms of social organization and interaction. Blending social movement concepts of
mobilization processes with theories of meaning making, Castells outlined the networked
perspective: “In the network society, discourses are generated, diffused, fought over,
internalized, and ultimately embodied in human action, in the socialized communication
realm constructed around local-global networks of multi-modal, digital communication,
including the media and the Internet. Power in the network society is communication
power” (53).
Theories of networked social change have been put into action by a number of
researchers who have employed social network analysis in their work. As Diani (2002)
described, systematic empirical analyses of social movement networks have grown
substantially in recent years. Many of these research projects have focused on the topic of
recruitment processes and participation (such as Fernandez & McAdam, 1989, discussed
above), while others have investigated inter-organizational dynamics. The works featured
in Diani and McAdam's (2003) collection, for instance, demonstrated how researchers
have come to employ network analysis in the quantitative comparison of different social
movement network structures, generally as a means to investigate the relationships
between structures and actions. Such was the case, for instance, in Diani's (2003) work on
Italian environmental organizations in the 1980s. He drew from interviews and surveys
30
with members of dozens of social movement organizations to assess the ways in which an
organization's centrality within the multi-organizational network of environmental
groups, as well as the extent to which an organization served as a broker between those
organizations, was related to their level of influence within the broader social movement
effort.
Within the field of social movement studies, network analysis is seen to open up
possibilities for researchers to analyze how collective action is affected by actors'
locations in preexisting networks, as well as to illustrate how new links created by social
movement actors over time influence the nature of the movement. Diani (2002) has
asserted that, while network analysis is generally associated with a set of formal, heavily
mathematical tools, it is, “best conceived as a broader approach to social processes...As
the interpretation of action hardly derives straightforwardly from network properties,
networks require careful investigation in order to reconstruct the meaning of certain ties.”
He continued: “To this purpose, triangulation strategies, combining qualitative and
quantitative evidence, are most useful” (174). Despite this call for triangulation, in the
work of Diani and most others who have employed network analytic methods, qualitative
research has been used primarily as a tool to inform subsequent quantitative research
efforts, and less often as a methodological end in itself.
Toward Multi-Level, Qualitative Network Analysis
Networked approaches have taken seriously calls to expand social movement
analysis to multiple levels of analysis. With that said, many of the projects that have
taken a networked approach still fall short of an analysis that cuts across macro-, meso-
and micro-levels. Indeed, research that has compared the multi-organizational fields of
different social movement organizations (e.g., Cress & Snow, 1996) has looked primarily
31
at connections between organizations, all operating at the meso-level. In these instances,
the micro-level has come into play only insofar as organizations are seen to deliver the
participation of individuals as a type of human resource. Macro-level structures and
organizations (like the government and mainstream media) have also been absent in
many of these research efforts, including those that have attempted to predict
participation in movement activities based on an individual's previous organizational ties
(e.g. Curtis & Zurcher, 1973; Fernandez & McAdam, 1989). For those research efforts
that have focused on the influence of and changes to macro-level structures, the
networked relationship under study has generally begun from the organizational/meso-
level and then extended to consider the macro-structural level (Diani, 2003). In such
instances, the huge scale of individual data has often been seen to make micro-level
analysis too unwieldy. The lack of attention to the micro-level in many of these examples
has also been a product of many network researchers' continued attachment to resource
mobilization theory, a framework that emphasizes the importance of ties between
organizations as the central component in accruing resources that can then be put towards
mobilization (Osa, 2003).
Staggenborg (2002) argued that the meso-level of analysis represents the ideal
place for social movement research to begin, as it allows for researchers to then make
linkages to the micro- and macro- levels of analysis. The networked research discussed
above has done a solid job of making these connections by starting at the meso-level, but
rarely has it been done in a cohesive way that brings the three levels together into a single
study. Further, its interest in formal organizational ties has, at times, biased the
networked approach away from investigating many informal groups and individuals that
might be part of a broader “social movement community”, including “networks of
32
individual movement adherents who do not necessarily belong to SMOs, institutionalized
movement supporters, alternative institutions and cultural groups” (Staggenborg, 2002,
126). The structural approach taken by most network analysis researchers, as well, could
come under criticism for replicating the same types of oversights that resource
mobilization theorists have long been criticized for making – notably, the role of culture,
identity and value systems in social movement activities has been given short shrift.
Networked research could therefore benefit from more in-depth investigations of
these qualities as they are made manifest, centered at the meso-level of the organization,
and then radiated out into the organization's networked connections at both macro- and
micro-levels. As Staggenborg declared, “If we start with the meso, we can examine the
ways how characteristics of movement communities influence individual commitment
and how meso structures are altered by leaders and activists (the meso-micro link). We
can also examine the ability of different mobilizing structures to exploit, and sometimes
create, political opportunities and large scale changes, as well as the ways in which large-
scale changes alter mobilizing structures (the meso-macro link)” (138). As will be further
elaborated below, a qualitative, ethnographic case study approach, grounded in an
understanding of the network's central role in social movement activities, is uniquely
situated to address this multi-level challenge, but as yet remains underexplored as a
synthesized methodological and theoretical approach for social movement studies.
Given his pioneering work on the network society, as well as his largely
qualitative methodological orientation, Castells might be seen to offer a model for how
work in this vein could be conducted. Indeed, in his book Communication Power (2009),
he offered several social movement case studies – of movements related to climate
change, movements against corporate globalization, demonstrations related to the 2004
33
terror attacks in Madrid, and the 2008 Obama US Presidential campaign. In each of these
examples, Castells explicitly focused on the role of media and networked technology –
including movement activities on the Internet, the use of mobile phone networks to
organize protest, and the role of celebrities as part of major media events. Together, these
mediated platforms exercised what he termed communication power, as they encouraged
social change at the individual and structural levels.
While useful, Castells' approach focused primarily on major organizations, as
well as on movement efforts at the national and international scales. For those researchers
who are interested in the processes of grassroots community change, as this present
dissertation project is, his approach necessarily requires additional theoretical
exploration. Indeed, there is a gap to be filled with respect to how communication power
might be operated at the level of the local community, and how this might interact with
broader movements for social change. This is especially pertinent within areas in which
the persistence of the digital divide means that many grassroots organizations must find
ways to connect with constituents who do not necessarily have smart phones or connect
to the Internet as a means to become engaged in civic action.
5
The communication
ecology approach offers just the strategy to explore such efforts to effect community-
based social change.
A Communication Ecology Approach to Social Movements
The present dissertation project represents an attempt to bring many of the multi-
level, networked social movement concepts, discussed above, down to the level of the
grassroots community, and to explore them through ethnographic, qualitative research

5 From both a scholarly and activist perspective, an over-investment in the promises of digital technology
to advance social change is problematic. For a relevant discussion, see Gibson (2010).
34
methods. Starting on the meso-level with a singular organization as its primary focus –
Neighborhood United (NU) – this work will follow the organization's network of multi-
level links to interrogate both why and how NU motivates food justice-related social
change in its specific community. The links under study include the types of resource-
based connections that resource mobilization theorists have long been interested in
exploring. At the same time, the qualitative approach also allows for an investigation into
the flows of values, culture, and identity as these elements are expressed through
storytelling and interaction across macro-, meso- and micro-level scales of relationships,
as well as across present, past and future time scales. In this sense, it attempts to take
central elements from structural and critical approaches to social movement studies,
blending them in a networked ethnographic approach that is grounded at the meso- level
of the community-based organization.
6
As will be discussed in greater detail in the
Chapter 2, the methodological approach is particularly suited as a means to investigate
social movement activities for food justice, a domain that is inherently multi-level and
ecological in nature. This research perspective, however, need not be limited to the study
of food systems, but could also be applied in a wide variety of other social movement
settings.
As a means to guide this attempt at theoretical synthesis, this work draws from
and will expand upon the tenets of the communication ecology approach, an ecological
model of communication dynamics that is currently under theoretical development by

6 Researchers like Howard (2002), Boyd (2008) and Burrell (2009) have used the term “network
ethnography” and “networked ethnography” to describe ethnographic research projects that study digital
networks, as they are created online and then extend offline. The use of “networked ethnography” in this
present work differs in two significant ways. Notably, instead of starting from the selection of multiple
field sites, then looking for points of interaction across those various sites within a networked field, this
dissertation works from an ego-centric understanding of a network. In this sense, it tracks the network of a
particular organization as it is constructed through its various communicative connections. Further,
previous network ethnography has tended to begin with digital and online communication environments as
a researchers' starting point. This present work, by contrast, does not see digital technology as necessarily a
prerequisite for the application of the networked methodological approach.
35
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and her colleagues with the Metamorphosis Project at the
University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and
Journalism. That framework itself builds upon previous theory building by Ball-Rokeach
and her colleagues, notably the orientation of Communication Infrastructure Theory and,
before that, Media System Dependency Theory. Both of those earlier theoretical
frameworks were multi-level in nature, and remained concerned with the ways in which
storytelling and networks of communicative flows influenced outcomes related to goal-
directed knowledge construction and goal-specific behaviors. A brief review of each of
these theories is worthwhile as a way to lay the groundwork for the more recent
communication ecology approach, which will then be elaborated upon in greater detail
below.
First, Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) is a framework for research
that investigates the structures and influences of communication processes, at the level of
the local urban community, and within the contemporary, digital, globalized age.
Drawing from researchers like Anderson (1983), it understands the concept of
community to ultimately be an imagined one, even if it is geographically situated. It
follows from Fisher (1985), as well, to assert that human communication is
fundamentally based in narrative storytelling. In this respect, CIT works from the notion
that “storytelling resources” are central to the process of building and maintaining a
community, as well as effecting social change at the community level. Through shared
discourses about the community, by members of that community, a community-level
identity can be forged, and community-level action can be encouraged and realized (Kim
& Ball-Rokeach, 2006).
36
The central piece of a community’s communication infrastructure is its
neighborhood storytelling network (STN), and this network is embedded within a
communication environment, what is termed the communication action context (CAC).
The STN describes what occurs when residents, community organizations, and local or
ethnic media (referred to as “geo-ethnic” media) participate in communicative actions
about the local community. These storytellers are not isolated, but instead are involved in
a dynamic, networked conversation that collectively forms the communicative foundation
of community. The power of the storytelling network is demonstrated most substantively
when all three nodes participate in discourse around the same neighborhood story – that
is, when each of the three players in the STN focuses on the same issue. The dynamic
interaction between them amplifies the effectiveness of each community storyteller, as it
can ultimately encourage more substantive community engagement across the network.
In short, when residents, media, and organizations all come to focus on a particular
neighborhood story – for instance, a community event, an instance of injustice in the
neighborhood, or a long-term community-based campaign – the network can serve as the
fundamental mover in recruiting participants and in sustaining community action.
Fundamentally, it is a theoretical framework that grants significant agentic potential to
networks of local community actors in their efforts to address local problems and build
community capacity through unified action.
The STN has been shown to have significant impacts on the nature of community
engagement. Previous research has found that in cases in which residents are highly
integrated into the STN – that is, when they engage in community storytelling with other
residents, with local organizations and connect to geo-ethnic media – they report higher
levels of neighborhood belonging (Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001), civic engagement
37
and collective efficacy (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). Important to note, as well, is that
neighborhood storytelling across this network is not inherently positive. If negative or
“bad stories” permeate the network, this discursive interaction can contribute to negative
community perceptions and outcomes (Matsaganis & Wilkin, Under Review). This was
demonstrated, for instance, by Broad, Gonzalez and Ball-Rokeach (Under Review), who
showed that stronger connections to the STN were related to more negative perceptions
of intergroup relations between African Americans and Latinos in a study of South Los
Angeles residents, an area in which the discourse of black-brown conflict has a long and
prominent history. In this case, it appeared that residents' connections to ethnically-bound
storytelling networks – in which African Americans and Latinos relied on different
communication resources to learn about what was happening in their community – played
a significant role in this negative effect.
The STN is situated within the Communication Action Context (CAC), which is
considered any piece of the built and social environments that enables or constrains the
STN. The CAC brings into view the other agents beyond the STN who are key players in
the network with respect to community-level change. Key agents operating as part of the
CAC include, but are not limited to: schools, law enforcement, local government, local
businesses, and various technological and physical infrastructures, among others. Again,
the relationship between these elements is not static, but dynamic, such that the CAC can
influence the STN, while the STN can make changes to the broader CAC. So, for
instance, the availability of high quality recreation centers within a community can be
considered an element of the CAC. If such recreation centers are of poor quality (or are
non-existent), they would not be amenable as a space for members of the neighborhood
STN to engage in communicative interaction about the local community – people would
38
not gather there, geo-ethnic media would not be distributed there, local organizations
would not be able to host events there, and so on. With that said, if the STN were
activated to address this issue – with residents, community organizations, and geo-ethnic
media coming together to discuss the problem of low quality recreation centers and to
propose solutions to remedy this problem – the force of this collective conversation could
work to increase the quality of these spaces, thus improving the value of the CAC and
reinforcing the capacity of the STN.
With its focus on geo-ethnic media, community organizations and interpersonal
networks of local residents, in addition to community-level actors within the CAC, the
Communication Infrastructure approach is centered at the meso-level. Macro-level
storytellers like the mainstream media, the federal government and national or
international non-governmental organizations tend to focus on issues that cut across wide
geographic areas and concern broadly defined populations. These macro-level storytellers
are undoubtedly part of an influential storytelling system, one that helps to shape
discourse on broader social and political issues, and which filters down in many ways to
the community level (Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001). It is the meso-level agents,
however, who tend to focus more of their attention on issues and stories that concern
particular neighborhoods or residents within a neighborhood. Thus, these actors have
significant relevance for research projects that are interested in interrogating how
neighborhood-level communication dynamics contribute to community building and civic
engagement at the community level (Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001; Chen et al.,
2013). CIT's attention to the influence of the community-level built and social
environments is also helpful as a way to guide investigations into those factors that
39
encourage and/or constrain the networked dynamics of community-level storytelling in
efforts to mobilize and sustain social change.
The Communication Infrastructure approach claims some of its roots from within
Media System Dependency (MSD) Theory (Ball-Rokeach, 1985; Ball-Rokeach, 1998),
which is a multi-level theory of media power (Ball-Rokeach, 1998). MSD grants agency
to individuals who seek out information through the media system – it argues that
individuals rely on different constellations of media connections in order to accomplish
particular goals related to understanding, orientation, and play. Notably, each of these
dimensions has both a personal and social sub-dimension as well. With that said,
individuals do not have total control in this process, since in the traditional media
structure there is almost always an asymmetric power relationship that places media
producers above media consumers.
7
In particular, media systems tend to exert significant
influence on individuals and their networks of interpersonal relationships when there is
ambiguity or threat in the social environment. Faced with a problematic environment, the
intensity of individuals' understanding and orientation goals is high, and they are
therefore placed in an uneven power relationship with the media that is in place to
address their individual goals. The asymmetric power relationship is also in clear view
when the media system commands exclusive information capacities, as well as when the
media system is activated to address particularly salient issues (Ball-Rokeach & Jung,
2009). Across these examples, the agenda of the media system can have a strong impact
on the nature of discursive interaction between and among individuals and organizations.
While the Communication Infrastructure approach updated, altered and expanded
the work of MSD theory to have greater relevance at the community-level and in a

7 A claim that is complicated, but not disproved, by the introduction of social media communication
technology.
40
globalized, digital age, they still share common elements. Notably, both MSD and the
Communication Infrastructure approach are ecological in nature in that they analyze the
dynamic relationships between networks of individuals in the context of their built and
social environments. They are also ecological in that they recognize that individuals are
situated within a broader ecology of communication resources, and that they draw from
resources within these networks of communication to construct knowledge and to achieve
their goals. While seemingly straightforward, these characteristics represent a divergence
from the mainstream thinking throughout the history of studies of communication and
media. This orthodoxy has tended to focus on specific communication channels –
interpersonal, mainstream media, online media, etc. – at the expense of a more networked
and ecological understanding of how communication dynamics operate.
8
It is
understandable, then, that these two theoretical frameworks serve as a foundation for the
communication ecology perspective.
Ball-Rokeach et al. (2012) defined the communication ecology as the network of
communication resource relations constructed by an individual in pursuit of a goal and in
the context of that person's communication environment. In this sense, all individuals
have a communication environment, one that is selected from within a broader universe
of all the possible communication resources with which a person might theoretically
connect. However, on account of different technological, linguistic and other social
circumstances, not all resources within this broader universe are actually available to all

8 An ecological approach to the study of communication practices in many ways bucks historical trends of
communication research (Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009). Traditionally, researchers have identified a specific
communication resource – be it interpersonal communication, television, the Internet or, increasingly
today, social media – and have isolated that communication medium as a way to study its usage and
influence. There are many notable exceptions to this trend of course, including those affiliated with media
ecology research (see Strate, 2004, for a review), as well as work on community communication ecology
by Friedland (2001). These and others have helped to inform the communication ecology perspective
outlined here.
41
individuals. The communication environment, then, represents a selection of this broader
universe, a possibility space of potential interpersonal, mediated, or organizational
resources that a person is physically able to connect to as a means to acquire knowledge.
An individual's communication ecology, then, is nested within this communication
environment, as it represents those communication connections that are ultimately
employed by an individual as a means to construct knowledge and to achieve goals.
To date, research on communication ecologies from this perspective has used the
concept as a way to study the communication connections of individuals, or, alternately,
among demographic social groups. Wilkin et al. (2007), for instance, compared the
communication ecologies of different ethnic and geographic groups within greater Los
Angeles with respect to how they stay on top of issues in their community. The
researchers created a “communication map” of the different communication connection
patterns of African Americans, Anglos, Armenians, Chinese, Hispanics, and Koreans
who lived in several different Los Angeles geographic communities. In recent work by
Sandra Ball-Rokeach and her colleagues at the Metamorphosis Project, the researchers
have dug deep into the communication ecologies of individuals, as they have worked to
develop a communication ecology measure that will allow for systematic comparisons
between individuals' knowledge construction strategies in their attempts to solve
problems related to health (Ball-Rokeach et al., 2012).
The nature of the individual communication ecology can be illustrated with a
specific example. Imagine, for instance, an individual who is concerned about the
availability of quality foods in her community. This concern might be prompted, initially,
by discussions she had with neighbors about their lack of local access to affordable,
organic produce. She might also have seen a news report on a national television station
42
that talked about the links between living in a community that lacks access to healthy
foods and the presence of negative health outcomes in those communities. This might
have raised her level of concern, and from there, she might decide to stop by the
headquarters of a local community-based organization that she knows advocates for
community health issues. Members of that organization might point her to the presence of
a new community farmers' market, organized by a local food justice organization and
hosted at the offices of the district's city council representative. From there, she might
become a regular customer of that market, and also could attend some of the food justice-
related events and workshops that the organization hosts in the neighborhood. Each of
these links in her trail toward the farmers market and the activities of the food justice
organization represent her goal-specific communication ecology, her network of
communication resource relations constructed in pursuit of a goal and in the context of
her communication environment. Importantly, her communication ecology involved
connections to interpersonal communication, national media, community-based
organizations, and city government.
9

Communication ecologies are particularly instructive when analyzed in a
comparative fashion, so an alternative example is in order. Imagine a second individual,
an active community member who lives in a neighborhood in which access to healthy
food has never been an issue. However, after reading a story in the LA Times about First
Lady Michelle Obama's healthy food and exercise initiative, she might have become
concerned about the links between food and health in America, and might have decided
to go on the website for Mrs. Obama's “Let's Move” program to learn more. After

9 This variation in communication connections is key to the communication ecology approach. Whereas
many communication researchers have tended to focus on either interpersonal or mediated connections to
understand the ways in which individuals construct knowledge, this perspective places just as much weight
on organizational ties.
43
clicking through a few different links, she might click on the “Take Action – Community
Leaders” section, and read some of the recommendations listed on the site. From there,
she might decide to sign up for the “Let's Move Faith and Communities!” online mailing
list. The discussion points from those E-mails could have served to motivate her to
organize a health and wellness team among members of her church. A member of that
team might then suggest that they could focus some of their work on improving the
quality of the local food environment in a neighborhood across town, an area they know
lacks any high quality grocery stores. They might reach out to another church in that area
to see if they would like to collaborate on a project together.
What do we learn from this comparison? For one, it becomes manifest that
different people, vested in different communication environments, are likely to construct
different communication ecologies, even when focused on similar goals. In this case,
both individuals had an interest in learning more about the links between food and health,
and sought out communicative interactions – interpersonal, mediated, and organizational
– as a means to construct knowledge on these issues and to begin to take action on the
basis of their concerns. Yet, the nature of their communication connections was quite
different, based on a variety of different personal characteristics – their geographic
location, their position in a broader social structure, their previous experiences, their
preferred media connections, etc. We can expect, based on these differences, that the two
individuals would come into contact with very different knowledge sources across their
train of communicative links. Indeed, the philosophy espoused by the government's “Let's
Move” website is unlikely to be the same as the community-based health advocacy
organization, while the types of conversations and actions taking place in the church
groups are likely to be quite different from those encouraged by the food justice
44
organization. From there, we can also expect that different clusters of communication
connections would lead to different actions and behaviors. Understanding communication
ecologies, then, can be a central tool for comparative works that attempt to determine
what types of communication connections are associated with what types of outcomes.
It is in this sense that the communication ecology approach opens up new
opportunities for scholars of social movements. Not only does the communication
ecology approach allow for researchers to track the flow of resources from one
communication connection to the next, but it also can be used as a central analytical tool
in tracking flows of values, culture and identity in this process. Indeed, it demonstrates
the ways in which identity itself is dynamically constructed through communicative
interaction. An individual's communication ecology is shaped by key identity
characteristics (including ethnicity, class, gender, political proclivities, and technological
access, to name a few), at the same time as these communication connections help to
shape the nature of that individual's identity moving forward. Individual communication
ecologies are also intricately linked to group-based communication ecologies, such that
collective identities are shaped and serve to shape collective communication ecologies as
well.
This dissertation project extends the individual-level communication ecology to
the level of the organization, and more specifically, interrogates the communication
ecology of a social movement organization. As a foundational definition, the
communication ecology of the social movement organization will be conceived as the
network of communication resource relations constructed by an organization in pursuit
of a social movement goal and in the context of their organizational environment. It is a
multi-level and temporal concept that works from the foundation that the key to
45
understanding a social movement organization is to look at its network of communication
connections, the communication ecology through which it derives its organizational
identity, builds partnerships with other groups, finds solidarity with other social
movement organizations, and connects with the community in which it operates and
works to effect change. It is a synergistic approach that bridges the divides between
structuralist approaches to social movement studies (including resource mobilization and
quantitative network analysis), on one hand, and identity-focused social movement
research (like New Social Movement theories), on the other. The communication ecology
approach allows researchers to investigate both the why and how of social movement
activities, with communicative interactions seen as the primary analytical avenue through
which social movement practices can be understood. Grounded at the meso-level, it is
well suited for research that explores the activities of grassroots social movement
organizations, as this project does, although it could also be applied to the activities of
national and international organizations.
It is worthwhile at this point to note the distinction between a social movement
organization – like Neighborhood United – and a broader social movement. Diani (2003)
argued that in order for a social movement to emerge, there are three primary
requirements – the movement must be in conflict with some aspect of the status quo, it
must develop a sense of collective identity that transcends a single event or action, and
there must be a connection between informal networks in which the social movement
action goes beyond the mobilization capacity of a single, defined organization. In
focusing on NU as the primary case study for this work, I do not suggest that the
organization, on its own, is a social movement. Instead, I suggest that NU represents a
representative organization that is participating in a specific type of food movement (food
46
justice), one that is not necessarily the norm in the broader constellation of food
movements, but of which there are others who share similar traits and with whom they
see themselves working toward similar goals. Chapter 3 will further demonstrate why
Neighborhood United has been selected as a representative case of a specific style of
organization that advances a food justice social movement.
Working from Diani's discussion, above, a networked ethnography of
Neighborhood United will be able to explore the extent to which all of the members of
the organization's network share the same collective identity and whether they all see
themselves involved in the same struggle against the status quo and for food justice. As
will be elaborated upon, NU finds itself at the center of a complex web of relationships in
which the organization is connected to a variety of public, private, and non-profit groups,
as well as to citizens and volunteers of different social, ethnic and economic
backgrounds. Far from a cohesive collective identity, the many players in this network –
in this ecology of communicative relationships – bring with them different perspectives,
philosophical foundations, practices and goals. NU aims to utilize this web as a means to
advance its specific vision of social change and social justice, as it seeks allies in a
variety of contexts and in sometimes unexpected places. Fundamentally, I argue, NU's
navigation through this complex web makes logical sense within the context of advanced
liberalism (Rose, 1999), an important contextual environment toward which this
discussion now turns.
The Advanced Liberal Context
A multi-level approach to the study of social movement activity requires attention
to the macro-level political and economic contexts in which movement activities are
situated. On one hand, these contexts can be seen as primary sources for the expression of
47
grievances amongst citizens and organizations, as social movements are often
characterized by citizens and organizations who work together in an attempt to remedy
deficiencies in political and economic systems. At the same time, macro-level dynamics
also serve to shape the politics of possibility for the types of social change efforts that can
emerge at a given time. That is, given different political and economic realities,
movement activities necessarily develop in different ways, and the communication
ecologies of social movement organizations reflect the particularities of these contexts.
The research presented in this dissertation takes place within the context of 21
st

century liberal democracy in the United States. The important question to ask, then, is
what does this mean for the expression of movements around food justice? The next
chapter of this work looks more closely at the dynamics of the food system, as it
demonstrates the ways in which the current political and economic climate has given rise
to concerns and grievances related to health, environmental quality and economic
sustainability. This present section takes on another area of concern, as it delves into the
ways in which the foundations of contemporary liberalism serve to shape the politics of
possibility for social movements that focus on human and environmental health. In so
doing, it draws from Michel Foucault's writings on liberal governmentality (2003, 2007),
along with subsequent theoretical extensions of that work by authors like Nikolas Rose
(1999). Ultimately, my argument is grounded in the idea that, while the advanced liberal
state has fundamentally problematic features, at the same time, its dynamics set the stage
for the types of activities that are enacted by activists and organizations who work to
advance food justice and promote other social justice-oriented ideals in the contemporary
moment.
48
This type of hybrid take on liberalism is not necessarily the norm among critics of
the status quo. When describing today's political and economic situation, many scholars
and activists opt to employ the term neoliberalism. This umbrella term is generally used
to describe widespread global privatization, the marketization of all aspects of social life,
and a hegemonic rationality of capitalist exploitation. As articulated by researchers like
Wendy Brown (2003), neoliberal rationality involves “extending and disseminating
market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a
distinctive player” (7, emphasis in original). Market values, then, serve to shape and
legitimate the dominant social order. Policymaking under neoliberalism, for one, is
characterized by the assumption that an individual is a calculating, rational actor – a
member of the species homo economicus – whose entrepreneurial abilities and decision-
making capacities make them responsible for their own station in life, regardless of
external factors or potential socio-cultural constraints. In this sense, an individual's
“moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for 'self-care' – the ability to provide for
their own needs and service their own ambitions” (Brown, 2003, 15).
Those who espouse a neoliberal philosophy argue that their laissez-faire form of
governmentality is an ultimate expression of freedom and liberty, as it grants faith in
individuals and non-governmental institutions to make the most prudent decisions that
will ultimately optimize well-being among the broader population. Such a claim is
harshly rebuffed by critics of the neoliberal state, as evidenced by Harvey (2005), who
wrote that, “The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners,
businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital” (7). Indeed, authors who
write in this critical vein have little optimism that the values of neoliberalism have any
value at all, and suggest that there is little possibility for social justice and social change
49
unless capitalism itself is destroyed. Brown (2005) suggested that the left's vision for
justice should, “focus on practices and institutions of popular power; a modestly
egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions; an incessant reckoning with
all forms of power – social, economic, political, and even psychic; a long view of the
fragility and finitude of nonhuman nature; and the importance of both meaningful activity
and hospitable dwellings to human flourishing.” She followed this list by asserting that,
“none of these values can be derived from neoliberal rationality or meet neoliberal
criteria for the good” (59).
Again, this present work does not deny many of the fundamental claims of critics
like Harvey and Brown, in that it recognizes that central practices within contemporary
capitalism have led to great social injustice on a variety of accounts (some of which will
be explored in Chapters 2 and 3, with a focus on injustice in the food system). However,
it does take issue with some of the fundamental assumptions of these critics, and argues
that the contextual scaffolding of advanced liberalism provides a more realistic portrait of
the landscape in which organizations like the one highlighted in this networked
ethnography operate. Notably, an advanced liberal perspective is less deterministically
pessimistic about the prospects of contemporary social change efforts that are not
fundamentally anti-capitalist. At the same time, the perspective also brings to light the
fact that it is not only the individual who is seen as the locus of change in the current
political and economic climate, but also the community that is conceptualized as a key
player in any effort to effect social change. The networked ethnography that is unfolded
in future chapters, then, is not only motivated by gaps in the social movement literature,
but also as a way to participate in a broader discussion about the possibilities for social
change in the context of contemporary liberal democratic life.
50
It is imperative, then, to briefly outline some of the key concepts that characterize
this alternative approach to understanding liberalism. Foucault's (2003, 2007) research in
this area, conducted primarily in the 1970s, was a genealogical exploration of the guiding
rationalities of state power as they evolved from the middle of the last millennium
onward. He proposed that the age of liberalism – beginning in Western democracies
around 1800 – was defined by a shift toward a governmental rationality. Rather than
increasing centralized state power, within the age of liberal governmentality, the state
began to govern at a distance, as it moved into a position in which it became one
important element within a complex matrix of broader institutional assemblages (Epstein,
2007). Whereas the state was once primarily interested in the disciplining and optimizing
of individual bodies toward certain ideals, its focus in the age of governmentality was
reoriented toward the regulation of populations in order to maximize well-being. It was a
move away from disciplining mechanisms that focused on the anatomo-politics of the
human body and toward those that implemented regulatory controls that focused on the
biopolitics of the population – that is, those practices that centered in on the health of
populations as a political problem to be managed and normalized through the interaction
of public, private and citizen action.
10

Nikolas Rose (1999) described how governmentalization in this manner was
responsive to risks that faced sets of defined populations. Approaching these risks
required the invention, assembly and dissemination of varied types of calculations,

10 A big part of this shift was grounded in society's evolution of concerns away from dangers and toward
risks. For much of history, individuals, groups and nations were primarily concerned with dangers, like
those presented by specifically identifiable enemy threats, diseases, or other harmful external forces.
Beginning in the late 18
th
century, the notion of risk was separated from that of danger. As Castel (1991)
outlined, “A risk does not arise from the presence of particular precise danger embodied in a concrete
individual or group. It is the effect of a combination of abstract factors which render more or less probable
the occurrence of undesirable modes of behaviour” (287, emphasis in original). Eventually, concern with
danger was overtaken by concerns over probabilistic risk as the prevailing motivation for security within
modern society, and it is this concern that still predominates today.
51
mechanisms and strategies, many of them developed within political centers. In this
sense, the once-dominant power of the sovereign was supplanted by the governmental
guidance of technocrats, who now could draw from mathematically derived probabilities
of risk to develop regulatory mechanisms that would center on the promotion of life
among varied populations.
11
As Foucault described, “One might say that the ancient
right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the
point of death” (261, emphasis in original).
It is within these technocratic operations that risks were made visible by experts
and their institutions. With the development of modern statistical techniques,
governmental institutions have drawn from what Hacking (1990) referred to as “an
avalanche of numbers” to develop an understanding of statistical normality and to
develop regulatory mechanisms in order to manage the lives of populations in order to fit
that statistical normal curve. In the words of Foucault (2003), “biopolitics will derive its
knowledge from, and define its power's field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the
mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment” (245). It
is the work of technocrats, then, who collect and analyze statistics related to the
economy, public health, and the environment that are empowered to help set the agenda
for where risk is present in society. They ask: Who and where are the populations that
find themselves at the negative side of this statistical risk profile? How can an
intervention be applied that will affect this specific population in order to encourage the
outcome in question to be brought closer to the center of the normal curve? What extra-
governmental administration is best equipped to handle this analysis and the task of the
intervention's application?

11 Although, it should be noted, disciplinary mechanisms were never, and have never been, fully removed
from the act of governance.
52
Rose (1999) extended Foucault's theorizing and explored the ways in which
liberal governmentality itself evolved since its initial emergence. He argued that late 20
th

century and early 21
st
century became characterized by advanced liberalism in much of
Europe and in the United States. He described advanced liberalism as a strategy of
governmentality that placed increased responsibility at the level of the community. Rose
suggested that, in the earlier biopolitical action of the mid-20
th
century, governmentality
operated from the “social point of view” – the state translated expert opinion into laws,
regulations, advice and funding streams that were disseminated into the public through
mass media or through the activities of institutional workers at potentially troublesome
moments (like childbirth, illness, schooling, and career choice). This was still consistent
with a liberal philosophy of governing at a distance, but its aims and targets remained at
the macro-social level. In recent decades, however, advanced liberalism began to
encourage a shift toward governmentality at the level of the community: “In such
programs, 'society' still exists but not in a 'social' form: society is to be regenerated, and
social justice to be maximized, through the building of responsible communities,
prepared to invest in themselves. And in the name of community, a whole variety of
groups and forces make their demands, wage their campaigns, stand up for their rights
and enact their resistances” (p. 136).
It is clear that this move to the community level took direct responsibility for the
maintenance of health and the promotion of social justice among citizens away from the
state. Instead, it depends on an ethic of entrepreneurship and coalition-building in which
the state plays the role of facilitator. Individuals, organizations, schools, private
businesses, parents, hospitals, scientists, academics, institutional authorities and others
are expected to come together as partners, to take collective responsibility, and to
53
collectively deal with the social and environmental justice issues that are faced by the
population. In this sense, it is an age defined by the development of hybrid coalitions
(Epstein, 2007) – collectives that bring together citizens, public agencies, non-profits and
private organizations into common cause. These coalitions are the site of collaboration
between players who bring with them vastly different philosophical backgrounds,
experiences, and ultimate visions of how society should operate.
An example of how this governmental logic might take shape in the domain of
food justice is in order.
12
Let us imagine a situation in which a set of government
bureaucrats and policymakers come to realize that people who live in urban inner cities
experience nutrition-related health disparities, like diabetes and high blood pressure. This
awareness likely came as a result of recent publications in esteemed medical and public
health journals, as well as on an account of government technocrats' own analysis and
understanding of health statistics. From there, a governmental bureaucracy – say, the
United States Department of Health and Human Services – might decide to convene a
conference of leading academic researchers, medical practitioners, policymakers,
businesspersons, and other government officials to try to figure out the best way to
encourage additional research and action to tackle this problem. A key outcome of this
conference might be the creation of a competitive grant program – funding would be
allocated to projects that would bring together health and/or policy researchers with
community-based practitioners to develop, deploy and evaluate a nutrition-related
intervention project in a geographic and/or ethnic community that suffers from food-
related health disparities. The ultimate goal of the programming would be to reduce the
risk profile of residents in these areas, such that their health outcomes would more

12 While a hypothetical, this example is grounded in an understanding of the way many competitive grant
programs are conceptualized and administered, not only in the area of food justice, but on a variety of other
health-related issues.
54
closely approximate the statistical average of nutrition-related chronic disease among the
broader population. The hope would be that the funded projects would help provide
models and guidelines for future intervention projects, as well as inform future grant
funding and policy-making efforts.
Continuing the example, a staff member working with a community-based food
justice organization might see this call for proposals in their monthly search for grant
funding opportunities. Seeing the requirement for collaboration with health researchers,
they might reach out to a local university public health department, and begin to work
together on an application. If selected, funding might be received within a year, at which
point the organization and public health researchers would begin to execute and evaluate
their programs. These programs might include, for instance, cooking workshops with
local residents, or youth development programs that focused on skill building through
urban agriculture. After a few years of programming and evaluation, officials at the
Department of Health and Human Services might be impressed with the demonstrated
results from the collaborative project – the evaluation might show, for instance, changes
in participants' eating habits, or trends in their vital health statistics that would reduce
their likelihood of developing a nutrition-related chronic disease. From there, those
government officials might invite the groups to apply for several additional years of
funding that would support a new stage of intervention, continue evaluation research, and
support their organizational functioning moving forward. Throughout this entire process,
the groups might also publicize their successes, through the publication of journal and
newspaper articles, with announcements via online newsletters and through social media
platforms, and through internal communication within their respective organizations.
55
This example points to a few central tenets of the advanced liberal context. First,
statistical renderings of risk related to health and well-being served as a fundamental
starting point for the development of biopolitical governmental techniques. From there,
these biopolitical strategies were not destined to be carried out by the state alone, but
rather their administration was connected to, as Rose (1999) described, the “thousands of
spatially scattered points where the constitutional, fiscal, organizational and judicial
powers of the state connect with endeavors to manage economic life, the health and
habits of the population, the civility of the masses and so forth” (18). As befits the
advanced liberal paradigm, the state's function was to serve as one node in a broader
circuit of biopolitical actors who helped to identify and alleviate the risk of populations,
with most of the action taken directly at the community level. The multiple partners
involved in the process is also illustrative of the networked nature of social change efforts
within an advanced liberal landscape. Developed in parallel to the rapid growth of digital
communication technologies, social movement activities in the context of contemporary
liberal governmentality reflect the networked logic of social organization and inter-
organizational interaction.
In addition, this example demonstrates how advanced liberalism's style of
government at a distance can be evaluated through a system of audits. Michael Power
(1997) argued that contemporary Western democracy might be thought of as an “audit
society”, in which society is organized to observe itself through mechanisms of audit as a
way to evaluate governmentalized programs of control. Rose (1999) placed the logic of
the audit as a central tool in advanced liberalism: “Audits of various sorts have come to
replace the trust that social government invested in professional wisdom and the
decisions and actions of specialists. In a whole variety of practices – educational,
56
medical, economic, organizational – audits hold out the promise – however specious – of
new distantiated forms of control between political centres of decision and the
autonomized loci – schools, hospitals, firms – that now have the responsibility for the
government of health, wealth and happiness” (154). The development of the coalition in
this example – between the federal government, public health researchers, and
commmunity-based food justice activists, was in large part bound together by faith in
evaluative systems of audit that aimed to measure the impact of community change
efforts over time. Despite the philosophical differences that these organizations would
bring to the table – and in certain ways because of these differences – the rationality of
advanced liberalism suggests that social change is best effected through such
collaborative action at the level of the community.
Ultimately, this extended example speaks to some of the fundamental differences
that are brought to light when one approaches social change efforts through the
perspective of advanced liberalism as opposed to through critiques of neoliberalism. A
number of theorists have asserted that the neoliberal state devolves all responsibility for
the promotion of health and well-being down to the individual level. However, this
example is illustrative of the contention that there is a great deal of activity happening at
the meso-level of the community to this effect. Importantly, these activities are often co-
constructions, encouraged by macro-level political and economic actors, but seized upon
by community-based practitioners who see opportunities for making substantive changes
in the everyday lives of local residents. As DeFillipis, Fisher and Shragge (2010) have
argued, “paradoxically, at the very moment that communities are most burdened and
constrained, they have also become increasingly more salient and popular sites for
responding to and struggling with the world they have been handed” (28). Indeed, those
57
authors took a similar approach to recognizing both the limits and potential of
community-based organizing, and in doing so developed six central propositions that
might be seen as guideposts for community level social change actors that wish to make
substantive social change:
 Realize both the potential and limits of community-based action.
 Conceptualize local work as the starting point, but not as the ultimate goal.
 Include conflict and struggles over power relations as part of a strategic and
tactical toolbox.
 Find connections and unite community-based efforts with broader social
movement activity.
 Build an analysis of political economy and understand how it relates to
structures of inequality.
 Have an understanding of historical contexts and choose to make history by
challenging their received world.

The propositions outlined by DeFillipis and colleagues speaks to a broader point,
which is that many critics of the so-called neoliberal state seem to think that any
legitimate social change is impossible without a complete rejection of liberal
governmentality on the way to crushing contemporary notions of the state. This research
project, however, does not take such a definitive stance. Instead, this work is normatively
open to the possibility that a community-based social movement group, operating within
the landscape of contemporary capitalism, can draw from certain elements of advanced
liberalism itself to achieve goals that contradict the status quo. Again working from
DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge (2010), it seems as if the, “limited capacity of community
remains, as does its centrality. Accordingly, the debate over the place of community in
social change should continue to locate both the possibilities and limits of practice at is
core” (166).
58
Conclusion
A central thrust of this dissertation project’s approach is a belief that both
scholarship and activism would be well served to find a line between a Marxist political
economic tendency toward totalizing critique and a cultural studies tendency toward
outright celebration of agency. In her work on contemporary brand culture, Banet-Weiser
(2012) concluded that consumer-oriented activism is characterized by a deep sense of
ambivalence. Similarly, what the networked ethnography of Neighborhood United will
work to demonstrate in subsequent chapters is that the reality of community-based social
change in the age of advanced liberal governmentality is inherently ambivalent,
contradictory and messy. Yet, as Banet-Weiser argues, there is a “generative power” of
ambivalence (218). As I will show, embedded within a circuitous set of partnerships and
communicative connections, NU found itself engaged in complex dance, in which the
organization at once saw itself working against and depending upon the support and
ideologies of key players within its ambivalent organizational network.
The multi-level analysis of the communication ecology approach allows for
exploration of these links across macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. By following the
organizational communication ecology of NU, the networked ethnography will not only
be able to explicate how these contradictions are made manifest in the practices of the
community-based social justice organization, but also will document how the
organization works to exploit these very contradictions to advance their model of a social
justice-oriented food movement. The communicative orientation of the project provides a
valuable contribution to the study of contemporary social movements. At the same time,
it offers an empirical case study that can advance our understanding of how social justice
might be realized in the age of advanced liberalism.
59
CHAPTER 2
CRISIS AND RESPONSE IN THE FOOD SYSTEM –
FROM THE GLOBAL TO THE LOCAL

For key stakeholders in society – consumers, farmers, merchants, policymakers,
researchers and others – the ways in which food is produced, distributed and acquired has
been of paramount concern for ages. In recent centuries, industrialization and economic
globalization have fundamentally altered the basis through which these enduring
processes have taken shape. A complex modern global food system has since developed,
one that offers great promise in its quest to feed the world, but one that has, in many
ways, fallen short of providing an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable
model to do so. This chapter outlines some of the basic contours of this global food
system, as well as describes some of the recent efforts that have emerged as a way to
improve the workings of that system. Having this context in place is important as a way
to situate the efforts of the alternative food movement organizations that are the focus of
subsequent empirical chapters within a broader landscape of food movement activity.
As will be demonstrated, problems of the modern industrialized food system are
characteristic of what scholars Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and others have termed the
world risk society: “For the threats and uncertainties in question, in contrast to earlier
eras, are not the result of the errors of modernization but of its successes and hence are
contingent on human decisions through which science and technology are perfected,
which are immanent in society and hence cannot be externalized” (Beck, 2009, 7,
emphasis in original). Over time, industrial innovations in the food system have been
encouraged by a widespread desire for the improvement of agricultural processes, as well
60
as by a quest to solve the long-standing dangers of hunger and malnutrition (Leigh,
2004). Shifts in agricultural systems have also been shaped by ever-evolving social and
economic structures, including the growth of capital markets and forces of international
geopolitical competition. Yet, despite continual promises that industrialization would
eliminate the dangers of hunger and malnutrition, this has not been the case (Cribb,
2010). Recent history has shown, in fact, that these industrial innovations themselves
have actually gone on to engender a set of novel economic, nutritive, and environmental
risks, risks that stand as primary concerns for the well-being of human populations and
the environment in the contemporary age.
Consistent with Beck's (1992) formulation, these new-found, self-generated risks
have both local and global implications, and they involve complex systems in their long-
term management. Still, just as these risks have emerged, so too have a set of
heterogeneous social movement formations that, through varying means and on the basis
of diverse sets of philosophies, have attempted to allay the risks that industrialization in
the food system has brought to the fore. This, too, is representative of the world risk
society, which is seen to spur a process of reflexivity in the face of risk, in which truth
claims become contested by stakeholders from a variety of institutions and among the
general public. The resistance typified by various alternative food movements, those that
stand in opposition to the status quo in the major industrial food and agriculture systems,
has stepped in to fulfill this function. Indeed, taking a cautiously hopeful tack to the
possibilities of confronting the world risk society, Beck (1995) argued, “It is therefore the
combination of reflex and reflections which, as long as the catastrophe itself fails to
materialise, can set industrial modernity on the path to self-criticism and self-
61
transformation” (34). It is with this shared optimism, it seems, that many of today's
alternative food movements have taken root.
The following discussion begins with a brief review of key moments in
agricultural history, and follows with a discussion of some of the central problems that
have emerged as a result of industrialization in the food system. Next, I describe the
varied sets of “food movements” that have formed in response to the risks of
contemporary industrialized food production, distribution and consumption. This work
sets the stage for Chapter 3, an application of the networked communication ecology
approach across three different organizations that seek to remedy food injustice in South
Los Angeles.
From Subsistence to “Conventional” Agriculture
First, a fundamental definition is in order. In this work and elsewhere, the term
food system is used to describe the processes and infrastructures utilized in the
production, distribution and consumption of food. For the vast majority of humanity's
existence, the “food system” consisted primarily of groups of humans who spent their
time foraging and hunting. The transition to farming and herding – which began some
12,000 years ago – represented perhaps the most fundamental shift in the organization of
social life across all of human history. From its earliest days in the Neolithic period,
agricultural activities spurred the development of new networks of interaction, as well as
the diffusion of resources, technologies, social practices, economic cooperation and, in
many cases, fierce conflict across new lands (Zeder, 2008). Over time, the networked
nature of the food system steadily expanded to include increasingly global flows of
interactions. Over the course of the last several centuries, the food system has proved
62
central to the development of the global economy, as it has continued to encourage global
trade and development in food and agriculture (Bonanno, 1994).
Today, the food system consists of a complex matrix of individuals,
organizations, transnational corporations, governments, as well as other public and
private institutions. It includes the states and corporations that invest money and
resources into agricultural development, farmers and laborers who grow food, animals
who are utilized in food production, processors who refine and package food, distributors
and retailers who sell food, consumers who eat food, and those involved with the
infrastructures that deal with food waste, to name just a few key players. Like any
complex system, the food system is inherently multi-level, and an holistic understanding
of the food system necessarily takes into account the actions of individuals,
organizations, and macro-institutional structures, as well as environments at local,
regional, and global scales.
From an academic perspective, research into food systems has come from any
number of agricultural, scientific and humanistic perspectives, the scope of which could
hardly be covered in this brief review. Pertinent to the interests of this dissertation
project, though, are the decades of anthropological, sociological, and historical works that
have used food systems as an avenue to explore central questions about human sociality.
For years, work in the interdisciplinary area of food studies has served to bolster
researchers' understandings of food's role in social organization, as well as to explore
what food can tell us about political-economic value creation, cultural and biological
evolution, and intercultural collaboration and conflict (for a more extensive overview of
such work, see Mintz & Du Bois, 2002).
63
In recent decades, in particular, a number of researchers have focused in on the
forces of industrialization and globalization in the food system, and have done so as a
means to explore how power is exerted, resisted, and shifted through practices in food
production, distribution and consumption. Sidney Mintz (1985), for instance, described
how the development of sugar cane production through slave labor in the Caribbean was
linked to sugar's ascendance as a luxury item in Europe before it became a staple of the
modern diet around the world. Susanne Friedberg (2004) explored flows of commerce,
technology and post-colonial power relations between Europe and Africa by following
the international pathways of French bean production, distribution and consumption.
Sheila Jasanoff (2005) provided a transnational comparison of the agricultural, political
and legal implications that followed the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods
across Europe and the United States. In these and in many other works, scholars have
investigated the multitude of interactive elements that characterize the food system. They
have analyzed relationships between key players that include business and technology
corporations, state actors, labor groups and consumers. Together, these works have
demonstrated that the food system is not characterized by neutral spaces of technological
production nor by isolated consumer choices. Rather, the food system is an influential
player in a set of broader local, regional and international power dynamics. Or, as
Friedberg (2004) concluded in her study of bean trading, “The power to consume tasteful
freshness year-round does not simply derive from technological progress. This power
resides in the structural inequalities of the world economy” (218). This present
dissertation project builds upon this history of scholarship in that it continues an
investigation of power, stability and change in a particular segment of the global food
system.
64
What is it, though, that makes the industrialized food system of the late 20
th
and
early 21
st
centuries so different from the past? At the risk of committing some key
historical oversights in the eyes of agricultural historians, Table 1, on the following page,
provides a general temporal overview of major changes in food system dynamics. First, it
is worthwhile to briefly look back at farming practices as they emerged in the pre-
industrial era, an agricultural epoch that began somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000
years ago (Zeder, 2008). At some point in this range, groups of humans decided to
abandon gathering and hunting as their primary modes of acquiring food, likely because a
shift to agriculture required less overall effort, yet still resulted in the same amount of
nutritive energy obtained. Over the course of the next few thousand years, agricultural
practices began to develop across a number of continents; a rapid and large-scale uptake
of plant and animal domestication then occurred during the span of years approximately
10,000 to 7,000 years before the present time, coinciding with climactic changes that
likely made agriculture more stable and harvests more robust (Gupta, 2004).
Pre-industrial agriculture was largely defined by slash-and-burn farming methods,
a low-technology style of subsistence farming in which natural vegetation was eliminated
and crops planted in its place until the area was deemed fallow and farmers moved to new
areas. Still practiced today by millions of subsistence farmers worldwide, the method has
allowed indigenous communities to survive for countless generations. These practices
called for the integration of multiple elements of the landscape – including cropland,
forests, waterways and seas – into an holistic agricultural process. Knowledge of local
agro-ecology historically played a central role in helping these farmers adapt and
innovate as necessary (Perfecto, Vandermeer & Wright, 2010).

65
Table 1: General Overview of Dominant Food Production Practices Over Time

Time Period 200,000 years
before the
present to
approximately
10,000 years
before present
Approx.
10,000 years
before the
present to the
15
th
century
15
th
century to
mid-18
th

century
Mid-18
th

Century to
mid-20
th

century
Mid-20
th

century to
Present
Dominant
Food
Production
Method(s)*
Gathering,
scavenging
and hunting
Subsistence
farming,
slash-and-
burn
production,
local agro-
ecological
management
Mix of
subsistence
farming with
pre-industrial
agriculture.
Improved
technological
intensify-
cation;
colonialism
and slavery
led to broader
food
distribution
Development
of “scientific
agriculture”,
with increased
agricultural
intensification
and the 20
th

century
introduction
of chemical
products as
part of the
“Green
Revolution”
Continued
industrial-
ization and
consolidation
in food
production.
Beginnings of
the “Second
Green
Revolution”
focused
mostly on bio-
technology
General
Societal
Formations*
Small and
mobile bands
of a few
dozen
Settled
communities
and villages
of dozens to
hundreds,
many engaged
in agriculture
Beginnings of
urbanization
mixed with
still
dominant-
rural life, as
well as
colonial slave
outposts
Movement
toward
modern mix
of heavy
urbanization
with fewer
farmworkers
living in rural
areas
Majority of
consumers are
urban, with
intensive
farming
situated in
rural areas
*Note: Throughout each of these time periods, forms of earlier production practices and societal
formations persisted and evolved despite the growing dominance of new practices.

With that said, slash-and-burn farming methods, along with other styles of small-
scale subsistence agriculture, have hardly been easy rows to hoe, so to speak. The
methods have placed food production at the whim of unpredictable weather patterns, crop
and animal diseases, volatility in market demand, soil fertility and productivity
constraints, as well as external strife and war. Skilled agro-ecological management has
always been required to balance the complexity and diversity of the system, as well as to
66
prevent the dangers of hunger and malnutrition that naturally have arisen from failed
periods of harvest. At its best, then, subsistence farming in the pre-industrial age was
most equipped to feed small rural communities. Today, it is not seen as a model to
provide for disperse and growing global populations, especially in the context of
widespread urbanization (Morton, 2007).
Agricultural practices developed in different ways across different regions of the
globe, as innovations in plant and animal breeding, irrigation, organic fertilization, and
food preservation came as a result of agro-ecological management that was specific to
varied locales. Still, the fundamentals of most agricultural practice remained mostly
stable over the course of many centuries. It was starting in earnest around the 15
th
century
that the development of cities, colonial expansion, and technological advances in both
agriculture and transportation began to shift this state of affairs. Around this time, more
and more land was being cultivated to produce goods that were then sold in cities and
transported long distances for distribution. In the centuries to follow, exploitative
European colonial expansion, which depended on slave-based agricultural labor as a
foundational element of its economic base, pushed agriculture toward a capitalist
industrial model. Indeed, these early agro-industrial practices of the 17
th
and early 18
th

centuries actually preceded the Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism.
As Sidney Mintz (1985) described in his account of the European colonialist Caribbean
sugar industry, this early plantation system was an agro-industrial one for several reasons
– it combined agriculture and processing under a single disciplined authority, it treated
the labor force as a series of interchangeable units, and the system was time-conscious
due to the demands of both the crop itself and the emerging capitalist market. As he put
it, “If it was not 'capitalistic,' it was still an important step toward capitalism” (55).
67
With these early agro-industrial practices in place, agriculture was fertile ground
for further intensification as the Industrial Revolution took hold. In the 18
th
and 19
th

centuries, proponents of “scientific agriculture” in Europe sought to maximize
agricultural production while using less land and fewer farmworkers. Through empirical
experimentation and technological innovation, they worked to improve the efficiency of
tools, provide better irrigation, select and breed crops and animals that would yield more
product, and improve transportation power. However, as Europe and its colonial agro-
industrial outposts began to specialize crop development and increase yields on wide
swaths of land – therefore abandoning a tradition of farming systems that had integrated
all elements of the natural landscape – problems of soil fertility became paramount
(Perfecto, Vandermeer & Wright, 2010). It was at this time that scientific advances in
chemistry became the purview of agriculture and an emerging capitalist agribusiness
(Leigh, 2004). The introduction of nitrogen-enriched inorganic fertilizers, petroleum-
based pesticides, and plants bred to optimally co-exist in a landscape with these new
chemical innovations laid the foundation for what is now often referred to as
“conventional” or “traditional” agriculture. Given the arc of agricultural history,
however, it is clear that these adjectives are hardly appropriate labels after such a radical
and abrupt transformation had taken place.
Increasingly intensive agricultural practices were seen as imperative for the
advancement of 19
th
century technological progress, a key way to raise standards of
living and meet the demands of growing populations in the growing cities of the time.
Not surprisingly, it was around this time that agriculture developed into a distinct field of
study for scientists and economists, among others. In the United States, President
Abraham Lincoln helped push for the creation of the United States Department of
68
Agriculture in 1862, as well as the establishment of land-grant universities through the
Morril Act and the gifting of undeveloped federal land west of the Mississipi to farmers
through the Homestead Act (Ross, 1929). Speaking in 1859 at a Milwaukee agricultural
fair, Lincoln put forth the key question: “It is true, that heretofore we have had better
crops, with no better cultivation; but I believe it is also true that the soil has never been
pushed up to one-half of its capacity. What would be the effect upon the farming interest,
to push the soil up to something near its full capacity?” (Lincoln, 1859).
The push toward intensification would only grow more central in agricultural
practices in the coming years. Into the 20
th
century, state-led development projects during
the Cold War touted further modernization of agriculture as the key to saving the bustling
world from widespread hunger. Building on the ideology of intensive cultivation that had
developed in the West in earlier centuries, this green revolution in agriculture was
characterized by the industrialization of farm inputs and the massive application of
petrochemical fertilizers and other chemical processes (Holt-Giménez & Patel, 2009).
Chemical corporations, who developed biocides as potential biological warfare agents
during World War II, played no small role in this process. At the conclusion of the war,
they were able to shift their productive capacity from waging war against foreign enemies
to waging war against weeds and pests. In the immediate post-war years, these
corporations were able to convince much of the public that these pests would otherwise
stand in the way of agricultural abundance, consumer freedom and, most importantly for
the developed world, the elimination of global hunger (Perfecto, Vandermeer & Wright,
2010).
What became of the great promises of the green revolution in industrial
agriculture? Well, in wealthy nations like the United States, its most clear
69
accomplishment was in the domain of consumer purchasing opportunities, where
strawberries became available in the wintertime and tomatoes began to look identical
from supermarket to supermarket. The heretofore unfathomable scale and relative
consistency of industrial agriculture allowed for the development of modern-day
supermarkets and produce markets. Combined with scientific advances in transportation
and chemical-based food preservation, industrialization also made possible the growth of
massive industries in the production and sale of processed, fast and convenience foods.
In terms of dealing with the great, long-standing dangers of global hunger and
malnutrition, for some time, mechanization, industrialization and chemicalization did
indeed demonstrate some success in tackling this challenge. Following the green
revolution, several decades in the latter-part of the 20
th
century witnessed a decrease in
the overall percentage of global citizens who experienced hunger (Cribb, 2010).
However, with global populations still rising, the green revolution hardly eliminated
hunger, a fact that remains clear to the present day. Indeed, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations estimated that, in 2010, 925 million people did not
have enough food to eat, with 98% of those people residing in developing nations (FAO
Media Centre, 2011). The shortcomings of the green revolution, however, did not stop
with an inability to once and for all eliminate the traditional danger of failed yields,
hunger and malnutrition. Instead, typical of the world risk society, industrialization and
capitalization in the food system created a number of new risks to the health and well-
being of agricultural practitioners, consumers and the broader environment. The
following sections sketch some of these key global food system risks as they exist in the
contemporary moment.
70
Risks of Corporate Consolidation in the Food System
Any analysis of industrialization in the food system must concurrently analyze the
economic structure of agribusiness that has developed in tandem. Buffered by market-
based governmental policies and subsidies that support monopolistic growth, over the last
several decades, large-scale capitalist agribusiness has enforced widespread consolidation
in the global food industry (Rosset, 2009). A few major multinationals aggressively
control the majority of the global production, processing and distribution of seeds, animal
products, and grains (Hendrickson & Heffernan, 2005; Howard, 2009). In nearly every
sector – from flour milling (61% global control by top four firms), to beef packing (81%
global control by top four firms), to broiler chicken production (50% global control by
top four firms), soybean crushing (80% global control by top four firms), food retail
(50% US market control by top five firms), and beyond – market power has been
concentrated in the hands of just a few organizations globally (Howard, 2006). Names
such as Monsanto, Dupont, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra and Tyson
dominate across these sectors. As Patel (2008) argued, “the effect of turning food
production over to the market has been to produce less competition, and offer more
structural power as a result” (104).
Howard (2006) outlined three processes by which consolidation in the food
system has occurred. Corporations have promoted horizontal integration, that is, the
consolidation of ownership and control within one stage of the food system (e.g.,
processing) and for one particular commodity. Further, vertical integration has occurred
as companies have linked multiple stages of the food system. Howard pointed to
ConAgra as an example of an organization that, “distributes seed, fertilizer and
pesticides; owns and operates grain elevators, barges and railroad cars; manufactures
71
animal feed; produces chickens, processes chickens for sale in grocery store cold meat
cases; and further processes chickens for frozen dinners” (17). Third, corporations have
sought global expansion as they have increased their market share worldwide. This
process has been seen, for example, in the retail sector, as companies such as Wal-Mart
and Carrefour have recently expanded into dozens of countries on multiple continents.
It is impossible to separate the corporate economic structure of the global food
system from the risks that have grown out of industrialization. As Adam (1999) asserted,
“Once farming is locked into the ideology of this globalised economic system, it is not
the ecological principle of networked interdependence between nature and agriculture or
concerns about fertility and the long-term reproductive health of the land but, rather,
political and economic considerations that dictate the nature, pace and intensity of
agricultural practice” (221). These trends have led toward practices in the food system
that promote an ever-increasing scale that attempts to increase the profitability of the
major corporate players. A market-based ideology in the food system idealizes a
commitment to economic efficiency and technological innovation as the driving values of
food production, distribution and consumption. As Shiva (2000) articulated, “Global
chemical corporations, recently reshaped into 'life sciences' corporations, declare that
without them and their patented products, the world cannot be fed,” but, in her
estimation, “Industrial agriculture has not produced more food. It has destroyed diverse
sources of food, and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of
specific commodities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water and
toxic chemicals in the process” (11-12).
The story of food security in the developing world is a case in point. Food-based
international development projects began in force with the green revolution of the mid-
72
20
th
century and, in recent decades, continued with structural adjustment programs
imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Deregulation of
international agricultural markets allowed multinational companies to dump massive
quantities of subsidized agricultural commodities (mostly grains) from US and Europe
into local markets in the developing world.
13
As Holt-Giménez and Patel (2009)
described, food security in the global South became dependent on food aid and the whims
of the global market, with little effort put into encouraging these nations to increase self-
sufficiency through local farm production: “The overlapping histories of development,
the Green Revolution, Northern subsidies, structural adjustment and free trade
agreements constitute an agrarian saga of global proportions and helps to explain why
poverty and overproduction – not scarcity and overpopulation – are the main causes of
hunger in the world” (25).
Supported by free trade agreements, corporations have found ways to cut costs
through international agribusiness. Most of the produce that fills US supermarkets, for
instance, is grown in other nations by farmers who are paid poorly and are exposed to
dangerous environmental chemicals (Patel, 2008). This has undermined US food
production at the same time as it has exploited global producers. Indeed, these shifts have
not worked to the economic advantage of small and medium-sized farmers around the
world, many of whom have found themselves in serious debt and out of business
(Gussow, 1999). A rash of farmer suicides in India and collective resistance from farmers
in nations as disperse as South Korea, Guatemala, and the Philippines points to the ways
in which global corporate agribusiness has not had the best interest of local farmers in
mind (Patel, 2008).

13 The US and Europe were under no international restrictions to limit their subsidization of agribusiness,
and instead pursued policies that promoted overproduction of commodities, thereby increasing corporate
concentration in the industry
73
A reliance on those practices advanced by the powers of global agribusiness is not
the only path that has been proffered as a solution to the deficits of traditional
smallholder and subsistence farming. For years, farmers, ecologists and other food
system practitioners from around the world have been arguing that greater support should
be given to improving traditional farming methods in ways that are more ecologically
sound and beneficial to farming communities (Perfecto, Vandermeer & Wright, 2010).
However, consolidation has led to a situation in which farmers in the developing world
and in the West have been forced to abandon traditional practices, and instead have been
coerced to participate in a generally environmentally unsustainable system that feeds into
the global market, marginalizes local food economies and has still been unable to
eradicate persistent global hunger.
Environmental Health and Safety Risks in Industrial Food
From an environmental perspective, industrial food production relies on heavy
inputs of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and a monocultural growing process, the
latter term meaning that a single crop is grown over a large area of land. Modern
agriculture endeavors to develop processes in which it can use the same piece of land
more frequently. It also aims to increase the specialization of productive crops in order to
improve yields and ease the processes of mechanization. Together, these practices have
had serious negative ramifications for the long-term viability of soil fertility, pest
management, biodiversity, pollution and broader environmental sustainability. (Perfecto,
Vandermeer & Wright, 2010). The current practices in food production are causing fresh
water, available land, and the necessary energy inputs to rapidly disappear at the same
time as the global population rises and demands for meat and dairy products, which
require significantly more resources to produce than do vegetable and grain crops alone,
74
increase (Cribb, 2010). In addition, nutrient leaks from herbicides and fertilizers have
been associated with the deterioration of fisheries, the development of “dead zones” in
bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico, and widespread soil erosion (Pimentel et al.,
2005). Farmworkers have commonly been exposed to a variety of these harmful and
disease-causing chemicals, as they have had to bear the brunt of the contamination as
much as any other food system stakeholder. Across the food system, however, many of
these workers are immigrant laborers with little access to legal recourse to remedy their
exploitation (Food First, 2009).
Proponents of a “second green revolution”, characterized by the introduction of
genetically modified (GM) foods and touted by multinational agricultural conglomerates,
have promised that GM foods could reduce this pesticide use and further increase yields.
Fundamentally, the mantra of the agribusiness corporations and their allies in government
and philanthropy has been that genetic modification will finally solve the interminable
task of “feeding the world” (Shiva, 2000). However, GM agriculture has done little to
actually increase agricultural yields. It has, however, brought with it a variety of new
risks related to the contamination of non-GM crops, the increased concentration of power
into the hands of multinational agribusiness through predatory patenting of seeds, and
general uncertainty with respect to its long-term social and environmental effects
(Gurian-Sherman, 2009; Patel, 2008). Notably, critics have contended that GMs damage
seed diversity and biodiversity as they encourage the growth of ominous “superweeds”
and “superpests” that can wreak havoc on once fertile lands (Moore, 2012; Shiva, 2000).
One of the most outspoken opponents of GM foods, Vandana Shiva, succinctly argued
that, contrary to protecting nature and biodiversity, “corporations that promote genetic
engineering steal nature's harvest of diverse species, either by deliberately destroying
75
biodiversity or by unintended biological pollution of species and ecosystems. They steal
the global harvest of healthy and nutritious food. Finally, they steal knowledge from
citizens by stifling independent science and denying consumers the right to know what is
in their food” (95).
Given the vast global food distribution system, which crosses regional and
international boundaries and regulatory regimes, it has also become clear that there are a
multitude of spaces in which potentially harmful pathogens and bacteria could be
introduced at various entry points (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson & Stevenson; 1996).
These broad-based regional and international flows of vast quantities of food products
invite potentially devastating spreads of food-related disease. Intentional contamination
of food and water in these disperse systems is also seen as one of the easiest ways
through which biological or chemical agents might be disseminated for the purposes of
terrorism (Khan, Swerdlow & Juranek, 2001). The heavy use of petrochemicals in
agriculture – including those built into GM foods – also raises serious concerns about
toxicity and chemical contamination of food (Guthman, 2011b; Pimentel et al., 2005).
As mentioned, much of the increase in grain production – through both GM
agriculture and “conventional” industrial farming – has emerged as a way to meet global
demand for animal protein. Once raised on pastures and fed mostly grass, the production
of meat and animal products has followed the industrial path in force. It has been
estimated that 99% of all animal products consumed in the United States come from
factory farm-style meat and animal production, in which thousands of animals are raised
in close proximity and fed grains. The largest types of these factory farms, referred to as
concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or Industrial Farm Animal Production
(IFAP), contain up to 125,000 animals, and the treatment of animals in these institutions
76
can only be described as heinous, cruel and unusual (Farm Forward, 2008). Factory
farming practices are also ultimately inefficient, both economically and environmentally,
as they require vast amounts of grain (mostly corn and soy), land, water and petroleum
inputs (Gurian-Sherman, 2008). Massive amounts of waste and agricultural runoff from
CAFOs also stands as a leading cause of air pollution, water pollution and soil
degradation. Further, industrial animal production as a whole has been identified as a
leading emitter of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, in no small
part as a result of methane emissions that come from grain-fed cows' flatulence (Gold,
2004).
The often unsanitary conditions associated with large-scale animal production
processes in the United States are part of the reason that the system pumps staggering
amounts of antibiotics into factory farmed animals. The US Food and Drug
Administration estimates that roughly 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the country are
used on farm animals (Bottemiller, 2011). Combined with often loosely regulated animal
production in some parts of the developing world, animal agriculture has become a cause
for significant concern with respect to food safety (Gold, 2004). Recent fears related to
antibiotic resistance, E.coli outbreaks, salmonella, mad cow disease and other pathogens
have made food safety a salient social and political issue in the US and around the world
(Bottemiller, 2011; Dunn, 2007). Workers in the industrialized meat and animal
production sectors, it should be noted as well, are tasked with performing dangerous jobs
in difficult conditions. The speed of the killing floors is hazardous and exhausting, while
exposure to the carcasses presents a variety of other risks to the health of often under-
resourced workers who have few options to redress their grievances (Compa, 2004;
Pachirat, 2011).
77
Following the production, distribution, and consumption chains of industrial meat,
it is clear that the process has had direct negative effects on animals, workers, local
communities and consumers. The use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, the rise of
antibiotic-resistance, and the presence of respiratory irritants and work-related injuries all
contribute to a dangerous landscape of risk (Walker et al., 2005). Meat production is one
of several major areas in which risks are engendered by industrial processes in food, and
then are filtered across multiple levels of the food system. Ultimately, these risks are left
to trickle down, from the top of the corporate agribusiness system, on down to affect the
health and well-being of individual consumers.
Problems of Consumption in the Industrial Food System
At the level of the food consumer, the eating habits of individuals and
communities have shifted in conjunction with an industrialized food system that produces
large quantities of highly processed meat and dairy products, as well as refined sugars
and carbohydrates. Minimally processed whole foods such as fruits and vegetables are
generally agreed to be health-promoting, but are relatively less profitable for the
corporations involved in their production, distribution and sales. By contrast, ultra-
processed foods are those that have as their foundation oils, fats, flours, pastas, starches
and sugars, and are then combined with complex additives to make them more palatable,
habit forming, and as part of ready-to-eat meals. As Monteiro (2009) has described, from
breads, to meat products, to sugary snacks and frozen dinners, these ultra-processed
products are, “typically branded, distributed internationally and globally, heavily
advertised and marketed, and very profitable” (730).
While aspects of the science remain contested, researchers and public health
officials have attributed much of the rise in chronic diseases like hypertension, coronary
78
heart disease, diabetes and obesity to diet, linking the risk of contracting these diseases to
the increased consumption of these poor quality processed foods (Lang & Heasman,
2004). These changes have been most clear in the United States and other developed
Western nations, but increasingly in the developing world as well, where a “nutrition
transition” has wedded increased industrialization with the appearance of chronic and
degenerative diet-related disease (Popkin, 1999). As Lang and Heasman (2004) pointed
out, industrialized agriculture may have successfully raised the overall caloric value of
the global food supply, but it has attendantly lowered the quality of much of the food
consumed globally.
Paradoxically, much of the food grown in the industrialized food system,
particularly in the United States, never gets eaten at all. Indeed, in recent years, one-third
to one-half of fresh produce has not reached the US consumer. Instead, much of the food
intended to be picked up by wholesalers and retailers, key players in the macro-scale
industrial food system, is not harvested and left to spoil, or is dumped into landfills if and
when the produce has declined in freshness and been deemed expendable (Evans &
Clarke, 2011). Food rescue initiatives have worked to put this edible produce to good use
by connecting it to needy populations, but such efforts have dealt with symptoms of the
failures of the food system and have not remedied its structural deficiencies. This is
striking considering the persistence of hunger worldwide as well as in the United States.
In 2010, 14.5 percent of households in the United States were “food insecure” at some
time during that year, meaning that their access to adequate food was limited at some
point by a lack of money and other resources (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2011).
14
This

14 The metric of “food insecurity” is distinct from hunger or malnutrition, which remain national and
global problems in their own right.
79
demonstrates that industrialized food production has created yet another new set of risks
for food consumers based on its wasteful and inequitable distribution of food resources.
In the United States, while diet-related diseases affect residents of all social
classes and ethnic backgrounds, low-income communities and communities of color are
disproportionately impacted by these afflictions, as well as by the presence of food
insecurity. These citizens are far more likely to experience “food injustice” on account of
living inside “food deserts” that lack access to high quality and healthy foods. Fast-food
restaurants and other cheap, unhealthy, ultra-processed options, on the other hand, are
more likely to populate the landscape of low-income and minority neighborhoods (Sloane
et al., 2003). Researchers have asserted that residents who are surrounded by these poor
food environments have more unhealthy diets and are subject to inequitable health
disparities, higher rates of chronic disease and obesity (Larson, Story & Nelson, 2009).
However, this remains a contested claim, as several other researchers have found
competing evidence to suggest that the food environment alone does not provide a direct
link to food consumption and health outcomes (An & Sturm, 2012; Lee, 2012). More
plausible than a one-to-one ratio, it seems, is the argument of Beaulac, Kristjansson and
Cummins (2009), who have suggested that a poor food environment in the United States
contributes to a process of “deprivation amplification”. In this sense, “structural problems
related to food retail appear to further disadvantage low-income and minority Americans,
who are already limited in their ability to purchase healthy food” (4).
This issue of deprivation amplification is an important one that brings to mind a
variety of other issues related to the built environment, transportation access, education,
economic opportunity and poverty that might intersect with food availability to influence
dietary health and contribute to chronic disease development. This is similar to the tack
80
that Guthman (2011b) took when she argued that general environmental pollution, as
well as toxins in foods that have been grown and processed in the industrialized food
system, might play a more central role in explaining diet-related disease and weight gain
than previous researchers have assumed. Low-income and minority populations remain at
high risk for exposure to these toxins, thus exacerbating their risk of chronic disease.
A review of the problems of industrialized food could go on for many more
pages. What has been made clear, even in this relatively brief discussion, is that the
industrialized food system presents a variety of significant risks to human, animal and
environmental health. While hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity are still salient
issues – as they have been since the times of the advent of agriculture – they are caused
as least as much today by failures of the industrialized food system as they are by the
types of traditional dangers faced by subsistence agriculturalists. Yet, these traditional
dangers are hardly the only ones faced by stakeholders throughout the food system.
Guided by a set of capitalist values that prioritize global economic imperatives in food
production, distribution and consumption, the industrial food system has created a whole
new set of risks related to the health and well-being of individuals, animals, communities
and the environment. As befits the reflexivity of the risk society paradigm (Beck, 1995),
though, these developments have not gone on without significant opposition. Resistant
social movements that attempt to minimize risk, shift cultural values, and alter structures
within the contemporary food system are the topic of the following section.
The Communication Ecologies of Alternative Food Movements
The many problems of the food system have led to an abundance of efforts to
reform and reshape the way food is grown, processed, distributed, and consumed. These
efforts have emerged as a means to reduce hunger and health disparities, bolster local
81
food economies and promote environmental sustainability, as well as to protect the
welfare of workers and of animals. In the United States and elsewhere, this new social
movement activity has often been referred to as the “alternative food movement”. Yet, as
Michael Pollan, journalist and vocal critic of the contemporary industrial food system,
pointed out, it is probably more accurate to describe the emergence of “food movements”,
since these efforts are, “unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial
food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public
health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high” (Pollan, 2010). Indeed, there is
great diversity with respect to the philosophical foundations, motivations, focus areas,
goals, and strategies employed by a number of individuals and organizations, all of whom
could be placed under a larger banner as collectively engaged in one or more of the “food
movements”. In the United States alone, organizations involved in the food movements
have taken on any number of the focal issues outlined above – genetically modified
foods, chronic disease prevention, animal rights, farmworker protection, local food
promotion, the list goes on. The form and function of a particular food movement is
shaped by members' positions within specific geographic and/or national locations, as
well as by their socio-economic status, their occupational orientations, their racial/ethnic
identity, and their political philosophical visions of the past and future.
Consistent with the communication ecology approach of this dissertation, the
networks of relationships that each of these food movement formations construct are a
primary method through which their purposes and activities can be understood. Granting
attention to the inter-organizational, mediated, and interpersonal connections through
which organizations from within these varied movement strains work to achieve their
goals is central to understanding both the why and how of their food movement activities.
82
By delving deep into the historical, contemporary and emerging communicative
connections of specific food movement organizations, it is possible to differentiate the
core values, strategies and visions for change that characterize different groups within
this complex landscape.
Perhaps the most prominent food movement organization in the developing world
is La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) – that group can serve as an illustrative
example, to begin this discussion, of the ways in which networked activities play a
central role in today's food movements. A coalition of grassroots farmers' organizations,
La Via Campesina was founded in 1993 and has developed into a leading voice for
peasant farmers in global agricultural debates. Collectively, their work aims to advance
food sovereignty, what is defined as, “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally
appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their
own food and agriculture systems...It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands,
territories, water, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those who produce
food and not of the corporate sector” (International Planning Committee for Food
Sovereignty, 2007). Far from a singular and cohesive entity, though, the organization
itself is actually made up of approximately 150 local and national organizations in 70
countries and from across all continents. In all, they represent approximately 200 million
farmers: “It is an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent of any
political, economic or other type of affiliation” (La Via Campesina, 2011). As Patel
(2008) described, although bound by a common commitment to the concept of “food
sovereignty”, the organization itself has remained quite diverse. In their work, each
member must confront, “specific conditions, constraints, opposition and arms,” such that,
“It's a mixed bag of movements. Some of its members are landless, some own land and
83
hire the landless; some are small producers, some are medium sized...Even within
countries, there are important differences.” (16).
La Via Campesina, then, is just one important decentralized movement
organization within the broader landscape of (even more decentralized) food movements.
And while the scope of La Via Campesina is significant, it hardly encompasses the full
breadth of organizations and individuals involved in work that might be termed part of
these “alternative food movements”. Taking stock of this array of activities, several
scholars have worked to outline typologies of the types of organizations that are at
present involved in alternative food efforts. It is difficult to imagine that any codification
scheme could definitively categorize the often overlapping activities of a countless
number of food movement actors. While not without its gaps, Holt-Giménez (2011)
provided a useful representation of this work, and his scheme is useful as a basis for the
organization of this discussion. An adaptation of Holt-Giménez's work can be seen in
Table 2, on the following page.
Before embarking on a description of alternative food movements, Holt-Giménez
first outlined an important structure that stands in contrast to those efforts. Since the
advent of industrialization in food, a number of ideas have emerged from within the very
status quo of industrial agriculture, and many of these ideas have been put into action as a
way to (marginally, perhaps) improve the workings of the industrial food system for
producers and consumers. The author referred to those initiatives as part of the “corporate
food regime”, with the dominant actors in the corporate food regime labeled the
neoliberals: “(The corporate food regime) is held firmly in place by the North's major
international finance and development institutions, as well as the major agrifood
corporations, the U.S. Government, and important players in big philanthropy” (320).
84
Table 2: The Corporate Food Regime and Alternative Food Movements
CORPORATE FOOD REGIME FOOD MOVEMENTS
Politics Neoliberal Reformist Progressive Radical
Discourse Food enterprise Food security Food justice Food Sovereignty
Institutions World Bank,
IMFO, WTO, Bill
and Melinda
Gates, etc
FAO, UN
Sustainable
Development,
mainstream fair
trade, Slow food
movement, some
food policy
councils, most food
banks and food aid
programs
Alternative fair
trade and many
Slow Food
chapters, many
organizations in
Community Food
Security
Movement, many
Food Policy
Councils and
youth food justice
movements, many
farmworker and
labor
organizations
Via Campesina,
International
Planning
Committee on Food
Sovereignty, many
food justice and
rights-based
movements
Orientation Corporate Development Empowerment Entitlement
Model Overproduction,
corporate
concentration,
unregulated
markets and
monopolies,
monocultures,
GMOs, mass
global
consumption of
industrial food
Mainstreaming/cert
ification of niche
markets (eg
organic, fair, local,
sustainable),
maintaining
northern
agricultural
subsidies, market-
led land reform
Agroecologically
produced local
food, investment
in underserved
communities, new
business models,
better wages for
ag workers, land
access, regulated
markets and
supply
Dismantle
corporate agrifoods
monopoly power;
parity;
redistributive land
reform; community
rights to water and
seed; revival of
agroecologically
managed peasant
agriculture to
distribute wealth
Approach to
Food Crisis
Increased
Industrial
production,
unregulated
corporate
monopolies, land
grabs, expansion
of GMOs, public-
private
partnerships;
international food
aid
Same as neoliberal
but with increased
medium farmer
production and
some locally
sourced food aid;
more agricultural
aid but tied to
GMOs and 'bio-
fortified/climate
resistant' crops
Right to food,
better safety nets;
sustainably
produced, locally
sourced food;
agroecologically
based agricultural
development
Human right to
food sovereignty;
locally sourced,
sustainably
produced, culturally
appropriate,
democratically
controlled focus on
UN/FAO
negotiatons

* Adapted from Holt-Gimenez (2011). Food Security, Food Justice, or Food Sovereignty. In
Hope Alkon & Agyeman (Eds), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, And Sustainability.

85
This network of macro-level players in transnational finance, agriculture, science and
technology believe that the problems of the food system – with their focus locked
primarily on the issue of global hunger – can be solved through the promotion of mass
global production and consumption of industrial food. Their efforts remain committed to
the idea that a food enterprise approach, one that emphasizes liberalization of global
markets and advanced technological solutions, can minimize the risks of global food
crises.
Following Holt-Giménez, also part of the corporate food regime are the reformists
– groups that see significant problems with the corporate food regime's practices, but
advocate for actions that would improve the food security safety net rather than plans that
would implement wholesale structural changes to the industrial food system. Consisting
of groups that include the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, fair trade
organizations, most food banks, food aid programs, and a variety of humanitarian and
social service organizations, these groups often depend upon the funding support of
major corporations, governments and large philanthropic organizations. Their advocacy
style puts a great deal of emphasis on the power of consumers to promote more equitable
and environmentally sustainable food market practices, as they aim to mainstream and
certify niche markets such as organic, fair, local, and sustainable. Without making
concerted efforts to transform either cultural values or dominant social structures, then,
neither the neoliberals nor the reformists are ultimately committed to advancing
substantive social change in the global food system.
These two strands of the corporate food regime are held in contrast to the “food
movements”, a category that Holt-Giménez also divided into two primary strains. First,
grounded in what the author referred to as a discourse of food justice, a movement of
86
political progressives, mostly in countries of the global North, is composed of a rapidly-
growing network of advocates who encourage agro-ecologically produced local food,
investment in underserved communities, new business models in the food system, and
better wages for agricultural workers, among other issues. Generally based in action at
the local level, these networks consist of groups that include sustainable food producers,
urban gardeners, and community-based food markets, as well as schools and youth
development organizations. Many of these groups come together with other actors in
local government, business, and civil society to participate in collaborative bodies such as
Food Policy Councils, which attempt to reshape local and regional food systems toward
greater health and equity.
Finally, Holt-Giménez (2011) outlined an additional strain involved in the food
movements, what he termed political radicals, those who promote food sovereignty. They
seek to dismantle corporate agrifoods monopoly power, call for redistributive land
reform, community rights to water and seed, and a revival of agroecologically managed
peasant agriculture as a means to equitably distribute wealth. This includes groups like La
Via Campesina and others who build coalitions of agrarian and labor groups, mostly in
the Global South, as a way to advocate at the international level. They seek democratic
participation and control in forums such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations. Taken together, both the progressive and radical approaches are
interested in advancing social change – each call for changes to the values and structures
that characterize the global food system, yet there remains great diversity in terms of the
philosophical and practical aims of these changes.
Indeed, other researchers have focused more specifically on outlining the
divergent approaches of alternative food practice, especially within the United States.
87
Slocum (2007), for instance, essentially provided a more granular look at what Holt-
Giménez combined together into his “progressive” food movement strand. That author
defined alternative food practices as, “those that advocate more ecologically sound and
socially just farming methods, food marketing and distribution, and healthier food
options across the US...The target of these efforts is the conventional food system that
privileges corporate agriculture, commodity subsidies, trans-continental shipping and
foods high in fats, salt and sugars” (522). She divided “Alternative Food Projects” into
four areas, outlined in Table 3, below.
Table 3: Four Types of “Alternative Food Projects”
Type Activities
Support Local Farmers Farmer's markets, community-supported agriculture, local
sourcing by restaurants, buy local campaigns, agricultural
policy change
Food-related
Non-profits
Nutrition education, cooking demonstrations, obesity
prevention
Environmental Advocate for organic, free range, hormone and antibiotic free
meat and open space; oppose concentrated animal feeding
operations; aim to protect heirloom seed stock, native plants
and soil fertility, advocate in-season-eating and the
promotion of groups' food heritage.
Social Justice Producer/worker rights on the one hand, hunger and food
insecurity on the other; some focus on farm workers', global
farmers' and black farmers' rights; use urban gardening to
strengthen neighborhoods; work with youth; augment home
consumption of vegetables and/or generate income for
specific communities.
Adapted from Slocum, R (2010).Whiteness, space and alternative food practice,
Geoforum, 38(3), 520–533.
*Note, non-profit groups can have projects in each of these areas.

For Slocum, alternative food projects include projects that are created to support local
farmers (such as farmer's markets, buy local campaigns and agricultural policy changes to
this effect), food-related non-profits (like those working on nutrition education and
obesity prevention), environmental groups (advocating for environmental sustainability
88
in food production and the promotion of local food heritage), and social justice-oriented
groups (which might focus on producer and worker rights on the one hand, hunger and
food insecurity on the other).
There are still other food movement activities in the United States that remain
slightly outside of a particular category, or perhaps extend across multiple categories.
What do we make, for instance, of the separatist agricultural efforts of the Nation of
Islam, as outlined by McCutcheon (2011)? The Nation's work is reminiscent of the food
sovereignty approach in its attention to racial justice and self-determination, but its lack
of engagement with broader international policy discussions makes its activities distinct
from groups like La Via Campesina. Where do the so-called “foodies” fit in this
landscape? That is, those that make a hobby of seeking out “quality, rarity, locality,
organic, hand-made, creativity, and simplicity” in their food choices, and whose
membership in this unofficial
15
club does not necessarily require any commitment to
social justice or to environmental sustainability
16
(Johnston & Baumann, 2009, 3)? And
what to make of the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama and her “Let's Move!”
campaign? While certain aspects of the nutrition education program's activities are
representative of a progressive alternative food movement trend, its lack of a broader
overall critique of the corporate food system (and its Wal-Mart sponsorship) means it
might have more in common with the “reformists” that depend upon corporate and
government support to make modest changes to the corporate structure.
All of this is to say that there is great contestation about the true meanings and
visions of alternative food practices, and that while these codification schemes are useful
as a way to catalog the wide landscape of food movements and introduce some common

15 And, in some cases, an official club, as in the case of certain “Slow Food” chapters.
16 To be fair, these concerns sometimes are on the mind of those who identify with the “foodie” label, but
it tends not to be the driving force of their actions.
89
vernacular, there is too much overlap and ambiguity to make any definitive statements
about an organization's placement within a particular ideological category. To his credit,
Holt-Giménez himself described the radicals and progressives as “two sides of the same
movement” in that they both “attempt to change food systems locally and globally”
(320). He continued: “The challenge for movement building is to reach beyond the
naturally occurring and tactical relationships, to form strategic alliances across the
progressive and radical trends” (326). While some of the language of these typologies
will be employed in this dissertation project – especially in Chapter 3, as I situate three
empirical case studies of alternative food initiatives within these categories – the
categorization is exercised with the recognition that such terminology is fluid and
necessarily evolves over time.
Sympathetic Critiques of Alternative Food Movements
There has been great scholarly debate around the activities of those food
movements that would fall under Holt-Giménez's “progressive” label or, alternately,
under the banner of Slocum's “alternative food projects”, or, to add yet another term, as
part of the community food security movement. Indeed, over the course of the last several
decades in the United States, many scholars, activists, farmers and consumers have
rallied around the concept of community food security, which has been defined as, “a
situation in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable,
nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community
self-reliance and social justice” (Hamm & Bellows, 2003). These efforts are really at the
heart of most of “alternative food projects” outlined by Slocum (2007), above, as they are
characterized by projects like farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture
arrangements, and nutrition education, among other initiatives.
90
Alternative food projects that promote community food security have been
espoused by many advocates as a key way to promote health and sustainability in the
American food system. It is these types of efforts, as well, that have received a great deal
of publicity in American media and popular culture, especially since the middle of the
first decade of the 21
st
century. Journalists such as Michael Pollan – author of The
Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Rules – and Eric Schlosser – author of Fast Food Nation
– emerged in recent years as public spokespersons in this arena. Together, their work has
taken aim at “big agriculture”, as they have called for new environmental health
regulations in food production, pointed to fast foods and processed foods as the villains in
America's battle against chronic disease, and lobbied for policy changes that would
incentivize the sale and consumption of local and organic fruits and vegetables. Their
writings became particularly popular amongst environmentally-minded, middle-class
whites, but they were able to reach a somewhat broader audience when their collective
work was repackaged and presented in the Academy Award-nominated documentary
Food, Inc. That film outlined some of the major problems of the industrial food system,
and put the onus on consumers to challenge the status quo. The filmmakers implored
viewers to “vote to change” the food system “three times a day”, insisting that, “You can
change the world with every bite” (Kenner, 2009).
Another popular culture boost put the spotlight on the food system when British
TV chef Jamie Oliver launched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on the ABC network in
2010. Oliver made it his personal task to push back the rising tide of obesity and diet-
related disease in a West Virginia town by introducing healthy food to local schools and
providing nutrition education to local families. His show spurred a great deal of discourse
in the broader public and within the alternative food movements about the implications of
91
his approach (Broad, 2012). And, of course, First Lady Michelle Obama's popular “Let's
Move” initiative, also launched in 2010, was founded on the premise that we all could
work to do a better job of integrating fresh fruits and vegetables into our lifestyles as a
way to combat what she described as an epidemic of childhood obesity (see Seiler, 2012).
Efforts such of these have received their fair share of criticism from the political
right in America, as they are often written off as “nanny state” initiatives that attempt to
force people to eat a certain (elitist) way. Yet, in the scholarly domain, alternative food
efforts like the ones trumpeted by public faces Pollan, Schlosser, Oliver and Michelle
Obama have been criticized for an entirely different set of problems. A number of
researchers have argued that many alternative food initiatives – including farmers'
markets and nutrition education programs – have historically worked to
disproportionately benefit economically advantaged and white communities (Allen et al.,
2003). Further, scholars have suggested that these initiatives have consistently been
defined by a normative whiteness and an ethos of “color blindness”. These projects, they
have argued, tend to ignore racial and cultural difference with respect to inequities in the
food system, and are too often initiated and controlled by well-meaning but uninformed
privileged whites. (Guthman, 2011b; Kato, 2013; Slocum, 2007). In the eyes of
sympathetic critics of alternative food, the community food security movement has not
done enough to make sure that residents and activists in low-income communities, along
with people of color, are in control of the conceptualization and management of such
programs.
In addition to critiquing the role of race in alternative food, critics have also
commented that these initiatives have tended to rely too heavily on neoliberal values in
the conceptualization of their programmatic activities. From this perspective, a
92
commitment to notions of entrepreneurial economic development and consumer choice
are at the heart of many of these projects. In taking a critical stance of this state of affairs,
researchers and activists have argued that community food security tends to belie a
number of social justice concerns, including agricultural labor exploitation and the legacy
of racial and economic exploitation, among other issues (Allen, 1999; Allen & Guthman,
2006; Guthman, 2011a, Guthman, 2011b; Slocum, 2007). Guthman (2011a) connected
this concern to the color-blind ethos of alternative food, arguing that as whites continue
to define the rhetoric, spaces, and broader projects of agrifood transformation, this
whiteness connects to a, “tremendous emphasis on market-driven alternatives, which
often take root in the most well-resourced locations” (277). For these authors, community
food security activities have put too much emphasis on communities and individuals to
do the heavy lifting of changing the food system through consumer practices and
entrepreneurial efforts. They see community food security initiatives as reifying
neoliberal practices and downplaying the need for transformative structural change, while
emphasizing the value of entrepreneurial and individual impacts (Allen, 1999; Allen &
Guthman, 2006).
What is needed instead, these critics have argued, is greater pressure on the state
to effect policy changes that will improve social justice for producers and consumers.
This might be done through actions that include promoting safety and wage increases for
agricultural labor, ensuring that toxic chemicals are not present in the food system, and
requiring fresh food access through school and public programs. Ultimately, some of the
biggest criticisms of alternative food movements, coming from the political left, continue
to bang the drum that these efforts' emphasis on market-driven alternatives to the status
93
quo reflect a “fairly delimited conception of the politics of the possible” (Guthman,
2011b, 277).
These types of critiques have made their way around the alternative food
movements for some time, now, and the emergence of the “food justice” frame – enacted
by those that make racial justice a central piece of their food movement mission – has
come about in part a result of this conversation in scholarly and activist circles. Still,
researchers like Guthman (2011b) have not been totally sold, as she argued that food
justice initiatives, while far more race- and class-conscious than the mainstream
alternative food movement, have resorted to the same types of education and access-
based solutions as has the mainstream alternative food movement. Further, Guthman and
others have asserted, food justice in this manner has focused too much attention on
injustices related only to healthy food access and consumption: “Like the local food
movement, the primary endeavor is to shorten the distance and strengthen the connection
between food producers and food buyers as a way to support small-scale, relatively
resource-poor producers and provide healthier food to consumers” (154). With attention
paid at the consumption end, food justice efforts tend to pay less attention to food
production-related injustices perpetrated on farmworkers, including exposure to toxic
chemicals, poor working conditions, and wage and employment disparities.
Some scholars and practitioners, more closely aligned with the “radical” food
movement strain and involved in Latin American food movements, have pushed on a
related point, in that they think scholars should do more to point out the inability of
progressive food system initiatives to encourage significant social change from within a
capitalist framework. Mares and Peña argued that scholars must provide a strong
“analysis of structural violence and its relationship with state power and its practices and
94
technologies of governmentality” (200). Those authors argued that alternative food
movement activism and scholarship should grant greater attention to the knowledge and
cultural practices of indigenous communities with respect to food production and
consumption. Focusing on food sovereignty efforts among Mesoamerican and Latina/o
farmer groups in the United States, they wrote that, in this work, they “focus on the
possibility that autonomous food cultivation practices enable the families and
communities working in these landscapes to create and sustain decommodified
relationships to food” (205).
The Communication Ecology Approach and the Study of Food Movements
Taken together, these authors represent just a sample of those who are
contributing to contemporary literature that characterizes the active practice and theory
related to the varied food movements at work in the United States. The critiques these
authors offered are valuable, as they bring to light some valid and important points.
Notably, they outline that the mainstream discourses around alternative food have indeed
been dominated by mostly white and mostly wealthy consumers and producers. They also
point out that the reliance of alternative food systems upon a number of neoliberal values
deserves the interrogation of both scholars and activist.
Further, the work of Guthman and Allen, in particular, can be seen to provide
strong support for a networked approach to food system research, even though this was
not necessarily the intention of those researchers at the time. Their work pushes
researchers to take stock of multiple levels of analysis within the food system, calling
attention to the dynamic relationships across levels of food production, distribution and
consumption. Specifically, their work has demonstrated that, if one advocates for social
justice in one part of the food system, this does not necessarily mean that one actively
95
advocates for social justice in another part of the food system. So, for instance, a
progressive alternative food organization might work to make fresh fruits and vegetables
more available to low-income residents in an urban setting. At the same time, this
initiative might not pay much attention to the labor conditions of the farmworkers who
cultivated that food. Or, perhaps an organization might focus on bringing a farmer's
market to a low-income community of color. However, without the active engagement of
community members in this entire process, the organization might be acting in a way that
does not build community capacity, nor respond to those issues that local community
members themselves see as most pressing in their neighborhood. Too often, their work
has shown, researchers and activists deal with isolated links within the food system, when
a true understanding of food system activity entails an investigation of networks of
relational links. With this in mind, if one is interested in tracking values like social and
racial justice
17
through multiple domains of the food system – as this dissertation project
does – it becomes incumbent upon researchers to follow networked interactions as a way
to do so. Indeed, it is not sufficient to take into account that an alternative food initiative
increased access to fresh foods, for instance, but one must also ask questions about the
labor process involved in the food production and distribution, as well as the level of
control that low-income and minority communities had in the development of these
alternative food initiatives.
With that said, the primary critiques offered above are also indicative of some of
the shortcomings of contemporary research in this domain, shortcomings that this
dissertation will attempt to address. One major shortcoming is that the thrust of such

17 As discussed in the Introduction, Basok, Ilcan and Noonan (2006) define social justice as “an equitable
distribution of fundamental resources and respect for human dignity and diversity, such that no minority
group’s life interests and struggles are undermined and that forms of political interaction enable all groups
to voice their concerns for change” (267).
96
critiques tends toward an overdetermined account of the “politics of possibility” within
alternative food initiatives that take root in an age of neoliberalism (as the authors cited
above term our historical political economic period). They generally have argued that
social justice cannot be achieved from within this system, because its logics are
exploitative, racist, and ultimately suffocating of culture and possibility. By contrast, this
dissertation project offers an alternative narrative of possibility in the context of advanced
liberal governmentality. It argues that social justice is indeed possible from within this
system, but that its nature is inherently hybrid, complicated, and at times contradictory,
largely on account of the networked nature of contemporary movements for social
change. Writing on urban agriculture, McClintock (2013) similarly suggested that, “Not
only is urban agriculture both radical and neoliberal, I argue that it has to be both. It
would not arise as a viable social movement without elements of both, insofar as
contradictory processes of capitalism both create opportunities for urban agriculture and
impose obstacles to its expansion” (11).
The work of Mares and Peña (2011), for instance, serves as an example of
scholarship on food movements that suffers from the types of theoretical shortcomings
outlined above. Those authors detailed a case study of the South Central Farmers of Los
Angeles, a group of most Latino immigrants whose urban farm was destroyed after a
lengthy property rights battle, but who went on afterward to maintain an eighty acre farm
in a nearby county. The authors celebrated these workers as “effectively pursuing food
sovereignty for the member families and their urban communities” (211). Generally
absent or glossed over in this account, however, was the substantial economic and legal
support that the South Central Farmers received from a variety of citizens from different
demographic and social backgrounds, from non-profit agencies and foundations who
97
continually bolstered their efforts and brought them media attention, and even, at times,
from city government itself. The South Central Farmers got a boost from actress Darryl
Hannah, who brought attention to their cause, from the Annenberg Foundation, who paid
for the relocation of trees, and from a local Toyota dealer, who installed an irrigation
system when the South Central Farmers began working on a new swath of more than 60
acres in Riverside County – land that was gifted from an anonymous donor (see Broad,
2013). This is not to take away from what the South Central Farmers accomplished, but it
is a much more empirically grounded picture of how food movements that place a
premium on social justice tend to operate. In most cases, such groups are ultimately not
separate and autonomous, but rather embedded in a network of communicative
relationships, networks that are made possible, in part, by the driving logics of advanced
liberalism itself.
Conclusion
The task of this dissertation project is to apply the communication ecology
approach as a way to conduct grounded scholarship that interrogates how and why social
movements around food operate at the community level. It seems that the best way to
proceed with this analysis, then, is to focus on a specific problem within the food system,
and from there to analyze the organizational communication ecology of groups who are
all involved in tackling that problem. By digging into the primary values that motivate
action on the part of such groups, and by tracking how those values are shaped, supported
and/or contradicted through their networks of organizational interactions, much can be
discovered. In one sense, an analysis of networked interactions can distinguish certain
groups from others in a landscape in which many groups attempt to solve similar issues.
Another important contribution of this work, as compared with a history of quantitative
98
social movement network analysis, is that the qualitative-oriented communication
ecology approach allows for a more textured, thick description of how these networked
dynamics differ from group to group. Further, the communication ecology approach can
also bring to the surface lingering tensions and instances of ambivalence as they exist
within the network of a specific organization. And, finally, this networked
communication ecology approach can be useful as a way to chart a model for the
advancement of a specific social movement mission, a mission that is necessarily situated
within the context of a globalized, relational, advanced liberal world. The following
chapter demonstrates this process in analytical action.

99
CHAPTER 3
DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO COMMUNITY-BASED FOOD INJUSTICE

Amidst the many problems of the industrialized food system, issues of risks
related to “food injustice” have emerged as particularly salient in many low-income and
ethnic minority communities across the United States. The concept of food injustice, and
of a movement for food justice, expands upon “environmental justice” movements that
developed in the 1980s and early 1990s. Environmental justice was a concerted reaction
to the limits of traditional environmentalism, which was accused of being disconnected
from the environmental hazards that people faced in everyday places where residents
“live, work, and play.” These traditional, often conservation-oriented environmental
organizations were seen as particularly unresponsive to the extreme environmental
hazards faced by communities of color and low-income citizens (Bullard, 1993; Lester,
Allen, & Hill, 2001). Food justice efforts have built upon this frame, and have aimed to
extend environmental justice to include concerns over places where residents, “live,
work, play, and eat” (Gottlieb, 2009). Food justice has been characterized as, “ensuring
that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown and produced,
transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly” (Gottlieb & Joshi,
2010, 6).
This food justice frame can be, and has been, taken up in a number of different
ways by activists and policymakers concerned about instances of food injustice across
levels of production, distribution and consumption. At the level of the low-income urban
community, risks associated with food availability and food consumption have proved to
be most salient. Notably, activists, public health officials, scientists and policymakers
100
have increasingly interrogated the relationship between the quality of the local food
environment and a number of chronic diseases (Larson, Story & Nelson, 2009). These
players have worked both independently and collaboratively to establish community-
based food justice as a social problem worthy of public attention. Subsequently, these
groups have conceptualized and implemented a number of potential solutions to promote
food justice for residents of at-risk communities.
Food Injustice in South Los Angeles
The following sections apply the organizational communication ecology approach
by delving into the networks of three different organizations, all of which have set out to
tackle the problem of food injustice in urban America. Specifically, each group has set
out to do work in South Los Angeles, a primarily low-income community with an ethnic
composition of over 60% Latino residents and over 30% African American residents
(Ong et al., 2008). The community of South Los Angeles is an area that has long suffered
from a poor reputation in media and public discourse, and it has endured significant
police repression, poorly functioning public institutions, economic discrimination and
disinvestment, a lack of public green spaces, high rates of gang-related violence, and
levels of unemployment and poverty that far exceed the averages across the city, state,
and nation (Broad, Gonzalez & Ball-Rokeach, Under Review; Matei & Ball-Rokeach,
2005; Sanchez & Ito, 2011) . Further, several studies have documented that South LA
residents lack access to high quality, affordable fresh foods, while the area is rife with
unhealthy fast food restaurants and corner markets (Lewis et al., 2005; Sloane et al.,
2003). What Shaffer (2002) referred to as a persistent “grocery gap” emerged gradually
101
over time – it was the product of long-term disinvestment, racially-motivated redlining
18
,
a retreat of business after the Watts civil unrest of 1965 and a lack of re-investment after
the civil unrest of 1992. Residents of the South LA community also suffer
disproportionately from chronic, diet-related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and
stroke (Park, Watson & Galloway-Gilliam, 2008). At the same time, South LA has a long
history of multi-racial community organizing and activism on a number of social,
economic and environmental justice issues (Broad et al., Under Review; Pulido, 1996).
In the pages that follow, the communication ecologies of three different
organizations will be detailed. On the surface, the organizations seem to be engaged in
very similar activities, all taking part in youth-oriented nutrition education and urban
agricultural projects in South Los Angeles. A basic comparison of these groups might
suggest that each appears to be responding to similar conceptualizations of food injustice
in South LA, and that each is in the process of developing similar food and agriculture-
related strategies to remedy that injustice. More in-depth attention to the broader
organizational communication ecologies of the groups, however, necessarily leads to
different conclusions. By employing an historical and in-depth investigation into their
networks of partnerships and communicative connections, it becomes clear that each
group brings with it vastly different histories, value priorities, collaborative partnerships,
visions for change and strategies for action. With that said, while the three organizational
networks are in many ways strikingly divergent, they also still overlap on account of their
shared geographic and topical focus areas. Indeed, operating within this shared multi-
organizational field has also shaped the evolution of the organizations’ activities, as well

18
Redlining is a term used to refer to the practice of systematically denying, or charging higher rates for,
access to a variety of services, generally within communities that are characterized by high concentrations
of ethnic minority populations. Services that have been associated with redlining include supermarkets,
health care, banking and insurance, among others.
102
as proven to be a source of significant tension. The communication ecology approach
offers an opportunity to explore the form and function of such interactions.
The chapter begins with a discussion of the Teaching Gardens, a project of the
American Heart Association. That program has received significant funding to plant
gardens in elementary schools in the South Los Angeles area, as well as elsewhere in the
United States, with the aim of combating chronic disease and obesity in “high-risk”
communities. It follows with a discussion of Groundswell, a Los Angeles-based high
school nutrition education program that uses cooking skills and urban agriculture to “get
kids to eat their veggies”. It concludes with an initial analysis of the network of
Neighborhood United, an organization committed to “building a sustainable food system
from the ground up in South Central LA.”
19

The comparative work to follow remains guided by the central research questions
of this dissertation – notably, to what extent can social and racial justice be realized
through community-based food movement efforts? In this analytical exercise, it is useful
to again draw from DeFilipis, Fisher and Shragge's (2010) set of propositions, in which
the authors outlined how organizations might effectively motivate substantive social
change through community-level action. Again, those propositions suggested that
community-based organizations must:
 Realize both the potential and limits of community-based action.
 Conceptualize local work as the starting point, but not as the ultimate goal.
 Include conflict and struggles over power relations as part of a strategic and
tactical toolbox.
 Find connections and unite community-based efforts with broader social
movement activity.
 Build an analysis of political economy and understand how it relates to
structures of inequality.

19
Pseudonyms are maintained for those involved in Groundswell and Neighborhood United, but not for the
Teaching Gardens program of the American Heart Association. Given the public nature of the latter
organization, a determination was made that anonymity was not required.
103
 Have an understanding of historical contexts and choose to make history by
challenging their received world.

Through an analysis of these three groups, all engaged in food work in South LA,
I demonstrate that of the three, it is only Neighborhood United whose communication
ecology meets these requirements for community-based organizing that could encourage
a broader social change toward social justice. As will be outlined, Neighborhood United's
geographically rooted and historically contextualized actions demonstrate a commitment
to racial and social justice through food movement activities. Their work is situated at the
local level, but also extends into regional and international domains. While the other
groups analyzed in this section meet some of these criteria, key gaps remain. These
differences lead to quite divergent storytelling practices in terms of defining food justice
issues and advancing strategies for change. Throughout the chapter, the reader might be
inclined to look ahead to the respective network diagrams, situated throughout, as well as
a comprehensive comparative chart, located near the conclusion, as a way to complement
the description. By charting the theoretical significance of Neighborhood United in the
domain of food justice, the empirical work presented in this chapter helps to lay the
foundation for the deeper dive that is the extended networked ethnography of
Neighborhood United in the remaining chapters.
Teaching Gardens and the American Heart Association Come to South LA
It is statistical evidence of health disparities that spurred the Teaching Garden
program of the American Heart Association to invest its time and efforts in South Los
Angeles. The Teaching Garden was founded by Kelly Meyer, who began a campaign on
TakePart.com – the interactive publishing and digital arm of Participant Media, the
company that produced films such as An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc., and The Help –
104
before the project was quickly adopted by the American Heart Association. Concerned
about the poor quality of school lunches and rising statistics related to childhood obesity,
Meyer wrote that she and some of her friends decided to take action on these issues:
“Inspired by Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign and Jamie Oliver's Food
Revolution, we came together to create an initiative to bring real, live garden laboratories
to schools across the country” (Meyer, 2010). The project focused on building gardens in
elementary schools, starting in Southern California, with plans to expand across the
nation. Figure 1, on the following page, provides a conceptual diagram of the
communication ecology of the project.
20

The Teaching Garden project was hardly the first effort, undertaken by Meyer and
her colleagues, to focus on environmental health advocacy. A mother of two, Meyer was
president of the Parent Teacher Association at Point Dume Marine Science School in her
home of Malibu, California, where she was part of an effort to install solar power to
support the science lab. She also collaborated with builder and developer Tom Schey to
complete the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum
building in California in 2008. Meant to serve as a way to educate the public on green-
building and to raise money for environmental causes, the project was bolstered by
donations and other support from dozens of corporate sponsors, including groups like
General Electric and Kohler, who lent building materials and appliances to the effort
(Project7Ten, n.d).

20
The conceptual network diagrams included in this chapter are not meant to be entirely exhaustive of each
and every connection within an organization's communication ecology, nor do the diagrams aim to catalog
each connection that might exist between different nodes within an organization's network. Instead, the
diagrams provide insight into the general thrust of the organizations' multi-level and temporal
communication connections that are drawn from in order to advance their goals.

Figure 1: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of the Teaching Gardens
105

106

The green building project was a continuation of Meyer's history of work with
various large-scale environmental and philanthropic efforts and organizations. She served
as a trustee with the National Resources Defense Council, as a board member with Heal
the Bay in Southern California, and worked as the co-founder of the Women's Cancer
Research Fund. That latter effort emerged as a program of the Entertainment Industry
Foundation – perhaps the largest Hollywood-based charitable organization. In that role,
Meyer worked with her co-founders, as well as with honorary chairs that included
celebrities such as Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson and Steven Spielberg – to raise over $40
million for women's cancer research. For these efforts, the founders of the organization
were on the receiving end of a number of public accolades, and they were given Glamour
Magazine's “Women of the Year Award” in 2004 (Grades of Green, n.d). Such high-level
Hollywood connections and major media buzz, of course, are hardly the norm in health
and environmental activism. The fact that Kelly is married to Ron Meyer, the COO of
Universal/NBC and the longest tenured studio chief in all of Hollywood, was
undoubtedly a factor in forging these high profile alliances (Deadline Hollywood Team,
2012).
Kelly Meyer's Teaching Garden program was initially launched in early 2010 at
the Point Dume Marine Science School (PDMSS) in Malibu – situated in one of the
wealthiest communities in Southern California, it is not an area known for experiencing
widespread food injustice. But the program quickly expanded to other schools, including
Kelso Elementary School in Inglewood, California, and Will Rogers Elementary School
in Santa Monica, California, both of which were designated as Title I Schools that

107

received federal funding on account of their economically disadvantaged student bodies
(Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, 2010). Meyer cited Principal Chi Kim of
PDMSS as an integral partner in developing the program, and also brought some star
power to bolster the effort from the start. Women's volleyball player and fitness guru
Gabrielle Reece joined the effort as an “ambassador”, as did Cat Cora of television's Iron
Chef, actor Tobey Maguire (who is married to Jennifer Meyer, daughter of Kelly's
husband Ron), and long-time professional basketball player Derrick Fisher. Michael
O'Gorman of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition and Peggy Curry of the non-profit garden
and nutrition education program GrowingGreat also came on board to help launch the
early Teaching Garden projects. As Meyer articulated, working together with parents,
teachers and volunteers, the Teaching Garden was conceptualized as a “place where
community partners come together to teach. A place where students, through the simple
process of putting a seed into the earth, nurturing it and ultimately harvesting the food,
will learn about efforts and results, delayed gratification, and cause and effect. The
ultimate goal: hands-on exploration of the life sciences that lead to positive choices for
health and fitness” (Meyer, 2010).
It did not take long for the Teaching Garden program to catch the eye of the
American Heart Association (AHA), the nation's oldest and largest voluntary health
organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. By September of 2010, the
AHA announced it would adopt the Teaching Garden program. Their plan was to roll out
the revamped effort in 2011, complete with associated nutrition education curriculum, for
a dozen or so elementary schools, in cities that cut across the nation, including New

108

York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Scottsdale, AZ; Houston, TX; Fairfax, VA and more
(PRNewswire, 2010). While the Teaching Garden program maintained a national focus, a
substantial grant from the California Endowment in the early part of 2011, combined with
Kelly Meyer's history living and working in Southern California, meant that the
American Heart Association focused a good deal of its efforts within the Los Angeles
area.
21

With more than a total of 100 Teaching Gardens planted across the nation by mid-
2012, Los Angeles County had more than any other metro community in the United
States, with several of those gardens located in South Los Angeles. In an interview, an
American Heart Association Senior Vice President described the reason for these sites'
placement:
It's all based on health statistics. It's based on the propensity for
cardiovascular disease, the rates of mortality and premature mortality.
Unfortunately those coincide with low income areas, communities of color
and communities that tend to have a lower education rate. But our
gardening factor truly is where more people are dying disproportionately
from cardiovascular disease. And those do tend to be, in Los Angeles
anyway, areas that are predominantly African American and Latino. So it's
become a health equity issue for us.

21
The California Endowment, it should be noted, is a private, statewide health foundation that was formed
in 1996, and it was established when Blue Cross of California created its for-profit subsidiary, WellPoint
Health Networks. In recent years, the organization shifted its focus toward a “place-based” health
promotion framework. This was exemplified in the launch of their Health Happens Here campaign and the
10-year, $1 billion Building Healthy Communities project. For Building Healthy Communities, the
California Endowment selected 14 broadly-defined neighborhoods across the state of California to serve as
community-level incubators in which significant grant funding would be allocated to a variety of
organizations doing work related to five core areas – building resident power, enhancing community
collaborations, fostering youth leadership, shaping public opinion, and leveraging strategic partnerships
(Iton, n.d.). To date, Teaching Gardens have been installed in three of those selected neighborhoods in
Southern California – Boyle Heights, Central Long Beach, and South Los Angeles.

109

At a basic level, two garden coordinators were charged with overseeing the Los
Angeles-area sites, visiting each two to four times per month. Schools in which Teaching
Gardens were installed signed an agreement to maintain the garden and incorporate the
curriculum provided by the American Heart Association into the school culture – this
could be done through after-school and in-school programming in a manner that fit the
unique needs and capabilities of each school. In South Los Angeles, AHA worked
directly with individual elementary schools, as well as with some of the education
management groups – including the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools and LA's
Promise – that ran multiple schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. With
an eye toward evaluation, the AHA conducted a pre-test and (planned to conduct) a post-
test survey of schools with respect to nutrition knowledge and behaviors. They also
hoped to include some health screening data, on pathologies that included obesity and
diabetes, from select schools in the future.
22

Ultimately, the theory of change that undergirded the Teaching Gardens was quite
simple, and a conceptual model of this theory is displayed in Figure 2, on the following
page.
23
As Ralph Sacco, MD, American Heart Association President put it: “Our hope is
that by teaching kids where vegetables come from and the benefits of healthy eating we
can inspire change and reverse the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country...
Besides changing their own eating habits, children may also motivate other family
members to modify their diets and improve cardiovascular health” (PRNewswire, 2010).

22
At the time of this writing, it is unclear whether any of this biometric data had been collected.
23
While based on an understanding of the organization and its activities, all diagrams are the work of this
author.

110

Figure 2: Theory of Change Model for the Teaching Gardens

The California Endowment was the primary funding agency that supported the Teaching
Garden initiative, but it was joined by nearly three dozen other supporters from other
foundations, the corporate world, the entertainment industry and the health care sector;
many of these groups had connections to other American Heart Association projects. The
list of organizations that supported the project included Bank of America, Capital One,
Chevron, FedEx, MetLife, NBA Cares, NBC/Universal, The Dole Nutrition Institute, and
the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. With this type of strong institutional and financial
backing in place, combined with the resources of the American Heart Association and the
longstanding connections of founder Kelly Meyer, it was no surprise that the Teaching
Gardens program was able to quickly expand, as well as develop a visible media
presence, in the few short years it had been in existence.
The website for the AHA's Teaching Gardens (heart.org/teachinggarden) features
descriptions of the programming, links to its school garden curriculum, and information

111

about ways to get involved as well as donate. The site is also rife with rich media,
including photos and professionally produced videos that highlight Teaching Garden
planting days, as they showcase parents, teachers, students, Teaching Garden staff,
representatives from organizational partners, and several celebrity friends (including
members of the cast of CBS Television's Hawaii Five-O). Taken together, the message of
the videos is clear – gardens are a central tool to help young, mostly African American
and Latino, and mostly low-income children make healthier food choices within an
environment that is rife with unhealthy ones. “Feeding our kids, in our lunchroom, every
day, high fat, high sugar, high sodium food, and then cutting the funding for physical
education – those two things together, equals one third of our children suffering from
childhood obesity,” Kelly Meyer remarked in a tight-shot on a promotional video. Her
remarks were immediately juxtaposed with a young African American boy and girl, who,
when asked of their favorite food to eat for lunch, both emphatically replied that they
liked hot dogs. The remainder of the video showed Meyer, along with celebrity chef Cat
Cora, Gabrielle Reese, actor Tobey Maguire and a set of other Teaching Garden staff and
partners – most, if not all, of whom were white and clearly not from the neighborhoods in
which the schools were located – giving lessons on healthy food, gardening and cooking
to smiling groups of children.
The internal media production of the AHA was matched at least as much by
external press. For instance, with support from The California Endowment and Parenting
magazine, Meyer set up a demonstration Teaching Garden during the film premiere of
Universal Pictures' The Lorax, which was based on the classic Dr. Seuss book in which

112

the title character “speaks for the trees” in the face of environmental destruction. The
garden was transferred to a South Los Angeles charter elementary school after the
premiere, while the event was covered through a variety of media platforms (Meyer,
2012). Meyer also appeared on NBC's Today to talk about the Teaching Gardens
program, and in 2011, she was named a Huffington Post “Game Changer” for her work.
In her acceptance speech, she articulated her vision:
I didn't want to come into schools and preach to kids about eating peas and
carrots, because most of them don't even have access to healthy food, nor
do their parents. I wanted to come into schools and meet them on their
turf, and bring a little box of green that hopefully was a metaphor for the
amount of time and energy and love and nutrition and water it takes, not
just to grow a healthy tomato plant, but to grow a healthy child and a
healthy community. (Game Changers, 2011)

In discussing the Teaching Garden program with an AHA Vice President, she
insisted that the project was part of a broader strategy of systematic built environment
change. She noted that AHA had also been an advocate for increased access to healthy
foods in South LA and elsewhere, and had supported a South LA City Council resolution
that banned the placement of new fast food restaurants in the area. She also pointed to a
new AHA cooking education program that was under development and could serve as a
complement to the Teaching Gardens. She articulated that the AHA worked on 3-year
funding cycles with the schools, and their hope was that after the current cycle, they
would be able to turn the gardens over to the schools themselves, such that, “they will be
able to use them in the spirit that they were planted, and that they will not only not die,
but they will thrive. And that healthy eating and healthy diet, physical activity will really
be embedded into the school.” She noted, as well, that the AHA's overall prevention

113

goals were looking toward 20% cardiovascular improvement in those areas with the
worst health disparities by the year 2020, and that she hoped the Teaching Gardens
would be a part of the strategy to reach those goals by that time. With that said, she also
suggested that continued involvement with the Teaching Gardens in South LA after this
cycle would be dependent upon funding allocations, and therefore the future of the
program's presence, at least from the AHA's perspective, seemed to depend upon the
extent to which the programs would be evaluated as effective in advancing their goals.
What, then, does this overview of the activities and relationships of the Teaching
Garden program tell us? What do their networks of partnerships and relations say about
the why and how of their food movement activity? First, with respect to what motivates
their work, while the Teaching Garden program focused its efforts on instances of food
injustice in South LA and elsewhere, at no point did they ever articulate that what they
were doing was in any way part of a food justice movement. Instead, the organizational
efforts were steeped in a fairly traditional public health perspective, one that was
grounded in statistical understandings of biopolitical risk. As the AHA Vice President
asserted, the Teaching Gardens came to South LA because that is where the highest rates
of cardiovascular disease happen to be, and it became an equity issue as a result of that
fact. The American Heart Assocation's affiliation with mainstream public health and
medicine means that their approach would be largely an individualized biomedical one,
such that critiques of systemic social, racial and economic injustice were not central to
guiding their philosophy.

114

Teaching Garden founder Kelly Meyer's background with mainstream
environmental organizations such as the NRDC further supports this claim, and it likely
made the AHA an ideologically complementary partner. It was the approach of this very
type of environmental group, remember, that was the impetus for the start of the
environmental justice movement to begin with. Indeed, the critique of mainstream
environmentalism was that it did not put issues of racial and economic discrimination at
the forefront as a primary cause of inequality when it came to environmental health and
community-well being in low-income and minority communities. It seems the same can
be said for the approach of this Teaching Garden initiative, which took race and class into
account, but did not call for systemic change as a way to build greater equity and justice
into the system. Despite the California Endowment and AHA's insistence that they were
committed to systemic “built environment change”, in this instance, their theory of
change remained attached to the idea that if individual children were to interact with soil,
fruits and vegetables from an early age, they would necessarily change their eating habits,
and from there, perhaps influence other members of their family.
The absence of food justice within the network of the Teaching Garden program
can also be seen in the type of leadership that had been featured in their efforts. Food
justice initiatives consciously promote the idea that the development and long-term
functioning of programs that attempt to reshape urban food environments must be led by
people who live in that very community (Hope Alkon & Agyeman, 2011). In the case of
the Teaching Garden project, it is clear that this was not the case, but rather, the
knowledge and skills related to gardening, cooking and physical activity were provided

115

by outside entities for these “vulnerable communities”. In terms of community
involvement, it seems that the majority of participation came in the way of episodic
“planting days” in which some community group might help build garden plots or plant
some vegetables. Individual schools were identified as the primary movers in terms of
integrating the Teaching Gardens into their broader culture, but with the three-year grant
cycle looming, there was little assurance that the project would be sustained unless a
particularly active teacher or administrator made it his or her task to maintain the
programming.
24

It is clear, as well, that the organization did little to get to know about the already
active landscape of food justice-related activities happening in and around South Los
Angeles. The extent of their connections to other gardening programs, it seems, were
very basic information exchanges with other school gardens, as well as some interaction
with national organizations like Tree People and Seeds of Change. While these groups
conducted some of their work in South Los Angeles, that geographic area hardly
represented their primary focus, and they would hardly be described as food justice
groups themselves. Further, in the Teaching Gardens' promotional literature and in press
on the topic, the organization presented itself as a pioneer in pushing forward the idea of
garden- and agriculture-based education. As was touched on in earlier sections of this
work, such efforts have a long and storied history, not just in Los Angeles but around the
country and around the world.

24
Of note, as well, is that despite significant funding and a potentially strong voice, the Teaching Gardens
program was not engaged in any substantive efforts to improve the broader policies of the Los Angeles
Unified School District with respect to healthy food.

116

Thinking back to the propositions outlined by DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge
(2010), what is most glaringly absent from the Teaching Gardens program is any
reflexive analysis of how systemic power imbalances contribute to food-related health
disparities. Despite placing Teaching Gardens in local areas across the country, the
program did little to conceptualize how these disparate local actions might be united as an
oppositional force, a counterbalance to inequities in the contemporary political and
economic structures of the food system. Further, lacking substantive connections to social
change-oriented groups in the South LA area, the organization did very little to tailor
their efforts to the specific geographic, ethnic, and historical contexts in which their work
was situated. Ultimately, their individualized focus on health promotion, as well as their
lack of critique with respect to the structures and institutions of the food system, meant
that their actions could hardly be termed social change at all. With these gaps in place, it
was unlikely that the Teaching Gardens had charted a course through which they could
ever make any real history of their own.
Yet, despite these criticisms, at the time of this writing, the Teaching Gardens
seemed to be gaining some momentum. The impressive amount of money pulled in to
support their efforts in just a few years – from major foundations, corporate sponsors and
health institutions – allowed them to build gardens in Los Angeles and across the nation
at a rapid pace. The media coverage that they received – on major television networks,
through online media outlets such as the Huffington Post (where Meyer was a
contributor), and through partnerships with major Hollywood film productions – raised
the profile of the Teaching Gardens in ways that most garden-based education projects

117

could never dream. The network of relationships that Meyer was able to bring to the table
in this instance – on account of her long career in major philanthropy, health and
environmental activism, as well as her strong connections to major Hollywood stars and
her affiliation with the American Heart Association – clearly played a major role in this
process. The fairly benign philosophical stance taken by the Teaching Garden program
also likely helped this along. Who would not want to support kids learning where fresh
fruits and vegetables come from, and why these foods are important for health? The
initiative has therefore proved a safe bet to bolster corporate social responsibility (CSR)
campaigns and to associate certain brands – from Chevron, to the National Basketball
Association (NBA), to Scotts Miracle-Gro – with a commitment to improving the health
and well-being of disadvantaged American children. Ultimately, their strategy maps right
onto Banet-Weiser's (2012) discussion of corporate brand culture's commitment to
political action: “CSR campaigns tend to attach to politics that are legible in brand
vocabulary, are palatable to an audience of consumer citizens, and are uncontested as
socially important issues (who is going to argue with the need to fight poverty or child
abuse?). In other words, CSR politics are safe politics” (148).
Thinking back to Holt-Giménez's food system typology, the Teaching Gardens
straddled a line somewhere between the reformist strain within the corporate food
regime, on one hand, and the alternative food movement, on the other. With its lack of
attention to racial issues or community self-determination, however, it is clear the project
fell short of embodying the food justice approach. Ultimately, the example of their South
LA projects demonstrated that the organization lacked a strong connection to the

118

community in which it worked – its history, its indigenous leadership, its values and
concerns. The project did little to get to know the landscape of South LA and of the many
organizations that had been involved in a variety of social justice campaigns for decades,
of which food justice was just one of several important and interlocking efforts. Instead,
with significant funding and high-powered connections in media, they were able to come
in from the outside and dictate the type of garden-based strategy that they thought would
reduce the cardiovascular-related risk of children and residents in the South LA area and
beyond.
Groundswell Gets Kids to Eat Their Veggies
Groundswell positions itself as standing on the front lines in the battles against
obesity and other diet-related diseases, including diabetes and high blood pressure. At the
same time, they set themselves up in opposition to a history of nutrition education that
they believe has been ineffectual, inefficient and, in many ways, rigged by a corrupt food
industry and its friends in government. The small non-profit organization began operating
in South Los Angeles during 2008, in schools and neighborhoods where healthy food
access is low and fruit and vegetable consumption, especially among youth, is not
optimal. From the start, the organization's focus was clear – their goal was to work with
youth to build demand for healthy food: “Most nutrition education doesn't actually get
people to eat their veggies – we do. We do that first,” Lauren, the co-founder and
Executive Director of Groundswell said at a public presentation. “Nothing else will
matter, you can grow all the gardens you want, you can drop gardens all over South LA,
if people don't eat the foods in them, they're pointless.”

119

At the time of my fieldwork, Groundswell worked out of a Victorian-style
bungalow in South Los Angeles, just down the street from the high school where they
recruited, trained, educated and collaborated with local youth to build that demand for
healthy food. Much of these efforts involved cultivating hands-on food preparation and
cooking skills, as Groundswell's high school-age participants started to see how they
could turn “nasty veggies” into some of their favorite meals. Groundswell also engaged
its participating “youth leaders” in discussions about what the organizers saw as major
components and problems within the food system – focusing on things like de-
localization and petrochemical use in food production; the nutritional superiority of
whole foods as opposed to processed foods; and the ways in which we could all allocate
our food dollars to support healthy, local and organic products.
After some time, the organization began to focus more directly on the supply side
of food as well, as they leveraged several partnerships and grant funding to begin to
develop multiple local food sites through the construction of gardens at South LA High
School, at local residences, as well as in the backyard of a local corner store food market.
In addition, Groundswell staff and youth participants went on field trips to local organic
farmers in the area, and also participated in regional meetings of groups such as the
Youth Food Justice Network, a consortium that brings together urban youth interested in
food justice issues and will be elaborated upon in Chapter 6. All in all, Groundswell
pointed to experiential education of youth leaders, the creation of entrepreneurial
opportunities around food, and the forging of connections with like-minded groups as
their primary methods for action. They were committed to the idea that these methods

120

could lead to changes in both healthy food supply and demand in an urban area like
South LA, and that block by block, these small changes could eventually create the type
of momentum needed to right some of the many wrongs of an oppressive status quo in
the contemporary food system.
A deeper look into the networked relationships and activities of the two co-
founders of Groundswell reveals a good deal about the approach that the organization
developed over time. Figure 3, on the following page, provides a conceptual diagram of
the communication ecology of the group. Their early foundations and initial activities
were connected largely to the work of co-founder Jessica, who first moved to Los
Angeles to attend college in the mid-1990s. Still living in Los Angeles in the early 2000s,
Jessica enrolled in a Masters in Public Health program, where she began to explore
community-based and youth-led approaches to health promotion. At this time, she began
to work with Neighborhood United (the organization to be detailed in full in subsequent
sections) as an intern on a South LA “Community Food Assessment”. She played a key
role in the organization's process of documenting the lack of quality food options that
existed in the neighborhood, as well as in soliciting participation and responses from
neighborhood residents with respect to the types of changes they would like to see. Her
involvement led to a staff position with Neighborhood United, but it was ultimately short-
lived, largely on account of differences with respect to potential career advancement at
the organization.
25

25
The implications of this parting of ways had future reverberations, and will be discussed in greater detail
in subsequent sections.

Figure 3: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of Groundswell

121

122

After completing her Masters program and moving on from Neighborhood
United, Jessica continued working on issues related to health promotion, youth and food
systems. She worked as a health and wellness consultant at a South Los Angeles
elementary school, and she also managed and developed a food and fitness-based
program at a South LA high school. The high school-based program was funded by a Los
Angeles-area children’s hospital, and it initially began with a focus on mostly
individualized strategies for improving healthy eating and physical activity among
students. Under Jessica's leadership, however, the mission of the group expanded to
include more of a focus on the environmental determinants of health among urban youth.
Students began to actively advocate for better food options at their school, as well as
across city and state levels. Somewhat hamstrung by the constraints of the program's
funding – in particular by the fact that she was unable to apply for funding independently
– Jessica began to think of new ways to expand. She was particularly interested in finding
ways to turn the youth development aspect of food-based programming into a job training
and fundraising vehicle; a mutual friend recommended she get in touch with Lauren, who
was working in San Francisco and was thinking along similar lines.
Lauren was born and raised in Ohio, then attended college in Connecticut before
working in marketing for major food companies in New York City. Dissatisfied, her
career bounced around a bit until she found herself working as a personal chef for a
family in New Haven, Connecticut. Reading John Wargo's Our Children's Toxic Legacy,
which outlined the dangers of pesticide contamination in the food supply, combined with
her experience cooking for upper-class children who had no idea where their food was
coming from, a new vision for Lauren's life and work was shaped: “I need to get people
reconnected to their carrots.” She ended up moving to San Francisco, earned a certificate

123

in holistic nutrition education, and worked with several different Bay Area organizations
that focused on programs that promoted the growing, selling, purchasing, cooking and
eating of healthy, local, organic foods.
After their introduction, Lauren was impressed by Jessica's style of youth-led
nutrition education and advocacy, and Jessica was struck by Lauren's energy and ability
to get students engaged in hands-on cooking exercises. Lauren began making fairly
regular trips down to Los Angeles to lead cooking classes with Jessica's youth
participants, and together they began to develop a plan to separate the Groundswell
program from her school-based, hospital-funded health promotion program, whose
funding was set to expire at the end of the year. Jessica consulted a friend who worked at
the California Endowment for advice, and he recommended that they get in touch with a
non-profit incubator in downtown LA. Groundswell was accepted by this group and
granted fiscal sponsorship in the late summer of 2008, and Jessica used the final months
of her funding cycle to get set for the next stage of the organization.
Around this time, Jessica met a school administrator, Janice, through a
permaculture design course.
26
Recently relocated as the Title I coordinator at another
South LA school, Janice had applied and received a grant to implement an environmental
education and job training program through the State Department of Education. As it
turned out, Jessica had actually been involved in writing portions of that very curriculum
that Janice would be asked to implement. Janice, however, was having a hard time
getting her programming off of the ground, and Jessica, likewise, was looking to make a
move from the school in which her programming had been located. The time seemed

26
Permaculture is an approach to ecological design that attempts to mimic natural ecosystems as a way to
sustainably support human settlements.

124

right for a more formal partnership, so in the fall of 2009, Groundswell officially opened
up shop at South LA High School.
Over the course of the next year, Groundswell began to implement their nutrition
programming, mostly working as an after-school club that taught food system education
and cooking skills. Those who progressed through the program – Groundswell's “youth
leaders” – were also counted on to run food tastings for other students during lunchtime,
as well as to participate in some off-site catering jobs and peer-education programs.
During this time, Jessica and Lauren were working to expand their reach and improve
their connections with other community-based organizations and leaders in the area. This
was particularly important considering the fact that they were two white females working
in a predominantly African American and Latino community in which neither of them
lived. Indeed, advisers of Groundswell pushed them to do more to build bridges with
others in the area, to better understand some of the historical dynamics of the community,
and to tap into the already existing assets of students and their families, including their
ethnic and cultural histories and food traditions. With this in mind, Groundswell
organized a few sessions of a South LA Green Working Group, which was an attempt to
bring together like-minded folks interested in food and environmental issues in the area.
Lauren looked back on the experience:
The audacity. Who are these white girls calling a roundtable in South
LA?...Jessica knew a fair amount of people. But here I'm the naïve one,
coming in saying, “Hey, I'm meeting all these people, we're having the
same ideas, having awesome conversations, why isn't everybody talking?”
That's where I was coming from. All these awesome people. In some
ways it's benefited me to come into South LA as an outsider, because I
wasn't beat down already by this knowledge that, “Oh, people aren't
working together,” or, “Oh, there's competition,” or, “Oh there's
skepticism,” or, “Oh there's territorialism.” I came in going, “There's
people here who aren't eating their veggies, and I'm here to work.” That
was how I came in.

125

Much of the previous action of Groundswell had been dictated by Jessica's
previous history and connections in the area – their board, for instance, was composed
primarily of folks that Jessica knew through permaculture and gardening activities, or
through other community-based non-profit work in Los Angeles. However, Lauren's role
and philosophical approach were soon to take a more central role. Jessica decided to
leave Los Angeles and follow her fiance out of state, and would remain on board only in
an advisory capacity. Lauren, meanwhile, had been commuting for weeks at a time
between San Francisco and Los Angeles, but decided to make the switch permanent, and
went onto make Groundswell her central project in life.
27

The activities of the organization began to more closely resemble the personality
and philosophy of Lauren – extremely energetic, excited to make new connections, and
open to new ideas and experiences. With Jessica's absence leaving a major gap in terms
of running programming, over the course of the next few years, Lauren brought in several
different friends and colleagues in a part-time capacity to play different types of roles –
assisting in development, in gardening, in education, and elsewhere. Many of the
partnerships forged came specifically as a result of a shared interest in food, including, as
mentioned, a number of key connections that came from a specific permaculture design
community.
At the same time, Lauren began to get to know the South LA community better,
and she took advice and suggestions from key connectors such as Janice, the Title I
coordinator, regarding who were the worthwhile people and organizations that she should

27
It was just around this time, as well, that I became directly involved with Groundswell. Jessica and
Lauren were one of several community groups that were looking for graduate research partners, and
pitched their ideas at a graduate seminar taught at my university. They were made aware of the opportunity
due to connections between one of the professors of the course and their fiscal sponsor. Along with a
colleague, we conducted a formative program evaluation of Groundswell, helped develop some
measurement devices, and piloted a student-led video-based communication curriculum. Some of the
interviews and research conducted at this time have helped to inform this section of the dissertation.

126

get to know. As Lauren began to show up at a variety of different events, and began to
tell the story of Groundswell to other folks doing community development in South Los
Angeles, her network began to expand beyond food. She connected to an organization
whose focus was on peace and anti-violence programming, another that worked to build a
youth work force in the area, a group whose programming was devoted to basic literacy
and critical thinking, and still another that focused on media production and media
literacy among youth. In terms of how they selected partners, for Groundswell it
remained mostly about geographic location and a commitment to youth development:
“That's how Groundswell works,” Lauren remarked. “People are interested in what we're
doing? Let's go try a trial program, and see what gets traction. And some things get
traction.”
Groundswell's interest was in effecting change in the food system at a micro- and
meso-level. “I'm really interested in community,” Lauren argued. “Obviously, you can
have a community in an entire city. But I'm really interested in seeing what can happen
on a block, or two blocks, or three blocks, if you begin to have people (who) have a
shared conversation that affects their community.” The theory of change at the root of
Groundswell's work, modeled on the following page, suggests that youth leaders would
lead the change in their hyper-local communities, and that this would have ripple effects
across the broader food system, at some point down the road.

127

Figure 4: Theory of Change Model for Groundswell

Cognizant of her status as a socio-demographic outsider in the community,
Lauren worked specifically to build relationships with community leaders with
longstanding tenure in the South LA area, and to build strategic alliances through grants
and programmatic activities. These strategic alliances were central to the biggest piece of
funding received by Groundswell to date, a more than $200,000 grant from the
Community Food Project Competitive Grants Program of the United States Department
of Agriculture (with additional matching funds coming from other Groundswell
supporters). While the organization had previously gotten by on smaller private donations
and minor foundation grants, this new grant funding was set up to allow the organization
to further develop the supply side of their organizational activities through various garden
projects at sites in the South LA area, as well as to continue building demand for healthy
food through their cooking and nutrition education programming.
As part of this grant, Groundswell worked to build a small garden in the back of a
South LA corner market, an establishment that was already in the process of receiving a

128

“corner market conversation” (revamping the store inside and out) through an initiative of
the (now defunct) Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (a program that
received funding from organizations like the California Endowment and the County of
Los Angeles Public Health Department, among others). Working with some of the
Groundswell Youth Leaders, Jessica also enlisted the assistance of a South LA native,
well-known food justice activist, and Groundswell ally to make the project happen. The
partnership was demonstrative of the type of effort that Lauren put into cultivating
connections with community institutions in the area, as well as with people of color who
lived and worked in South Los Angeles long before Lauren was even interested in food
justice issues. Lauren commented on the impact that her race had on her ability to get
work done in South LA – she contrasted her approach with the activities of larger, better-
resourced agencies that have entered the foray of South LA food politics around the same
time:
I don't think it (race) has really impacted me. All my supporters – I'm
grateful for some people who state it and name it, fortunate for people who
do this work, we can talk about this, and they say, “Don't buy into that,
you're doing the work.” But Jessica did leave – it's not an option for me to
leave. Not because I'm a white girl – I'm somebody who's really good at
getting in with kids and getting them to eat their veggies, and I'm going to
focus on that. I totally acknowledge there are legitimate reasons people
could look at me and question what I'm up to, because I' m an outside
entity and I'm a white girl. But when American Heart Association comes
marching in...I heard of (another organization), because they have a great
grantwriter, and they get five million dollars and they do nothing of
appreciable change. I didn't come here with five million dollars, I came
here with nothing. And now I'm getting money, but I feel ok, because
we're building something in proportion to what we're doing, getting money
in proportion to what we can do already.

Ultimately, Lauren continued to position herself as a catalyst in the South LA
area, a neighborhood that she said was big enough that it could always use more people
who were willing to put in the hard work and energy to make change happen. Aware of

129

the racial and socio-demographic implications of her involvement working on food
justice issues there, she maintained that her goal was to not be at the helm of
Groundswell forever, but that long-term community participation and management was
key. “How do we make this movement not just relevant to people, but how do we engage
them so that they become the new voices and faces of the movement. People of and from
these communities? How do we get them?...How do we find the heroes of and from the
neighborhood to be the bearers of the message?”
The work of Groundswell was grounded in public health and youth-leadership
approaches to community-level health promotion, in a critical appraisal of the problems
of the industrialized food system, and in a commitment to practical and entrepreneurial
skill development in food production and cooking. Returning again to DeFilippis, Fisher
and Shragge (2010), the organization brought with it a necessary analysis of power
imbalances that should be central to community-based efforts that want to effect broader
social change. However, in their theory of change and in the majority of their actions, the
organization still lacked a fully conceptualized understanding of both the benefits and
limits of community-based action. They had not yet fleshed out how changing the supply
and demand of food “block-by-block” in South LA might actually lead to a
transformation of the food system that extended beyond the local level. Further, the
founders' outsider status in the South LA community remained an obstacle to the
organization's full understanding of the historical and geographic context in which their
work took place. It forced the organization to adopt a stance in which they did not fully
assert themselves and were mostly averse to conflict with other community-based actors.
Aware of the skepticism with which she might be received, Groundswell's founder
consciously cultivated partnerships to strengthen the organization's position in the

130

community, but struggled to find as solid a footing as would be ideal for community-
based action to take place.
In many ways, Groundswell is representative of the types of community food
security organizations that have proliferated through alternative food movements in
recent years. Food justice is a term that Groundswell staff, volunteers, and youth leaders
sometimes use to describe their mission and activities, as Lauren articulated: “To me, the
nicer way to put what is the food injustice is that an awful lot of people are making an
awful lot of money, selling something that's not really food. Marketing it, selling it,
shipping it. To put it more aggressively, it's an oppressive system, it's a controlling
system, it’s a system that's so ingrained now.” Food justice, then, from Lauren and
Groundswell's perspective, was something that became manifest in different ways in
different places, and called for different solutions based on different contexts, but was
ultimately a universal struggle against corruption in the corporate food industry. And it
was this universality, in part, that allowed for connections to be made across racial and
socio-demographic difference, as Groundswell worked to improve the local food
environment in urban Los Angeles. A question might be raised, however, as to whether
issues of systematic inequity related to race, class and ethnicity were not central enough
in the organization's work, such that the food justice label might not be appropriate. As
Lauren described: “I work in South LA, in that I think, I deal with young kids, young city
kids, who might be resistant to being asked to change their minds. But it's my parents in
Ohio who have more money than I do, who don't believe, or don't want to care to believe,
that the Kraft slices and salad dressings with MSG are no good. It's everybody, it really is
everybody.”

131

For all of their efforts over the course of the several years, Groundswell had
started to see some returns. They began to host community events and monthly potlucks
at their South LA headquarters, where youth participants and their families were able to
come together with Groundswell staff, colleagues and friends to share food and
conversation in a common space. Hardly privy to the type of major mainstream media
coverage of the Teaching Gardens, Groundswell relied on its Facebook page and blog to
get the word out, and their stories had made some ripples through the Internet on various
food blogs and community news and event pages. The organization hoped to continue to
build their network of youth, friends and partners through the leadership and
communication capacities of the youth leaders themselves, combined with the continued
energy of Lauren, her staff, and Groundswell's allies in the community. Their recently
received USDA grant would be a big part of this process – funded with stable and
substantial resources for the first time, it would be a test to see the extent to which
Groundswell's approach could begin to advance food justice, block by block in South
LA, and serve as a building block for broader food system transformation. As Lauren
would attest, however, in terms of advancing community-based food justice in South LA,
Groundswell was neither the only nor the first organization to make this a top
organizational priority.
Neighborhood United Builds From the Ground Up in South Central LA
Neighborhood United (NU) is a multicultural, non-profit community-based
organization that is centered in South Los Angeles, and it is their network of resource-
based and communicative interactions that will stand as the primary focus of the
remainder of this dissertation project. This section, then, will not attempt to catalog the
full breadth of this communication ecology, as there will be ample space to do so in

132

subsequent chapters. It will, however, outline some of the key tenets of NU's approach,
and will begin to chart the ways in which the organization advances its social change
goals through a complex web of inter-organizational, interpersonal and mediated
channels. Importantly, the concluding sections of the chapter will draw direct
comparisons between the three organizations detailed thus far. Figure 5, on the following
page, provides a conceptual diagram of NU’s organizational communication ecology.
Ultimately, NU's style of approaching food injustice at the community level is
grounded in an historical commitment to battling racial and economic exploitation in the
community of South Los Angeles, and in solidarity with other oppressed people of color
across the United States and around the globe. The organization is quick to differentiate
itself from many of the other groups that attempt to battle food injustice in South LA,
especially those groups that have entered this arena in the last several years. In the eyes
of NU, food is a medium for a broader process of social and economic transformation in
the community, and it is the organization's history within that community, and its
dedication to community-based management and empowerment, that makes them a
unique voice for the promotion of food justice in the area.
Neighborhood United was founded in 1977 as the 501(c)3 non-profit arm of the
Southern California Black Panther Party. In the early 1980s, as the Black Panther Party
dissolved and its Southern California-based chapters closed, organizers decided to keep
the non-profit arm in place, with its headquarters located in South Central LA. Led by
Jaja, the former coordinator of the Southern California Black Panther Party and a long-
time community activist and civil rights attorney, NU continued to operate a number of
community service initiatives. This included gang intervention programs, prison litigation
efforts, as well as work to prevent police abuse and brutality.

Figure 5: Conceptual model of the Organizational Communication Ecology of Neighborhood United

133
134

Much of their value through this time came through the organization's ability to provide
fiscal sponsorship and tax-exempt services to other community-based organizations, and
these efforts allowed other organizations to carry out medical screening programs,
computer literacy training, and other community activities.
Into the 1990s, NU continued these operations, and worked in conjunction with
the New Panther Vanguard Movement (NPVM), also led by Jaja. That group formed
after the LA civil unrest in 1992, or the “LA Riots”, and placed “Peace, Justice and
Reparations” as the top point on their ten-point platform. NPVM operated several
educational and justice-oriented programs, developed and distributed a locally-produced
newspaper, led campaigns and hosted events on topics that included reparations and joint
organizing with Chicano and other indigenous rights organizations. Into the early 2000s,
the programs of the NPVM began to recede, while NU emerged as the more active legacy
organization with its roots in the Southern California Black Panther Party.
The current Executive Director of NU, Maya, is of Indian descent, and spent her
formative years living in her hometown of Southall, England. In 1980s Southall, she
worked as an organizer and focused on the rights of West Indians of African descent who
were systematically discriminated against in the United Kingdom. Maya and her fellow
organizers in Britain were inspired by the work of the Black Panthers in the United
States, and by the writings of leaders that included Bobby Seal and Huey Newton. In the
tradition of the type of community news production that had long been central to the
activities of the Black Panthers, Maya and her colleagues eventually went on to create a
community-based newspaper they called Panther. The success of Panther and of other
efforts initiated by Maya and her fellow community activists led to a variety of exchanges
between Maya's organizing community in the United Kingdom and the Black Panthers in
135

the United States. In the 1990s, Maya went on an exchange trip to Los Angeles. There,
she met Jaja, and the two not only became close collaborators, but also were married, and
Maya decided to stay in South Los Angeles to work with NU and the NPVM. Several
years later, they divorced – Jaja, after serving as Executive Director for nearly thirty
years, as well as operating NU out of his law office for much of that time, eventually left
his post as an active board member toward the end of the first decade of the 2000s. While
Maya had played a central role in directing the course of NU's activities and programs for
some time, her interests in food systems came to the fore as she took over as Executive
Director, and NU began to make economic, youth and community development through
food justice its primary programmatic focus.
Drawing from the ethos and rhetoric of their Black Panther roots, NU's motto is,
“Serving the people, body and soul,” and their stated mission is to, “foster the creation of
communities actively working to address the inequalities and systemic barriers that make
sustainable communities and self-reliant life-styles unattainable.” Their programs have
always aimed to improve the health and educational prospects of residents, particularly
youth residents, in the community. As mentioned, through the 1980s, 1990s and into the
2000s, this was accomplished largely through projects that focused on gang intervention,
black-brown relations, and community economic development in South Los Angeles. The
more recent focus on food emerged when Maya began to take stock of the poor quality of
the food environment that surrounded her son, Kenneth (now in his mid-20s and a staff
member with NU), as they lived in South Los Angeles and he attended the public school
system. As Maya described:
For me it was literally, Kenneth started going to the schools here, I moved
to South Central...and you know, you couldn't get decent food. I mean it
was that simple. Kenneth started complaining about it. So I, literally for
136

the first time in my life, started to grow my own garden. You know, like
not just for fun, but for food...I visited his school a few times; I met other
parents who were also dissatisfied, started doing some kind of, you know,
just having conversations with the Principal, with the cafeteria staff. And I
ended up meeting people from a local college who, you know, were
looking for parents doing this, interested in this kind of work.

Maya began to work with other concerned citizens, parents, administrators, and
engaged scholars from a local college to form a coalition that was instrumental in passing
the “Soda Ban” across the Los Angeles Unified School District, among other initiatives.
Further, Neighborhood United's 2004 community food assessment (discussed above and
elaborated in greater detail in Chapter 4) was a foundational moment in their entrance
into the world of non-profit food justice organizing. Bringing together partners from the
previously active school food coalition, the New Panther Vanguard Movement, as well as
other community-based social justice organizations, community volunteers and interns,
they set out to document the quality (or lack thereof) of the local food environment and
began to develop recommendations for change. The coalition wrote in their report:
It is our vision that everyone in this community has an understanding of
the impact of food choices on their health and their environment, in
addition to an increased access to a variety of culturally appropriate, high
quality and affordable food choices. It is our mission to engage and
involve community members, especially youth, in promoting and
sustaining food and justice issues and projects.

With this Community Food Assessment completed, NU established itself as a
“fundable project” in the eyes of grant-making agencies, and soon they were able to
develop a set of programs that depended primarily on grant support. Around this time,
NU began to partner with community institutions and schools to install gardens and
“mini-urban farms”. Through their Growing Healthy program, they began to integrate
education on food and nutrition into elementary school curriculum. In their From the
Ground Up initiative, they began to train (and pay a stipend to) youth interns of middle
137

and high school age to participate across all aspects of the organization's activities. The
Garden Gateway program, a partnership with a local university public health program,
provided a platform for gardening and cooking classes with local residents. With their
Village Market Place project, they began to sell fresh organic produce – grown at their
mini-urban farms and by other local farmers – at community farm stands, through a
produce bag subscription and at a newly established storefront. Notably, it was this
“social enterprise” that was often seen as the future engine of the organization, what
could allow the group to achieve self-sufficiency en route to building a model for
community-based social change. NU also engaged in a number of national and
international learning exchanges and partnerships that extended beyond the local
community, as a way to build solidarity with other historically oppressed people of color
and those working on food and environmental justice issues. This included participation
in the Youth Food Justice network and collaborations with food justice organizations
from Mexico and South Africa, among other areas. A model of their theory of change can
be seen in Figure 6, on the following page.
For the last several years, Maya was joined by three core, full-time staff members
– Kenneth, Maya's son, is in his mid-twenties, was born in London of mixed Indian and
Trinidadian descent, and grew up in South LA; Charles, an African American in his mid-
twenties from New Jersey, lived in South Central since moving to LA in the mid-2000s;
and Gretchen, a white female in her thirties brought with her a history of working on food
and agricultural issues across the country and in Southern California.

138

Figure 6: Theory of Change Model for Neighborhood United

This long-tenured full-time staff worked in concert with a number of other part-
time and full-time staffers who took on various roles in the organization over the years.
Staff members came from a diverse set of professional, geographic and ethnic
backgrounds. NU went out of its way, in particular, to draw from young African
American and Latino workers who lived in the local South LA community, some of
whom came through the NU internship or apprenticeship programs before being hired,
and others who had been involved in South LA-based social justice organizing in the
past. The organization also relied on the assistance of dozens of volunteers and friends –
some, but not all, of whom resided within the local community – as well as youth interns
and apprentices, as they attempted to collectively accomplish a variety of tasks on a
limited budget. The working environment was always close-knit and time-intensive,
physically and mentally demanding, and had a strong educational element to it, as senior
staff members continually engaged junior staff members in reflexive discussions about
the ways in which their work could be improved to better achieve the organization's
overall mission.
139

NU always relied on a number of partnerships with other organizations to propel
their operations forward, drawing from its long history of social and racial justice
organizing in South LA to engage in collaborative projects with other local community-
based organizations. Working with organizations that focused specifically on topics that
included affordable housing, sustainable transport, health promotion, community
economic development and beyond, NU explored ways to develop initiatives that use
food as a vehicle to blend their shared interests in the promotion of community-based
social justice. NU also maintained strong connections to several public schools in the
South LA area, with city-run institutions and public spaces, and, increasingly in recent
years, with students and faculty from universities in the Los Angeles area. In addition, the
organization remained open to collaboration with partners that were not “of the
community”. Indeed, NU developed a number of projects that brought local, regional and
national-level organizations – including several that worked specifically on food and
environmental issues – into the heart of South Central LA, a place into which they would
otherwise have likely found little reason to venture. For NU, such collaborations were not
merely a way to bring outside resources into their community of practice, but also a way
to educate individuals and groups from elsewhere about the values, desires and powers of
those who live and work in low-income communities of color in Los Angeles and other
urban centers across the country.
Throughout this ongoing process, funding for NU came in part from the sales of
their produce and through donations, a number that increased significantly in recent
years. Still, most of their operating costs were largely supported through a mix of public
and private grants. Their list of grant funders over time included small foundations such
as the Aepoch Fund, corporate partners that included Bank of America, private
140

institutions like the University of Southern California and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation,
as well as public funders such as the California Department of Public Health and local
city council members. In addition, several major federal grants supported growth in
recent years, including significant funding from the United States Department of
Agriculture's Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program, as well as from the
United States Department of Health and Human Service's Community Economic
Development Program.
Ultimately, NU asserted that systematic racial discrimination and economic
exploitation were primarily responsible for the inequitable social, economic and public
health-related conditions that South LA residents experienced. At the same time, they
were insistent that South Los Angeles' residents, institutions, and local community-based
organizations had the knowledge, skills and spirit to reverse this long-term outlook. They
saw their role as facilitating a movement for community-level social, environmental and
food justice that could transform South LA into an environmentally and economically
sustainable and self-reliant community. They also saw themselves as engaged in a
broader movement, one that extended beyond South LA, and they believed that they were
on the forefront of providing a framework for how community-based social change can
take root in the 21
st
century.
An important question to focus on is, of course, what is it about the organizational
communication ecology of NU that differentiates it from other efforts that address food
injustice in South Los Angeles? In the eyes of NU, the answer is quite simple – the
organization's constellation of communication and resource-based connections
demonstrated that their work was authentically grounded in the history and everyday life
of the community in which their programs were situated. Fundamentally, NU's
141

communication ecology was illustrative of the organization's commitment to the
empowerment of low-income communities of color that had long been discriminated
against and actively oppressed. Food, therefore, was seen as an avenue for change, an
important one that had significant effects on individual, community and environmental
health. Yet, for all of food's importance, NU's efforts to achieve food justice were
conceptualized as part of a much bigger struggle for social, racial, economic, and
environmental justice, struggles that had a deep history, and struggles that must be
overcome by community members themselves. It was this commitment to race-conscious
and community-based empowerment through food that likely placed NU somewhere
between food justice and food sovereignty on Holt-Giménez's typology of food
movements. As Maya, NU's Executive Director, articulated:
Our interest isn't in maintaining the system as it is, and just feeding
people, just making sure people are getting enough food for a meal, or
whatever, right. Our interests are, as they have always been in all my
personal organizing and in the history of NU, they've always been about
really making real shifts in people's outlook, in how they see the world
and how they see their own ability to shift the world. And so really for us
it's that food is just another tool and another means of doing that, and a
very important tool and means, because ultimately we all need to eat.

Returning once more to the framework of DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge (2010),
NU had the foundation of a community-based organization that might parlay local
organizing into broader social justice action. The organization located its work at the
level of the local community, and drew from its Panther roots to historicize its efforts as
part of a long-term community initiative for change. At the same time, the organization
recognized that the struggle for food justice in which they were engaged was emblematic
of countless other local, regional, national and global efforts to combat systematic
inequity and oppression. Members of NU saw their mission in South LA to not only
142

transform the local food system through community economic and agricultural
development, but to provide a model for other groups of historically oppressed
communities to do the same. The organization recognized, as well, that such challenges
to the dominant system required not only a generative approach, grounded in community-
level action, but also the maintenance of a critical and conflict-oriented stance when they
felt their interests are under threat.
Indeed, at various times, NU perceived its interests to be under threat by both the
Teaching Gardens and Groundswell, and their reaction further distinguishes their
approach from that of the two previous case studies. Soon after the American Heart
Association's Teaching Gardens began to make their way into South Los Angeles, NU
was contacted by a non-profit management corporation in charge of a local middle school
in which NU had installed and operated gardens for several years. With the entrance of
the Teaching Gardens and their associated funding, NU was told that the school had
decided to remove the gardens that had long been under NU's care. Hardly averse to
standing up for their rights within the community, NU demanded this plan be aborted,
and prepared a letter with signatures from dozens of community supporters to that effect.
Their gardens were spared, and their involvement in the school programming was
maintained, for the time being at least.
Around the same time, NU was made aware of the fact that Groundswell had been
granted significant funds from the USDA's Community Food Projects Competitive
Grants Program, the same funding source that had given NU a grant just a year before.
Since the departure of Groundswell's Jessica from NU years before, NU staff members
had long felt that Groundswell was largely building off of their hard work and successes,
mimicking their programming but lacking a true connection to the grassroots on account
143

of their outsider status. Concerned that Groundswell's expansion would cut into NU's
own production and sales plans, NU staff made their protestations known to the USDA,
who they felt should have done more to understand the implications of their grants, which
they saw as undermining their ongoing activities in South LA.
28
Groundswell’s project
moved forward, but NU had certainly made their voice heard.
In each of these instances, NU insisted that it was not opposed to geographic,
racial and economic “outsiders” showing an interest in and bringing resources to South
LA. With that said, their stance was clear – those organizations that lacked an historical
authenticity were required to show NU greater deference and respect, on account of NU's
longer tenure in the community, as well as their connections to the grassroots. Lacking
such an effort, NU showed that they would not be afraid to demonstrate their opposition.
Subsequent explorations of NU's organizational communication ecology will interrogate
the utility and validity of this central organizational claim. What, exactly, does grassroots
“community-based authenticity” look like in the contemporary moment?
The interaction and conflict between NU and the other organizations also speaks
to the interdependent relationship between the groups in this multi-organizational field.
Focused on food injustice in South LA, they found themselves inhabiting similar spaces,
engaged in partnerships with some of the same institutions, seeking funding from some of
the same foundations and agencies, and attempting to gain attention from some of the
same media outlets. Each of their organizational communication ecologies was situated
within a broader communication environment in which they shared a number of potential

28
As a friend and colleague to both Groundswell and Neighborhood United over the years, my position in
this conflict has been a challenge to navigate. In this instance, in particular, I had provided some
consultation to Groundswell as they prepared their initial USDA grant application. At the time, I was not
fully aware of the historical and potential future conflicts between the organizations, and were I to go back
in time, I would have likely handled things differently. Eventually, I was able to come to an understanding
with both organizations about my intentions and goals as an engaged scholar.
144

– and actual – connections. Their respective histories, missions and value systems helped
shape the ways in which the communication ecologies of the organizations were
ultimately deployed to achieve their goals. With that said, the presence of groups like
Groundswell and AHA in the food justice world also required NU to adapt and evolve as
an organization if it hoped to build sustainable model for change in South LA moving
forward.
Conclusion
This chapter provided an examination of the organizational communication
ecologies of the Teaching Gardens of the American Heart Association, Groundswell, and
Neighborhood United. It demonstrated that an understanding of the organizations'
networks of communicative relationships and partnerships allowed for an evaluation of
the organizations' ability to advance food justice, not only at the level of the local
community, but rippling into other areas beyond a specific geography. A clear finding of
this work is that Neighborhood United's practices differed significantly from the other
two – the organization's communication ecology demonstrated a stronger grounding in
the history and ethnic identity of South Los Angeles, while its image of social change
connected to broader visions that extended beyond local action. Based on their
communication ecologies, each organization told very different stories about the types of
problems faced by local residents, the roots of those problems, and the avenues for
change. Table 4, on the following page, provides a summary framework for comparing
the three groups across several important categories that have been discussed in this
chapter.

Table 4: Summary of Comparisons Across Three Alternative Food Initiatives' Organizational Communication Ecologies

Organization Style of Food
Movement
Organizing
Stated
Inspirations
Primary
Support
Critique of
Food System's
Political and
Economic
Structures
Connection to
Local
Community
and Its
History
Connection to
Broader
Agenda for
Social Change
Place of Race-
Conscious
Social Justice
as Guiding
Force for
Activities
Teaching
Gardens
Reformist/
Alternative
Food Initiative
Michelle
Obama's “Let's
Move”/
Jamie Oliver's
“Food
Revolution”
American
Heart
Association/
Corporate
Sponsors/
California
Endowment

Weak

Weak

Weak

Weak
Groundswell Community
Food Security/
Food Justice
John Wargo's
Our Children's
Toxic Legacy/
Experience in
Cooking and
Nutrition
Education
Public Grants/
Small
Foundation
Grants/
Private
Donations

Strong

Initially Weak/
Moved Toward
Moderate

Moderate

Moderate
Neighborhood
United
Food Justice/
Food
Sovereignty
Black Panther
Party/
Personal
Experiences in
South LA
Public Grants/
Foundation
Grants/
Donations/
Social
Enterprise
Funds

Strong

Strong

Strong

Strong
145

146

Fundamentally, the differences that emerge between the groups are emblematic of
a divergence in the value priorities that these organizations used to guide their activities.
Milton Rokeach and his colleagues outlined how values – of nations, organizations, and
individuals – are best conceived as part of a hierarchically ranked system of value
priorities. This is because, as Rokeach and Ball-Rokeach (1989) described, “A
hierarchical conception directs our attention to the idea that although the number of
values that individuals and societies possess is relatively limited, values are capable of
being weighed and arranged against one another to lead to a very large number of
permutations and combinations of value hierarchies.”
Looking across the three organizations, it is clear that Neighborhood United
prioritized a commitment to a historically situated notion of race-conscious social justice.
This could be seen in the organization's style of food movement organizing, in its stated
inspiration, in its connection to the local community, and in its broader agenda for social
change. The organization saw food injustice in South LA as arising largely as a result of
long-term racial exploitation, an exploitation committed against people of color in similar
ways across a variety of geographic contexts over a number of generations.
Neighborhood United aimed to build a model in South Los Angeles for how these
historic wrongs might be remedied, with their strategy for doing so focused on food
justice activities. For Groundswell, race and social justice were present in the
organization's work – these themes were part of the organization's discourse of food
injustice, but never a driving force in its overall critique of the industrial food system, nor
central to the organization's programmatic development. For the Teaching Gardens, race
and social justice was at best an afterthought, and when racial issues and broader

147

inequality were made visible in their activities, the topics tended to be made manifest
only through a discourse in which privileged whites were providing resources and
education to underprivileged children and residents of color.
A key question remains, however – how does this value-based commitment
actually manifest in the communication ecology of Neighborhood United, and in what
ways does it advance or constrain their mission? In the context of community-based food
justice efforts, those that bring together so many different stakeholders from strikingly
different arenas of social and political life, is an idealized form of pure and simple
community-based authenticity really possible, or even preferable? DeFilippis, Fisher and
Shragge (2010) have suggested that, “community efforts can play a critical role in
challenging contemporary neoliberalism, but it is essential not to romanticize the power
and potential of local efforts” (12). This remainder of this work will work to explore that
very tension. Indeed, it will proceed on the basis that, if one is interested in advancing
social change toward race-conscious social justice in contemporary urban America,
understanding the nature of these complicated networked relationships – those that
radiate in both directions from within and out of the local community – is a key place to
start.

148

CHAPTER 4
FROM THE BLACK PANTHERS TO THE USDA

It was a busy Saturday morning in April for the staff, volunteers and youth interns
of Neighborhood United. Out on the playground of South LA Elementary School, over
100 college student volunteers stood in small groups, waiting for some direction as to
what they would be doing during their university-organized day of service. On the
interior of the school's campus, five high-school aged youth interns sat in a trailer along
with NU staff, ready for their first day of training and education with the organization.
For the college volunteers, a brief orientation and explanation of the history and mission
of NU was in order before they were sent out to canvass the neighborhood with flyers to
publicize an upcoming event. The interns would be in line for a more in-depth
conversation and discussion, as they were expected to soon be able to serve as
representatives of the organization, with a broad knowledge of NU's organizational
values, activities and goals.
At the center of these parallel but distinct orientations were two key points. First,
NU staff asserted that the community of South Los Angeles was one that had experienced
a history of significant race and class-based discrimination and disinvestment, with a
legacy that could be seen in the area's lack of healthy food options, among other
indicators. This reality was confirmed through the Community Food Assessment that the
organization had conducted back in 2004, as well as by ongoing work conducted by NU
and other researchers and activists. Next, staff members suggested that there was an
equally important history of people in the neighborhood who actively worked against
these historical inequalities. Indeed, they pointed out that NU was created as the non-

149

profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party, and that their work today
carried on the Party's legacy of “serving the people, body and soul”.
Sitting with the group of interns, Maya, Neighborhood United's Executive
Director, asked the youth if they had ever heard of the Black Panther Party. One young
woman replied that she knew they “did some things in the community”, while another
remarked that he had seen some movies in which they were depicted. “You barely know
about them,” Maya explained, “but at one point there were 5,000 full-time organizers
working for the Black Panther Party. That's a pretty big deal, and it's been sort of washed
away from the history books. When you do hear about them, it's usually about guns or
violence. But the Party was about much more than that.”
The emphasis given to the foundational role of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in
these introductions is demonstrative of the key influence that the historical organization's
ideology and practices played in shaping Neighborhood United. The BPP, and in
particular the Southern California chapter of the BPP, represented a key element of NU's
organizational communication ecology, serving as an historical backbone for NU's
organizational identity.
29
Yet, while the BPP remained a central force in guiding the
philosophy and strategic action of NU, the Party's influence did not tell the entire story.
Working as a non-profit entity within the contemporary advanced liberal landscape, the
nature of NU's practices were shaped not only by these BPP roots, but also by a complex
set of other community-level and macro-structural forces. Indeed, NU's activities were
constructed through constant conversations with the local residents who were served by

29 As a refresher, I have defined the communication ecology as the multi-level and temporal concept that
describes the network of communication resource relations constructed by a social movement organization
in pursuit of a social movement goal. Through this communication ecology, the group derives its
organizational identity, builds partnerships with other social movement organizations, and connects to the
community in which it operates.

150

the organization's programs, by the public and private funding agencies whose resources
helped NU build its model for encouraging food justice, by public health and urban
planning researchers whose work informed NU's practice, and by a broader media and
cultural environment in which issues of alternative food initiatives had recently gained
salience.
These elements of NU's organizational communication ecology are the focus of
this chapter. With NU's guiding mission as a focal point, I illustrate how an organization's
communication ecology develops and changes over time, and demonstrate how such a
process of evolution brings with it a complicated and sometimes contradictory set of
interacting influences. The guiding questions of the chapter ask: how does an
organization, with its roots in the Black Panther Party, today go about operating as a
community-based non-profit food justice organization, one that receives funds from a
variety of public, private and individual sources? What does this tell us about the process
of advancing social justice through food movement efforts in the contemporary moment?
Drawing from a review of relevant literature, as well as from primary source
document analysis, participant observation and interviewing, the chapter examines the
foundations and evolution of Neighborhood United's organizational philosophy. It begins
with an outline of the Black Panther Party in general, then describes the establishment of
Neighborhood United from within the activities of the Southern California chapter. The
chapter then discusses how NU came to focus specifically on food issues as its central
organizing tool. In so doing, the work concentrates on the 2004 “Community Food
Assessment” conducted by NU that set the stage for their involvement in food justice
issues in South LA. The chapter concludes with a discussion of NU's strategy for

151

constructing partnerships and acquiring major grants to support their food justice
activities. It analyzes the extent to which the influence of the Panther Party has persisted,
evolved and changed throughout this ongoing process. The analysis shows that when
committed social justice organizations like NU push toward their social change goals –
all while working from within an advanced liberal non-profit landscape – they must
engage in a clear process of setting priorities and constructing boundaries as a way to
keep their social justice mission at the forefront of their efforts. Embodying one's long-
held community-based organizational ideals, while also incorporating the insights and
demands of external influences, is a process fraught with tension and complication,
requiring conscious and deliberate action on the part of social movement actors.
The Black Panther Party: All Power to the People
The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally called the Black Panther Party for Self
Defense, was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Oakland, California in
October of 1966. In the midst of the significant racial turmoil of the 1960s, the BPP
emerged as a leading national voice for the rights and interests of African Americans, as
well as a proponent for international and intercommunal coalition-building amongst
oppressed peoples. The BPP's original Ten-Point Platform and Program delineated “What
We Want” and “What We Believe”, as the leadership called for self-determination within
the black community, full employment, decent housing, appropriate education, the end to
policy brutality and freedom for black prisoners. Several events in the late 1960s –
including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the murder of Panther member
Bobby Hutton, and the charging of Panther founder Huey Newton for the murder of an
Oakland police officer – became catalysts for the Party's growth. The BPP was at its

152

height in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the Party expanded into cities across the
United States, official membership grew into the thousands and The Black Panther
newspaper grew to a circulation of approximately 250,000 (Murray, 2005).
Key ideological influences on the work of the BPP included Malcolm X's black
nationalism, Mao Tse-Tung's revolutionary organizing principles, Frantz Fanon's call for
revolutionary violence, and a Marxist-Leninist attention to class struggle and dialectical
materialism (Clemons & Jones, 1999; Hayes & Kiene, 1998). Over time, the BPP
underwent significant ideological evolution – moving from black nationalism to
revolutionary nationalism, then to revolutionary internationalism before coming to
revolutionary intercommunalism. That final ideological stage was defined by Newton as,
“The time when the people seize the means of production and distribute the wealth and
the technology in an egalitarian way to many communities of the world (Clemons &
Jones, 1999, 187). This intercommunal spirit was exemplified by the BPP's inspiration
for and interaction with similar groups that extended beyond the African American
community, including the Southern California-based Chicano leftist Brown Berets, the
Black Beret Cadre in Bermuda, the Black Panther Party of Israel, the college-based
White Panther Party and the politically-focused Peace and Freedom Party, among others
(Clemons & Jones, 1999; Jones & Jeffries, 1998).
The early 1970s saw a significant internal struggle within the BPP, as Huey
Newton's emphasis on the development of community programs stood in contrast to
those, like Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who emphasized armed defense. Many of
those who sided with Cleaver opted to leave the Party in 1971, around the same time that
the central BPP decided to close many of its local chapters and instead shift its emphasis

153

toward gaining local political power in Oakland. However, when both Panther candidates
in Oakland – Bobby Seale for mayor, Elaine Brown for city council – lost their bids, the
organization soon declined significantly in membership and influence. Through the mid-
to-late 1970s, Newton further consolidated organizational power, often through autocratic
means. Drug and alcohol abuse, misappropriation of funds, and violent behavior against
members of the community and Party comrades on the part of Newton's security squad
signaled the ultimate demise of BPP, which officially ceased operations in 1982
(Johnson, 1998). Importantly, as well, throughout the life of the BPP, the organization
was under significant stress from police repression, government infiltration and
retribution from groups like the FBI's COINTELPRO program, which took as its aim the
deconstruction of revolutionary black power groups like the BPP (Jones & Jeffries,
1998).
Ultimately, as Johnson (1998) has outlined, the demise of the BPP can be
attributed to a host of intersecting factors, including, “state political repression,
ideological errors, an inexperienced and youthful membership, intraparty strife, strategic
mistakes, and the cult-of-personality phenomenon” (391). With that said, the BPP also
left a significant legacy in the United States and abroad, a legacy that Jones and Jeffries
(1998) suggested consists of four components – the saliency of armed resistance, a
tradition of community service, a commitment to the self-determination of all people, and
a model of political action for oppressed people. However, as Maya, executive director of
Neighborhood United, pointed out to the youth interns, the significance of the BPP is
often minimized and their constructive contributions downplayed. Popular depictions of
the BPP generally suggest that they were an anti-White, ultra-leftist, media-created

154

organization of thugs and criminals (Jones and Jeffries, 1998). Yet, as Jones (1998) has
asserted, while the so-called dark side of the Party should not be dismissed or excused,
“unbalanced attention to this issue unfairly reduces the organization to a quasi-political
underworld organization” (4). Indeed, when NU called upon the legacy of their Panther
roots to introduce their organization to others, they did so from a perspective that
understood that armed violence did characterize certain elements of the early BPP;
however, this perspective was significantly countered, even then, by a Panther ideology
that saw community development through local “survival programs” and critical
educational processes as representative of the true spirit of the BPP.
The Black Panther Party: Serving the People, Body and Soul
The BPP's emphasis on community programs became a central piece of the
organization's broader approach to social change and served as the primary focus for
many of the local BPP chapters in cities across the United States. Referred to as “Survival
Programs”, these BPP activities were meant to meet the immediate needs of local
residents, and cut across the areas of health promotion, safety provision and education.
Initiatives included the publication of the Intercommunal News Service (Black Panther),
the free breakfast for school children program, political petition campaigns, housing
advocacy, health clinics, sickle cell anemia testing, safe escort services for senior
citizens, and the Liberation School/Intercommunal Youth Institute, among many others
initiatives (Jones and Jeffries, 1998). As former BPP member JoNina Abron (1998)
described, the concept of self-determination among oppressed African American
communities was at the heart of these efforts: “Institutional racism relegated a
disproportionate number of African Americans to deplorable housing, poor health care

155

services, an unresponsive criminal justice system, inadequate diets, and substandard
education. The Party's survival programs aimed to help black people overcome the
devastating effects of racism and capitalism” (178).
Nelson (2011) provided an in-depth look at the health care efforts of the BPP. She
argued that, in the face of health crises that disproportionately affected them, “black
communities had little choice but to provide their own solutions to what ailed them” (26).
The BPP cultivated what she termed a “social health perspective”, a praxis that “linked
medical services to a program of societal transformation” (12). Putting the social health
perspective into action called for grassroots efforts to develop their own healthcare
facilities. This process of institution building also required significant efforts to educate
the black community about health and medical issues, as many residents had little
experience with or faith in mainstream public health systems. It was in this vein that
initiatives like free food giveaways served a significant purpose. These efforts were
conceptualized as not only serving an acute need in the impoverished cities in which BPP
chapters operated, but also as a chance to open up a discussion about the broader social
transformation goals of the BPP. As BPP leader David Hilliard articulated: “Food serves
a double purpose, providing sustenance but also functioning as an organizing tool; people
enter the office when they come by, take some leaflets, sit in on an elementary PE
(political education) class, talk to cadre, and exchange ideas” (quoted in Nelson, 2011,
58).
At the same time, the emphasis on community programs emerged as the site of a
significant schism in the movement, as many of the more militant Panther elements left
the group in the early 1970s in opposition to this strategy. Critics within the party felt that

156

the organization was moving too far in the direction of the reform of present institutions,
as opposed to focusing on revolutionary procedures that they believed could only be
advanced through armed defense and aggressive military action. Defenders of the
community program strategy argued that the survival programs were indeed a vehicle for
radical political socialization. The philosophy behind the actions was, as BPP leader
David Hilliard articulated, “survival pending revolution – not something to replace
revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that
strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat or raft leading us safely to shore” (Quoted
in Jones & Jeffries, 1998, 31). Bobby Seale similarly rejected the label of “reform”:
“They're not reform programs; they're actually revolutionary community programs. A
revolutionary program is one set forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change
the existing system to a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing
exploitative system as an appeasing handout to fool the people and keep them quiet”
(Quoted in Abron, 1998, 178).
Despite the internal strife and the significant external pressure placed on the BPP,
the community programs persisted through the late 1960s and well into the 1970s.
Through the building of alternative institutions, the Party linked service provision to a
program of social transformation. As Nelson (2011) described, within the health
provision domain, the BPP critiqued what it termed the “medical-industrial complex” –
the, “confluence of business interests, the medical profession, the insurance industry, and
pharmaceutical companies that drove the commodification of healthcare” (12). Yet, the
Party did not act alone, as they also sought out partnerships with established white
professionals who were allied with their cause. Some BPP chapters even secured

157

municipal, state, and federal funds to support their initiatives, a practice that came with
some trepidation. Ultimately, the Party came to the conclusion that, as long as the
funding did not go against their ideology, it made sense to take government money and
make better use of it. What they might not have expected, however, was that many of
these survival programs – including the free breakfast for school children program and
their work on Sickle Cell Anemia – would come to be mimicked by government and non-
state actors. The BPP saw such actions as an unfair co-option on the part of establishment
actors who looked to minimize the BPP's importance and to remove the control of
community program development and management away from low-income black
communities themselves (Nelson, 2011). Such co-option was another factor that led to
the slow demise of the Party's influence in communities across the nation.
Both the survival programs and the BPP's forays into electoral politics
demonstrated that the forces within the party who called for outright separatism,
characterized by an underground movement of guerillas, did not hold sway. Instead, after
a more militant early stage, the practices of the Panthers moved toward a revolutionary
style of changing values and reshaping institutions. As Newton explained:“You can't very
well drop out of the system without dropping out of the universe. You contradict the
system while you are in it until it's transformed into a new system” (Quoted in Nelson,
2011, 63).
The Southern California Chapter of the BPP
The Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed in 1968
by Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. In the early 1960s, Carter had been a leader of the
Renegades, the hardcore element of the Slauson gang, the largest street force in Los

158

Angeles. Incarcerated in Soledad Prison in the mid-1960s, Carter read the works of
Malcolm X, joined the Nation of Islam, and met radical intellectual and future Panther
militant leader Eldridge Cleaver. Upon his release, Carter worked to organize former
gang members and ex-inmates toward a revolutionary consciousness under the auspices
of the BPP (Umoja, 1999). Just a few years after the 1965 uprisings in Watts and
throughout South Los Angeles, many in the Southern California region were responsive
to the revolutionary perspective of the BPP, and the chapter's membership grew quickly.
Carter's leadership, however, would be short-lived, as he and fellow Southern
California BPP member John Huggins were murdered on the campus of the University of
California, Los Angeles in January of 1969. The murder was the result of an altercation
with members of the cultural nationalist US organization, a militant black radical group
that was saw little value in the community-minded programs of the BPP. Years later, it
came to light that the conflict between these groups was stoked by the FBI as part of its
COINTELPRO effort to impede the efforts of black radicals (Nelson, 2011).
Still, the efforts of the Southern California chapter persisted, under the leadership
of key members like Elaine Brown. They soon followed the direction of the BPP
headquarters with the development several key survival programs, including community
policing of police activities, health care services, educational programs, legal aid and free
breakfast for children. In late 1969, the chapter was getting set to open the Bunchy Carter
People's Free Medical Clinic when their headquarters at 4115 South Central Avenue
came under attack by a police raid. With the facilities destroyed, Party members injured
and imprisoned, and three police officers wounded, the clinic's opening was delayed.
However, just a few weeks later, the Bunchy Carter PFMC was open for business at 3223

159

South Central Avenue, a testament to the organization's commitment to community
service in the face of great adversity (Nelson, 2011).
As Newton consolidated power in Oakland in 1971, the Southern California
chapter's operations came to a standstill. Several years later, in late 1976 and early 1977,
an effort was made to reorganize the chapter. In consultation with Elaine Brown and
other BPP leaders in Oakland, Jaja – the future founder and first Executive Director of
Neighborhood United – took on a leadership role in Southern California. Jaja
30
himself
had first learned of the BPP while imprisoned at Soledad State Prison after being
convicted of armed robbery as a young man. He undertook a serious education while in
jail, inspired by the works of WEB Dubois and Malcolm X, studying anthropology and
sociology, and taking on a “conscious black perspective” toward the world around him
(New Panther Vanguard Movement, 2000).
When Jaja was paroled in 1970 at the age of 27, there was little to no Panther
activity in Southern California. In 1973, he joined with his sister and other community
activists to form the non-profit Intercommunal Youth Institute, an alternative school
modeled off of the BPP community school in Oakland. Two years later, Jaja’s sister and
her boyfriend were wrongfully shot and killed by California Highway Police Officers
during a routine traffic stop. He helped to form the Coalition Against Police Abuse
(CAPA) in 1976, which brought together black and Chicano activists from across the Los
Angeles area.
Soon after, Jaja officially became a member of the BPP, and led a small but
devoted group of BPP activists in Southern California. It was around this time, as well,

30
While the actual names of BPP members discussed in this historical account are kept in tact, Jaja is used
as a pseudonym on account of his direct connection to the ethnographic project.

160

that party members saw the need to establish a non-profit structure in order to carry out a
set of survival programs. Such an institutionalization would be necessary in order to
properly solicit donations and provide fiscal sponsorship for their various community-
based efforts. With that in mind, Neighborhood United was formally launched in 1977.
With NU in place, the reformulated Southern California Chapter resumed survival
program activities, including the publication of newspapers, free food programs, free
shoe programs for children, safe escorts for seniors, legal aid, medical screenings and
other efforts. Yet, significant conflict with Newton and the BPP leadership in Oakland
hampered the sustainability of these efforts, as autocratic tendencies and rampant drug
use and trafficking came to characterize Newton's Oakland-based headquarters.
Reflecting on his letter of resignation to Newton in 1981, Jaja wrote: “With revolutionary
criticism, love, and undying hope for the eventual liberation of oppressed peoples, we
remained dedicated to the revolutionary ideals of the Black Panther Party but accepted
the fact that the Organization was no longer viable” (New Panther Vanguard Movement,
2000).
The New Panther Vanguard and Neighborhood United
While the BPP ceased operations through the 1980s, Neighborhood United
remained in tact, providing tax-exempt services and fiscal sponsorship for several
community-based efforts, including the Coalition Against Police Abuse. Through that
time, Jaja had been working with a South Los Angeles Legal Aid Office, pursuing an
independent legal study as well as enrolling in classes at the Peoples College of Law. He
was also active as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party, undertaking a few
unsuccessful bids for political office. He received his JD in 1989 and began to practice

161

civil rights and community-based law. As he said in an interview, “I've been criticized by
loved ones that I don't have the economic model that most lawyers have. My practice has
always been sort of a community-based practice. I couldn't practice up in the corporate
world, I don't have the heart for that.”
It was after the civil unrest of 1992 in Los Angeles, in the wake of the Rodney
King beating, that Jaja began to engage in discussions about organizing a new “panther-
like” group in South Central Los Angeles. Working with other former members of the
Southern California BPP chapter, as well as younger local activists, they came to the
conclusion that the area lacked a principled and serious grassroots organizing force that at
once embodied the revolutionary goals of the BPP, understood both the values and the
mistakes of the original BPP, and could connect with local youth and residents to push
forward a constructive political and social agenda. Calling themselves the New African
American Vanguard Movement, the group was launched during a community festival in
1994 that featured educational speakers, networking with community-based
organizations, cultural and entertainment activities, and the distribution of nearly a
thousand bags of free groceries. A name change followed shortly thereafter, as the group
went by the New Panther Vanguard Movement (NPVM), in part reflecting their
commitment to an intercommunal ethic of action. A description of their program
described their inspiration:
Not only was there total anarchy within the Black (and Mexican and
Central American) communities of Los Angeles, there was no Black group
(or for that matter any other group) that could capture the imagination of,
or demand the respect of, all segments of the community, including the
“street gangs.” There was no organization with the potential of appealing
to the legions of under-employed and unemployed Black and Mexican
youth, or to the thousands of Black “homeless” men and women. There
was no group that appealed to both Muslim and Christian, or even to those

162

who professed no established religious belief. It was crystal clear to the
NAAVM organizers that a “new type of Panther-like” organization had to
be created. (New Panther Vanguard Movement, n.d.)

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Maya, the future director of Neighborhood
United, was engaged in her own social justice organizing among historically
marginalized people of color in London. Maya had grown up in Southall, a low-income
community with a majority of residents from the Indian sub-continent and others of
African descent. As a young activist, she helped to create a successful legal rights center
that still operates to this day. Along with other activists in the 1980s, Maya was inspired
by the intercommunal model of the BPP and went on to form an organization they called
Panther: “The reason we called it Panther is because we felt, many of us who had been
studying black history for many years, we felt that the Panthers in the US were a
representation of the highest political level of thinking,” she explained in an interview.
“In terms of their ideological development and their political theory, we felt like they
really spoke to who we were and what we were trying to do.”
One of the first initiatives of Panther was to create a newspaper – with the lead
headline on the first issue declaring “Fight the Power”, the publication quickly sold out
and membership in the organization grew rapidly. Soon, Panther was organizing rallies
and events in the Southall area – some of the largest political rallies of black residents in
the history of England – as well as doing a lot of community work on the topic of gang
intervention and gang truces. They began to bring over some of their BPP inspirations to
take part in these events, including former leader Bobby Seale, and an exchange program
of sorts commenced. Into the 1990s, Panther leaders began traveling from England to the
United States to take part in meetings and to observe the activities of newly reformed

163

groups like the New Panther Vanguard Movement. Maya eventually took part in one of
those exchanges, and it was there she met Jaja, with whom she began a relationship.
Although she had little plans to do so when these exchanges began, she officially moved
to Los Angeles in 1997, bringing along her young son, Kenneth. From there, Maya
became a central volunteer in support of the activities of the New Panther Vanguard
Movement and of Neighborhood United.
Through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, the New Panther Vanguard
Movement (NPVM) remained active, with NU serving primarily as the economic arm of
the organization to continue to raise resources and provide fiscal support for
organizational activity. Maya and Jaja worked with other volunteers to publish a
newsletter on a somewhat-less-than quarterly basis – The Black Panther Intercommunal
News Service – that featured writings on the history, philosophy, and current activities of
members and allies working to advance social justice and social transformation.
Modeling their philosophy in large part off of the community service-oriented arm of the
original BPP, the NVPM published their Ten Point Platform and Program, which
included the following items:
– Peace, Justice and Reparations
– Food, Housing, Medical Care and Quality Education
– Reform of the U.S. Criminal Justice System
– Freedom for all Political Prisoners
– An End to Police Brutality, Terror and Abuses of Power
– Sentencing Review and Reductions
– Solving the Drug Problem
– An End to Military Aggression
– Religious Tolerance and Separation of State and Religion
– Freedom is All Power to the People

164

The NVPM played a particularly active role in efforts to advance the cause of
reparations, helping to convene several national and international efforts to put the issue
on the agenda. Jaja described the approach in an interview:
It was about an intercommunal approach to reparations. It was a
recognition that I think a lot of reparation activists had come to, which is,
look – Africans are spread all over the planet. The largest population of
African Americans are in Brazil. So we can't talk about reparations just in
America. We have to talk about reparations as an international demand, as
a global demand, as an intercommunal approach to reparations. I think
that's the only way it will be achieved, for a global approach...It's about
economic development in the communities that trace their legacy to
slavery and discrimination and exploitation. And the majority of the
people in the world are in that position right now – Indians in India,
certainly the African continent. There are populations worldwide that need
economic assistance. Not as a handout but as an effort to pay for the past
acts – call it genocidal acts against people.

Another key component in the intercommunal approach of the NPVM centered on
joint projects between the historically African American organization and partners in the
Mexica/Chicano community. Drawing directly from earlier works by key BPP leaders,
including Huey Newton, Jaja and his colleagues went to the pages of the Black Panther
Intercommunal News Service to outline a plan for “Education in Our Interests”. This
included direct advocacy for specific local electoral candidates, those who the organizers
believed genuinely had the interests of young African American and Latino youth in
mind. Further, they described of an alternative method of critical education for young
people, a style that was successfully put into practice through a number of after school
programs during this time period. The authors outlined their case:
Forcing the public schools to teach the truth will be the hardest part of any
educational effort. The lies and distortions are deeply imbedded in the
consciousness of our people and will not be easily dislodged or
discredited. As the Mexica activists point out: “Most of our people have
been intentionally kept ignorant of Anahuac history. What little we know
is lies or exaggerations of our failings. We are only taught of European

165

“discoveries” and accomplishments and nothing of the crimes that they
committed against us”...If this approach sounds radically designed,
impractical or utopian, then we ask: what other real alternatives exist?
There are none; the choice lies between a genuinely new and radical
approach and maintaining the ineffective, often paternalistic, often self-
destructive, violence-breeding public school life as it exists today...From
the point of view of conscious African Americans and people of Mexica
ancestry, the road to “education in our interest” is the path we choose to
take (New Panther Vanguard & Mexica Movements, Summer 1999, 15).

At the heart of all of these efforts was a recognition and assertion that significant
investment in traditionally marginalized and oppressed communities of color was
necessary in order to right the wrongs of an exploitative past and advance the cause of
social transformation. Consistent with the practices of the original BPP's survival
programs, there was a tenuous recognition that, while the local community needed to
guide the process of such efforts, significant contribution from outside of the community
could also play a constructive role in the process. For the NPVM and Jaja, the guiding
philosophy for such an approach was in the practice of “community economic
development”, an investment strategy that Jaja had begun to explore while working in the
Legal Aid Foundation, then expanded upon as a founding member of three different
organizations – Neighborhood United, the NPVM, and later the Statewide Association of
Community Economic Development (SACED). Writing in The Black Panther
Intercommunal News Service, he described the context for community economic
development (CED):
Then, as now, CED advocates continued to point out the fact that the
private, market-driven economy of the US is, at best, blind to the notion of
equitable distribution of economic benefits and actually fosters
concentration of wealth in the hands of individuals and
families...Unfortunately, the reality is that the national commitment to
improve conditions in urban ghettos and rural areas like Appalachia,
Native American Indian Reservations, the South and the Southwest has

166

always been temporary and shallow. Today's CED movement attempts to
bridge the gap involved in the ongoing debate by encouraging
“partnerships” between both the private and public sector, individual
entrepreneurs, CDC's and CBO's seeking to promote economic
development throughout the entire community. Today, CED activists and
advocates understand clearly that “community-based development” is a
political task mainly because they recognize that the traditional flow of
economic benefits must be fundamentally transformed in order for these
benefits to reach minority and poor communities. More significantly, they
understand that fundamental economic changes will not occur absent a
grassroots and mass-based political challenge to existing national public
policies on economic issues (New Panther Vanguard Movement ,1999, 18,
emphasis in original).

Into the early 2000s, the NPVM continued to remain active in community
organizing, publishing the newsletter, hosting community events, facilitating weekly
community forums, engaging in critical intercommunal education and working toward
gang truce interventions. However, Jaja remained focused on his civil rights law practice
as well, and slowly the NPVM's activities began to recede, to the point that it was mostly
defunct a few years into the decade. However, also in the early 2000s, Maya took on a
more active role in cultivating the work of Neighborhood United, specifically. She saw
great potential in expanding the operations of the non-profit arm, breaking from its
history as a mostly tangential economic tool put to use by Panther-like organizations, and
developing its place as an independent entity.
This was a new stage for the operations of NU, but the group was hardly starting
from scratch in terms of its organizational identity. Indeed, at this critical juncture in its
organizational history, there was already a substantial philosophical and ideological
backbone to build upon. Table 5, below, provides an outline of some the key elements of
NU's organizational communication ecology that had shaped its organizational
philosophy to that point.

167

Table 5: Foundational communication ecological influences on philosophy and practice
of Neighborhood United
Organization Location(s) Active
Time Period
Philosophical &
Practical Legacies

Black Panther Party

Chapters across the
US and
internationally,
with headquarters in
Oakland, CA

Most active from
1966-1971; officially
dissolved in 1982
Revolutionary
Intercommunalism

Social Health
Perspective

Community
Survival Programs

Newspaper
Publishing

PANTHER

Founded in Southall,
London, with other
chapters across
Britain

Founded in 1986,
active into mid-
1990s
Black Youth
Organizing

Rallies and Events

Legal Rights

International
Learning Exchanges

New Panther
Vanguard Movement

South Central
Los Angeles

Founded 1994,
active into early
2000s
Community
Economic
Development

Civil and Legal
Rights

Intercommunal
Reparations

African American/
Chicana
Joint Education

The group was founded in the intercommunal revolutionary philosophy of the BPP,
grounded in an engaged style of community organizing amongst low-income people of

168

color, and committed to a plan of community economic development that could play a
role in righting the historic wrongs of discrimination and oppression.
In the years to come, the organization would begin to shift its focus toward food,
and would work to build its profile as an independent non-profit organization working
toward food justice. Through this process, that communication ecology would continue
to undergo a dynamic process of both stability and change. NU would be faced with the
challenge of maintaining an historically grounded, community-based mission for social
transformation, while at the same time meeting the inherent demands of a competitive
non-profit landscape. The Community Food Assessment would prove to be a key
exercise as they began to forge this link.
Food Justice, Community Food Assessment and Liberal Governmentality
For years, food had played a role as an organizing tool in both the BPP and in the
NPVM. Food giveaways had long served a dual purpose, as Jaja explained: “One, to let
the community know we could take some initiative to make sure people had access to
food. Two, we needed to get them onto things. To rally, to get recruits from people, to
get them involved and active.” In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Maya took stock of the
poor quality food her young son Kenneth was complaining about in his South LA public
school. She became engaged with other concerned citizens, parents, administrators, and
researchers to form a coalition that advocated for the “Soda Ban” in the Los Angeles
Unified School District, and got involved in other local and statewide efforts that touched
on food issues. Her concerns about food were further intensified as she worked on the
Education in Our Interest after school program with local youth, described above. While
she and other volunteers felt they were making progress in the critical education process,

169

she found that the focus and attention span of the youth participants was lacking, and
began to see clear connections between their diets and instances of erratic behavior. She
explained the process in an interview:
We started to have the kids document what they were eating, what they
were consuming. We started having them document when they were
getting into trouble on graphs. “Oh, I had a soda and here, 20 minutes
later, I did this crazy thing which I have no idea now why I did it.”...Then
we started to talk to the kids about the impact these foods have...I was
really horrified to see that these kids were being given these stupid
messages about eating five (vegetables) a day, but no kind of like – why
does sugar do this, what's the impact it has on you, what does it make you
do, how does it affect your chemistry, and how does that then affect your
physical reaction? You know what I mean? There was none of that. And
what we found was that when you actually talked to kids on that level and
you treat them like they're intelligent, they get it.

From there, Maya and other volunteer members involved with Neighborhood
United saw that food could be a powerful medium for exploring the key issues in which
the BPP, NPVM and NU had always been interested. They began to develop ideas
around programming, now fully under the auspices of Neighborhood United, that might
use food, agriculture and nutrition as a method for community economic development,
social justice and social transformation. Contrary to previous eras in the organization's
history, NU would no longer simply be in operation as a means to provide fiscal
sponsorship for the activities of other organizations, but rather the non-profit structure
would be put to use in its own right. In one sense, this moment marked a key transition in
the life of the organization, but given the history of community service programming
within which Neighborhood United was steeped, there was also great continuity with the
goals and practices of the organization's communication ecological foundation.
From there, NU set its eyes on first gaining a more grounded understanding of the
food-related issues that residents of South Los Angeles faced, then on developing and

170

deploying community-based efforts that would address those issues. However, in order to
carry out such comprehensive programming – initiatives that would fundamentally
advance NU's goals of community development and social justice advancement through
food – they also came to realize that significant funds would need to be raised. While
there was a bit of history within the BPP of receiving a few grants to support health
initiatives, such an approach to fundraising did not represent an area of expertise for the
NU leaders who were truly community organizers at heart. They were faced with a
central question – how might NU be able to transform the organization into a “fundable”
non-profit while still maintaining its long-held commitment to its ideals of social change?
NU's Community Food Assessment (CFA) – led by the organization in
collaboration with a coalition of South LA-based residents and organizations in 2003 and
2004 – stands as the exercise that allowed the organization to begin to develop answers to
that critical question. As outlined at the start of this chapter, discussions of the CFA were
often paired with an explanation of their Black Panther Party roots when the organization
introduced itself to new and varied audiences. NU identified their CFA as a touchstone
for its foray into food justice work. As staff member Charles explained, “NU basically
started as a facilitator for the people to change, to create change, to change whatever they
feel might be problems in their community. And I think that process started in 2003 with
our assessment, and we saw that there's no getting around food.” Through this process,
several new and key connections were integrated into NU's organizational
communication ecology. In the following sections, I describe how NU's Community
Food Assessment (CFA) served as an introduction into the 21
st
century non-profit
landscape. By carrying out the CFA, NU demonstrated to potential funders that it was a

171

serious non-profit organization, able to competently design and carry out programmatic
activities and evaluative research. At the same time, the experience allowed NU to find
its own identity as a non-profit organization working specifically toward food justice,
carrying on the tradition of their BPP roots while serving the people of the local
community and building a new foundation for action in contemporary South Los
Angeles. It is this dynamic interaction between the organization's historical roots, the
expression of local residents' needs and desires, and the demands and expectations of
power brokers in the non-profit world that characterized this portion of NU's emergent
organizational communication ecology. The resultant mix – a merger of the
organization's historical and philosophical foundations of community-based
programming, brought together with a public-health oriented style of research and
evaluation – helped to shape NU's viability as an emerging leader in the community-
based food justice movement.
Indeed, with the organization's new focus on food in the early 2000s, NU looked
to expand their work by applying for a grant to grow an “edible schoolyard” at a local
South LA elementary school. They were rejected, with the caveat that they should
conduct a Community Food Assessment (CFA) and then re-apply. They attempted to get
funding for this assessment work, but one funding proposal and four letters of intent were
rejected by different foundations. Despite these setbacks, NU and their partners decided
to move forward, even without any real budget or dedicated paid staff to devote to the
project. Before digging into the implications of that project for the work of NU, however,
some basic explanation is required. What exactly does a CFA entail? And what

172

importance does it hold, such that the CFA might be seen as a prerequisite before a
foundation or other agency might deem an organization deserving of fiscal support?
At its roots, the CFA builds upon tools that were developed in the late 20
th

century in the fields of urban planning and policy as part of community assessment and
neighborhood indicators projects.. Pothukuchi (2004) defined community assessments,
broadly, as, “activities to systematically collect and disseminate information on selected
community characteristics so that community leaders and agencies may devise
appropriate strategies to improve their localities” (356). Sawicki and Flynn (1996) argued
that there were historically few attempts to build neighborhood-level indicators as a
means to measure neighborhood problems and design policies to address them:
“However, recent development in desktop geographic information systems, combined
with the devolution of social programs to the local level, have created the technology and
the need for such indicators” (165). Innes and Booher (2000) concluded that the key
lesson of the community indicators and assessment projects of the previous decade was
that indicators must be developed in collaboration with those who would go on to use
them. They continued: “The community needs to develop a way to bring its key
stakeholders, agency players, experts and citizens into a process to select a set of system
indicators...” (184). The Community Food Assessment developed in concert with these
other assessment and indicator projects, and began to take hold as a key mechanism to
advance food justice in the early 21
st
century.
Pothukuchi's (2004) analysis of CFA projects identified 5 common threads of this
work:
 a focus on the needs of low-income residents
 concerns about the environmental sustainability of the food system

173

 a commitment to the community as a unit of solution to food system problems
 a focus on community assets in the community appraisal
 the use of multiple data sources and categories of information (like
demographics, infrastructure, food environment, and policy, among others).

Many of these CFA efforts have also assessed “differential accessibility to healthy and
affordable food between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged areas” as a
way to draw a comparison and support an argument regarding the existence of a “food
desert” in the community of interest (Beaulac, Kristjansson & Cummins, 2009, 1). This
comparative process has been used a key mechanism through which specific claims about
concentrated disadvantage and food-based injustice could be made.
Two complete step-by-step guides to conducting a CFA were published in 2002,
and each helps tell the story of how and why the CFA has been deployed to advance
community-based food justice. Pothukuchi et al.'s (2002) “What's Cooking in Your Food
System? A Guide to Community Food Assessment”, published by the Community Food
Security Coalition (once a leading, but now defunct, North American coalition of
alternative food movement activists), asserted: “Community food assessments promote
community food security by increasing knowledge about food-related needs and
resources, by building collaboration and capacity, by promoting long-term planning, and
by facilitating a variety of change actions including policy advocacy and program
development” (6). Another document, Cohen's (2002) “Community Food Security
Assessment Toolkit”, was written by a private consultant under a research contract with
the United States Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. That work
came complete with a set of specific methods and indicators for tracking community food
security through quantitative, qualitative and geographic means. The author outlined the
need for the project:

174

A community food assessment will help you to (1) understand local food
systems, (2) inform the setting of goals to improve these local food
systems, (3) inform decision-making about policies and actions to
improve community food security; and (4) establish a long-term
monitoring system with a clear set of indicators. This last point is
important if as a Nation we will ever decide to compare communities with
respect to food security. The indicators included in this toolkit represent a
first attempt at defining a unified set of indicators that could be used
across communities (9).

In both reports, explicit references were made to the Community Food Projects
Competitive Grants Program, an annual grant program of the National Institute of Food
and Agriculture of the USDA. That program has proven to be one of the primary sources
of funding for community-based alternative food initiatives over the last several decades.
For the year 2013, the USDA estimated that they would distribute $5,000,000 under this
program, with awards of up to $500,000. In the previous fiscal year, 18% of applicants
were awarded some funding (USDA Grants, n.d.). Joseph (2009) authored a guide to this
application process, another publication of the CFSC, and spoke directly to the
relationship between the CFA process and the grant application:
Sometimes, a new project (and proposal) emerges from a community-
based needs assessment or similar strategic planning process, wherein
there is no prior program structure but the planning is well along, the
community needs are established, and the partners are identified. New
projects that emerge from this type of process tend to be better
positioned to meet all the CFP (Community Food Projects) criteria...A
CFA (Community Food Assessment) process can take you through
planning steps that identify resources and needs, collaboration and
community participation opportunities, and follow-up activities. It is a
useful strategy to develop a CFP project because CFAs often create the
collaborative structure from which a successful Community Food
Projects proposal can be developed. Alternatively, CFP can provide
funding for food assessments, especially as part of a broader project
proposal. (Joseph, 2009, 10)

As evidenced by these and other statements, the CFA has served a key role in
helping to shape the community-based approach of many contemporary community food

175

security and food justice projects. As this work has outlined previously, there are any
number of points of intervention throughout the food system that might be focused upon
as a problem worthy of food justice advocates' attention. Yet, the CFA makes a great deal
of sense when conceptualized as a tool that has emerged from within the advanced liberal
landscape, a political and economic context that situates community-level action as a
primary arena for the maximization of social justice (Rose, 1999). The community-based,
geographic focus of the CFA is a point of synthesis that matches the philosophical
interests of multiple actors involved in food justice work, including grassroots
community-based organizations, scholars and practitioners of urban planning, and
funding agencies, among others. Table 6, above, describes how the outcomes of the CFA
process speak to specific elements of a guiding liberal governmental rationality.
Table 6: Community Food Assessment Outcomes and Associated Liberal Governmental
Goals

CFA Outcome Liberal Governmental Goal
Establish a specific geographic area as a
site of food-related concentrated
disadvantage.
Focus on the community-level as a primary
site of intervention.
Develop and deploy food environment
measures and indicators that can be
replicated and compared over time.
Rely on methods of audit-based evaluation
for planning, policymaking and funding.
Engage in a process of education and skill-
building around food issues and research
methods.
Increase the overall capacity of
entrepreneurial individuals and
communities.
Create connections between community
residents, organizations, researchers and
other professionals engaged in food work.
Develop hybrid coalitions that can
champion social causes and maximize
social justice.

The next section describes how this tool – one that was developed primarily by urban
planners and public health officials, but that was consistent with a participatory and

176

community-based approach to research in the local food system – played an integral role
in shaping Neighborhood United's communication ecology as the organization shifted its
focus to food justice in the early 2000s.
The Role of the CFA in the Work of Neighborhood United
The 2004 report that eventually emerged from NU’s CFA identified the local food
environment as a key player in perpetuating health disparities, but not one that was
isolated from other important issues, like poverty and racial discrimination. Early in the
report, in a section entitled Our Community, the authors outlined the problems that the
organization planned to tackle in their research process.
Diabetes deaths rose 53% overall among residents of Los Angeles County
between 1990 and 2000, and the racial disparities are clear. The risk of
diabetes-related death is over 2 times higher for African Americans and
1½ times higher for Mexican/Central Americans than for whites and
Asians. Additionally, Mexican/Central Americans living in poverty are
about 3 times more likely to have diabetes than those with incomes over
200% of the federal poverty level. Nutrition experts partially blame
malnutrition, including obesity, among the urban poor on limited exposure
and access to healthy foods. NU's service area, centered around our
headquarters in South Central Los Angeles, has roughly 500,000 residents;
where 44% are African American and over 50% are Mexican/Central
American. The median family income is $21,000, with 77% percent living
below 200% of the federal poverty level, which in 2004 is $18,850 for a
family of four. Statistically the population we serve is at a high risk for
diabetes-related death.

Independent of their own CFA, members of NU, along with their organizational
partners and most local residents in the area, could all speak to the poor quality of the
local food environment. Indeed, several other projects were already underway in the
neighborhood to systematically document these same issues (for instance, Sloane et al.,
2003). NU could also look to a variety of publicly available secondary data, like those
listed above, to assert that their community was subject to a variety of chronic disease-

177

related health disparities, many with connections to diet and nutrition. With these varied
data sources in hand, it might seem as if the CFA was conducted simply as a way to
satisfy the data-driven demands of the types of funding agencies that NU hoped would
support future projects. While this was, indeed, one important motivation, NU's goals for
the project went beyond solely collecting data that could more systematically document
the experiences of local residents as they lived and worked within their food
environments.
Writing in reference to the funding rejection and the foundation's suggestion to
conduct a CFA, NU wrote in their 2004 report: “We took this to heart, but decided that
from its inception it was going to be an educational process for all involved and not
simply an academic exercise to gather information.” Indeed, NU set the intention that the
CFA would not simply be used as a means to gather data that established their local
neighborhood as a site of food injustice. Guided by Paulo Freire's approach to
participatory research and community education, and reminiscent of the BPP's
conceptualization of educational organizing, the CFA was also seen as providing a
platform through which NU could work to raise a critical consciousness around the risks
faced by local residents, as well as to collaboratively develop solutions to the problems
uncovered in this work. From there, NU could begin to build a community-based
coalition of organizations and individuals interested in working together to advance food
justice in their local neighborhood.
Neighborhood United's CFA largely followed the roadmap of “common threads”
outlined by Pothukuchi (2004) – its focus was on the local community as a unit for
change, it highlighted community assets where possible, it collected data in a variety of

178

categories and through both traditional and nontraditional methods, and its primary
concern was food-related injustice in the local area. NU and their partners received data
collection and analysis instruction pro bono from a local expert in program evaluation,
and enlisted the help of a few university public health graduate students to assist with the
project. Feedback on the format of the assessment was solicited from a variety of
community groups, churches and school. The assessment was ultimately carried out by
the few unpaid members of NU, along with a group of five high school student interns,
and several other professionals with backgrounds in social justice, community
development, and food system issues.
The CFA survey included both traditional survey questions and a community
mapping of available food resources, as well as more non-traditional practices like having
elementary school students draw pictures of what they ate for breakfast and keep a photo
journal of their daily food consumption. In addition, the assessment included taste-
testings and evaluations of alternative food products like soy milk, and the staff remained
in an ongoing dialogue with participants throughout the study about the implications of
their food environment and their personal food choices. This multi-methodological effort
was offered in contrast to what NU staff saw as gaps in traditional research on nutritional
health in their community. Not only did the community food assessment measure aspects
of the local food environment that had never been focused upon by public health or
planning researchers, but the participatory nature and non-traditional methodologies
employed in the effort staked a claim about the legitimacy of local knowledge from
residents' experiences that the organization felt had previously been ignored.

179

In the end, the results were hardly a shock – they found that their local area was
indeed a “food desert”, bereft of healthy options and rife with unhealthy ones, as
compared to a more affluent comparison community. They found a preponderance of fast
food chains and liquor-mini markets within the community, a lack of restaurants and full-
service grocery stores, widespread availability of junk foods and sugary drinks, and a
strong desire from community members for better access to fresh, healthy foods. With
these findings as a guide, from this point on, NU's work began to focus almost
exclusively on projects that provided nutrition education, agricultural training, fresh local
produce, and food-based job creation for youth, adults, and senior citizens in South Los
Angeles.
NU's Community Food Assessment accomplished several primary tasks that
helped shape the group's viability as a productive community-based food justice
organization, at the same time it served as a foundation for the organizational
communication ecology that guided their activities for years to come. Fundamentally, the
CFA represented a first step in the establishment that local residents in their
neighborhood service area experienced food injustice. The CFA allowed NU to enter into
an often highly charged and complicated political and economic discussion – through the
CFA, the organization transformed what might otherwise have been written off as
anecdotal complaints about the local food environment into a product that could be
deemed a systematic and credible account in official policymaking circles as well as in
the local community. Further, with this data in hand, the CFA served as a baseline for
future evaluative projects related to food justice in the community. Evidence of the
organization's ability to conduct systematic data collection and analysis responded to the

180

needs of potential funding agencies and partners, and could serve as a foundation for
future fiscal and resource-based support. Finally, the process of organizing and executing
the CFA process demonstrated that NU was capable of marshaling the necessary
resources to make collaborative partnerships between and among residents, community
organizations, and professional researchers work successfully. Fundamentally, the CFA
allowed NU to become a legitimate player in an advanced liberal landscape characterized
by community-based hybrid coalitions, monitored over time through audit-based
evaluation techniques. Following Rose (1999), the development and execution of the
CFA served to invent, assemble and disseminate calculations, mechanisms and strategies
through which advanced liberal governmentality could operate.
With the CFA in hand, and building upon their BPP roots, NU set their task to
“serving the people, body and soul” through food justice programming. The work had set
the stage for the types of inter-sectoral partnerships that were at the heart of Jaja's
“community economic development” philosophy, and came to guide the programmatic
strategy of NU as the organization developed into a food justice leader in the community.
The resident-led and participatory nature of the exercise, the collaboration with other
social justice-oriented groups, and the integration of experts and researchers from outside
of the community into the project was both reminiscent of BPP community programs and
a signal of what was to come as NU grew into a viable player in the food justice world of
South LA. At the dawn of the CFA process, NU faced the key question – would they be
able to transform the organization into a “fundable” non-profit while still maintaining its
long-held commitment to the ideals of social transformation? At this early stage, they
seemed to be able to answer in the affirmative by keeping local community knowledge

181

and community resident participation at the forefront of their efforts. Yet, the challenge
would only grow more daunting as the organization's scope and reach increased. Through
what processes might they balance the myriad of sometimes conflicting influences that
characterized their organizational communication ecology while still advancing their
ultimate social just goals?
Food Justice and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Since the 2004 CFA was conducted, NU went on to receive grant funding to
support a wide set of food justice projects, funding that helped them develop a program
of social entrepreneurship that put them on a path toward greater self-sufficiency.
31
While
the share of the organization's operating costs that were covered by their “social
enterprise” increased significantly in recent years, the majority of the organization's work
over time was supported through grant funding from both private and public sources. To
date, some of the key funders of NU's work included private foundations, such as the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation, regional
and local public funders, such as the Network for Healthy California of the California
Department of Public Health and the City of Los Angeles Office of Community
Beautification, and federal public funders, such as the United States Department of
Agriculture/National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Community Food Projects
Competitive Grants Program and the Department of Health and Human Service's
Community Economic Development Program.
Yet, NU did not proceed blindly in this pursuit of funding. Instead, organizational
and program development through grant acquisition was consistently guided by NU's

31 The following chapter will dig deeper into the networks involved in these varied programs and the
impact such efforts have had on the organization's communication ecology.

182

historical vision of social transformation and its strongly-rooted philosophical view of
social justice. At the same time, situated as the organization was in the contemporary
non-profit landscape, the strategic action of NU was also shaped by the demands of
funding agencies, by the contours of popular media and contemporary “brand culture”, as
well as by the need to incorporate a diverse set of partners into funded programmatic
activity. This dynamic interaction began to take shape with the CFA process; it remained
a central piece of NU's communication ecology in the search for and acquisition of grant
funds, as well as in the ways in which programs were carried out under the auspices of
these funds. The final sections of this chapter draw from interviews, document analysis,
and participant observation to outline the process through which NU navigated this
landscape of funding and strategic partnerships.
When discussing their approach to grant funding, staff members and leaders of
NU insisted that it was their organizational mission that always came first. They looked
for funds from agencies that they believed could support that mission, and resisted what
they saw as a common urge within what they called the “non-profit industrial complex”
to shape an organizational programmatic philosophy in order to respond directly to the
calls of certain funders. As Associate Director of Development, Gretchen, outlined,
“When we go out and ask for money, we do it in the context of a whole story. That isn't
just this year's story, it's a thirty-year story of how NU got to where it is. That's what's
compelling. That's what raises the money,” adding, “One thing we don't do when it
comes to fundraising is be like – oh, there's this money, how do we mold ourselves into
their talk to get that money? It's staying really true to who we are, why we do it, how we
do it.”

183

Sticking true to this principled approach was not always easy, however, as there
were times during the organization's existence that funds to support all staff and programs
were hard to come by. Committed as the staff was to the overall mission of the
organization, and to the belief that the organization's strategy would ultimately be
recognized as fundable by relevant parties, NU persisted. “There's not many
organizations doing food work where that could happen,” Maya asserted. “There's a way
in which we have been very, very careful to distinguish between going after money if it
can serve you to do what you're doing, and being reliant on that money to do what you're
doing.” Bimala, a long-time board member with NU, argued that it was this type of
approach that set the organization apart from many of the other so-called progressive
organizations with whom she had worked in the past. “I feel like NU has the ability for,
has a political imagination, an imagination about other kinds of futures that I just don't
think other organizations have. So many other organizations get caught up in the non-
profit industrial complex...And I think NU has always really refused the terms that other
organizations work from. So part of it is that ability to imagine other types of political
futures...NU, I feel like there's a way they're very flippant towards power, and it's like
we're just going to do our own thing. So I think that refusal of the terms, refusal to
engage in the conversation in the way that it's been given to us is one of the reasons that I
have just consistently gone back to NU.”
Indeed, some key economic and fundraising advisors had actually encouraged NU
to focus less on its political ideology and its Black Panther Party roots as a way to garner
more significant fiscal support. Quentin, the director of the Statewide Association of
Community Economic Development (SACED), said that the Panther connection had

184

scared away potential funders – including banks and major foundations – in the past. He
suggested that, for many in the more politically moderate funding community, the natural
reaction would not be, “Golly, you’re a Panther – let me go get my checkbook.” Vacating
this ideological positioning, however, was always antithetical to the approach of NU.
They recognized that certain funding agencies would not be interested in their story;
projects like the American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens would be more
attractive to those major corporate and foundation entities who sought out a “safe”
partner. Yet, abandonment of their Panther roots would mean a loss of credibility for NU
in their community of service, and without that foundation, the work would lose all
meaning. Ultimately, the tension again speaks back to Banet-Weiser’s (2012) work on
brand cultures, as she wrote: “Urban farming can be an important act of cultural
resistance to the bullying powers of capitalism…However, public visibility of urban
farming in the contemporary moment makes some urban farms far more brandable than
others” (161). In these instances, NU opted against optimal corporate “brandability” in
favor of staying true to its ideological roots.
Still, to think that NU's process of organizational development – of which grant
funding continued to play a significant role – moved forward in an entirely autonomous
fashion, independent of the needs and interests of potential funders, also would not be
fully representative of the organization’s actual situation. Indeed, the organization did
depend upon an array of public and private entities to deem them worthy of significant
investment in order to advance their mission. For one, as was outlined in the previous
section, NU specifically sought out partnerships with outside public health professionals
and integrated the language of the public health and urban planning domains into its

185

work. These types of collaborations and this discursive integration opened up access to
specific funding areas that would otherwise not be available, and it further provided a
specific type of legitimacy that proved amenable to the interests of a number of potential
funders in their evaluation of NU’s programs.
While NU clearly stuck to its organizational mission as its guide for developing a
programmatic strategy, this strategy was also undoubtedly influenced by the priorities
and frameworks of the funding agencies that supported its efforts. The previous section of
this chapter outlined how NU was compelled, in part, to conduct a Community Food
Assessment (CFA) when it became clear that the exercise would prove useful as a way to
demonstrate that it was a “fundable” project. Indeed, this was a specific expectation from
those involved in the National Institute of Food and Agriculture/USDA's Community
Food Projects Competitive Grant (CFPCG), a program that remains a primary source of
federally-based fiscal support for community-based alternative food system projects. It is
useful to look at the stated goals of the CFPCG to interrogate how grants like these
served to influence the strategic action of NU. In its annual call for proposals, the CFPCG
stated that its grantmaking program – which has been in existence since 1996 and now
distributes approximately $5,000,000 annually – has the following primary goals:
 Meet the food needs of low-income individuals;
 Increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for the food needs of
the communities;
 Promote comprehensive responses to local food, farm, and nutrition issues;
and
 Meet specific state, local or neighborhood food and agricultural needs
including needs relating to:
 Infrastructure improvement and development;
 Planning for long-term solutions; or
 The creation of innovative marketing activities that mutually benefit
agricultural producers and low-income consumers.

186

NU did indeed receive a sizable grant from CFPCG several years after its CFA,
with those grant funds playing a big role in supporting staff salaries and program activity
as the organization grew in scope and impact. A summary of NU's proposal for that grant
described how the funds would ultimately go toward the improvement of the agricultural
capacity of NU's garden sites, as well as toward the institutionalization of NU's youth
internship program and the scaling up of NU's produce sales and distribution. That
proposal summary began, not surprisingly, with a description of the CFA process itself,
highlighting the participatory role of local residents and describing the insights that the
collaborative gained about residents' needs and desires related to the availability of fresh,
local organic produce in South LA. Subsequent updates and progress reports for this
grant provided descriptions of the partnerships that were formed to achieve the proposed
outcomes – including with local small food-based business owners, local public schools
and other community organizations. Detailed statistics related to agricultural
productivity, outreach efforts and produce sales were also meticulously outlined. Further,
descriptions of the significant disparities faced by residents in NU's community of
practice served as a guiding rationale for why this project spoke to the stated goals of the
CFPCG. Notably, a key portion of the report – entitled “Target Audiences” – read much
like a public health policy brief as opposed to a broader statement of political philosophy:
The South Central Los Angeles (SCLA) community suffers from
significant environmental, social and economic inequities that impact the
health and well being of residents. The community is 64%
Mexican/Central American, 32% African American, 2% white, and 2%
Asian/PI/Native American/Other. SCLA has the highest rate of poverty in
the county. 38% of households live at or below the federal poverty level
and 47% of children under five live in poverty. More than 70% of students
qualify for free or reduced price school meals. The high school graduation
rate is the lowest in the city (35%) and the unemployment rate is the
highest (14%). Many of our young people who do find work are limited to

187

minimum wage jobs because of lack of education, training and
encouragement...Only 28% of adults in SCLA surveyed by the DPH
reported that the fresh fruits and vegetables where they shop are high
quality, and only 13% consume 5+ servings of fruits and vegetables a day
(both the lowest in the county). As a result, residents of SCLA have the
highest rates of obesity in adults 35.5% and children 28.9%. Adults have
the highest rate of diabetes 12% and hypertension 29%, and are three
times more likely to die from diabetes than those living in the wealthiest
area of the city.

NU staff members were quick to argue that their work had never been defined by
the types of funds that were available, and that their mission guided their work instead.
Still, the evidence demonstrates that, while the mission remained the guide, NU did not
operate somewhere outside of the funding structures that existed to support community-
based efforts. For several years, NU was out on the forefront of community-based food
justice issues, in many respects providing a model for how similar activities might be
conducted elsewhere. Yet, their practices had also been integrated with a broader
advanced liberal culture of governmental public health programming and norms of audit-
based evaluation. Indeed, as Banet-Weiser (2012) pointed out in her discussion of today’s
contemporary brand culture: “realms of culture and society once considered outside the
official economy – like politics – are harnessed, reshaped, and made legible in economic
terms.” As evidenced by the NU’s CFPCG proposal and report updates, NU's
programmatic activity was at the very least a co-construction that remained influenced by
funding norms and economic realities.
This push and pull was reflective of a broader organizational communication
ecology that served to construct NU's philosophy and action – key elements of which are
outlined in Table 7, below.

188

Table 7: Elements of NU's organizational communication ecology that guided its
philosophy and action as a food justice non-profit organization

Philosophical Foundations Community Program
Praxis
External Influences
Community economic
development

Freirian educational
approach

Revolutionary
Intercommunalism

Social health perspective
Critical education and skill-
development for youth and
adults

Environmental and food
justice

Job creation in low-income
communities of color

Social justice partnerships
and alliance-building
Demands of audit society
and brand culture

Practices and preferences of
outside partners

Priorities of funding
agencies

Public health and urban
planning research

It began with thinkers like Huey Newton and Paulo Freire, integrated the lived
experience of community residents, and put those ideas into conversation with
mainstream discourses in public health and policy. From there, statistical understandings
of concentrated disadvantage and health disparities – the lingua franca of the
bureaucratic, administrative and brand-conscious establishments that were charged with
distributing funds – became central to NU's public rationale for their work. Further, the
fastidious monitoring of community reach, agricultural production and produce sales
became markers of impact and progress that served as continual evidence that NU
properly audited its activities. NU could therefore demonstrate that it was on its way
toward the management of a self-sustainable enterprise – one day, they hoped to no
longer need direct governmental support, an outcome that both conservative limited-
government proponents as well as those with philosophical roots in the Black Panther
Party might all see as an ideal situation for the long-term. So, while NU at once went to
great lengths to place local and cultural knowledge, history and experiential

189

understandings of systemic injustice at the forefront of the organization's work, this was
almost always married with a more traditional public health frame as they went about
their fundraising and programmatic activities. Instead of standing in total opposition to
dominant forces in public health practice, then, their work was instead in constant
discussion, and quite often in collaboration, with those mainstream standards of research
and practice.
Setting Priorities and Constructing Boundaries in Funding and Partnerships
The complicated and sometimes contradictory landscape of food justice activity
represents a site of interaction between radical political activists, everyday community
residents and youth, and power-brokers in mainstream public health and policy practice.
NU worked to integrate these ideas within an organizational communication ecology
while maintaining an historically grounded and place-based ideological backbone.
However, with this kind of collaboration also came tension, as well as a need for NU to
consistently evaluate the types of partnerships and funding agreements in which the
organization felt comfortable engaging. Were certain types of partnerships off limits?
Were some funding agencies considered out of bounds and entirely incommensurable
with the organization's guiding ideology? Further, might NU play a role in actually
reshaping the practices of outside partners and funding agencies, such that these groups
could come to better understand and support the visions and values of the food justice
movement?
Several examples from my fieldwork and interviews speak to NU's consistent
wrestling with the moral weight of these types of connections. Together, the examples
demonstrate an interactive process of priority-setting and boundary-construction that

190

helped to guide the organization's actions. In the process of building and maintaining key
partnerships, members of NU checked-in with themselves and each other to see if their
current work was advancing their broader mission. They recognized that not all
partnerships would be perfect, but looked for opportunities to educate others about the
importance of the organization's community-based and race-conscious approach. In other
instances, they put up a heavy guard, concerned about being used as a tokenistic prop or
marketing tool, especially in a popular cultural context in which food system issues had
recently gained a salient broad-based appeal. Table 8, below, summarizes the central
value priorities helped to guide NU’s work on one side, with a related set of
organizational boundaries and cautions that were constructed by the group in order to
preserve these very priorities listed on the other side.
Table 8: Organizational Value Priorities and Related Boundaries Constructed by
Neighborhood United

Organizational Value Priorities Organizational Boundaries & Cautions
Community and youth participation and
management
Resist outside and expert “truth” that does
not integrate community knowledge
Critical Education and Free Speech Avoid co-optation by corporate and public
entities who do not embody value system
Economic and environmental sustainability Do not pursue funds that distract from
broader, long-term social transformation
mission
Race-conscious approach Beware of partnerships in which people-of-
color are not in positions of power

At a brainstorming meeting to discuss raising funds for a Youth Food Justice
Network conference that NU was set to host, an example of this boundary construction
took place. Running the meeting was the Youth Coordinator, Kenneth, and we were

191

joined by a board member and several volunteers, including a young woman who was an
undergraduate student at a local university. My field notes are excerpted, below:
The young woman threw out a potential funding source: “I was doing
some research and saw that Cargill gives out grants for this kind of thing.”
Kenneth replied with a wry smile and a furrowed brow: “Cargill? I'm
pretty sure they're one of the Big Six.”
She responded: “Oh, ok. I just saw that they do fund these kinds of
projects.”
Kenneth: “Yeah, I don't think we'd want to work with Cargill.”
The conversation moved onto a new topic.

In referring to the “Big Six”, Kenneth was making mention of the six major
chemical corporations that dominate the seed, pesticide and agricultural biotechnology
market – Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont. Cargill is actually not
part of that “Big Six”, as it is in fact a food processing and agricultural commodity
trading corporation that, according to Forbes, is the largest private company in the United
States. Despite not being part of that aforementioned group, Cargill shares with them a
history of environmental, economic and human rights exploitation through its
transnational activities in the food system. That was enough to disqualify the corporation
from contention as a funder and partner of NU – the organization would not see it as in
accordance with its mission to align with a private corporation that so fundamentally
differed from its own social justice approach. Not only would NU not want to be reliant
on the funds of such an organization, but so too would they be concerned about being
featured as part of a Cargill corporate social responsibility campaign, an instance that
could serve to damage NU's credibility as a food justice organization at the same time as
it would prop up what they conceptualized as an unethical actor in the food system.
While setting up the boundary against Cargill seemed to come easy for Kenneth,
NU lacked any explicit policy about the types of organizations whose support they would

192

be interested in accepting. Different types of potential funders came with a different level
of scrutiny on the part of NU. For a group like Cargill, it appeared to be a dead-end. For
other private funders and foundations, NU staff engaged in a deliberative process of
interrogation in which they tried to explore the aims of the funding agency, to get a sense
of whether it was “dirty money”, and to think through the extent to which such
partnerships would be in line with their guiding principles. Interestingly, staff members
tended to place government funding at a lower level of scrutiny, despite their many
critiques of governmental policy in the agricultural, social and economic domains. To
NU, government funding sources offered an opportunity to demonstrate the proper role of
local, state and federal support. It was, in many respects, the type of ideal collaboration
that Jaja had outlined when writing about Community Economic Development in the
pages of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. Responding to a question I
posed, in which I asked her to explain how NU could levy criticisms against the work of
a group like the USDA while simultaneously being supported by USDA-derived grants,
Gretchen offered the following explanation:
Why not take it (USDA funding)? And then you can be in a position to
say, “Look at what you can do that is good.” That's what the money
should go to...So we're going to take it and we're going to show that this is
what the government can do, and this is what the government can be
investing in and creating.

Gretchen and other NU staffers were sure to point out that funding from an
organization like USDA did not mean that they would withhold criticisms of such an
institution. Indeed, especially with a government operation that was far removed from the
grassroots work of a group like NU, speaking out while taking USDA funds was both
conceivable and necessary. In many ways, NU staff saw the ability to speak out against

193

systemic inequality as a central organizational priority, one that went back to the
organization's very foundations, as Gretchen continued:
At the same time, that doesn't mean we're not going to speak out against
USDA. We're not going to shy away from saying that the commodity
programs are whack. We're going to say it. I guess that's one thing – the
money doesn't silence us. I think NU, the people who are part of it, who
have been a part of it, and the history of where it comes from, is rooted in
a righteousness. So your money doesn't buy our silence, or it doesn't buy
going along with some craziness.

Throughout the history of their many partnerships, NU had situations in which
conflict forced them to take some action. Some examples of these conflict-oriented
stances were described in the previous chapter, as NU took action to protect their
interests in the face of what they saw as unqualified intrusions on the part of the
Teaching Gardens and Groundswell. When NU engaged in these types of conflicts, their
argument generally followed that such acts were necessary as a way to pursue the key
organizational priorities that were rooted in their place-based approach. In particular, NU
saw it as necessary to take action when they believed their race-conscious approach to
building a self-sustaining model of youth-led food justice coming under threat.
In a conversation about this issue, Maya pointed to a report by the Greenlining
Foundation that examined philanthropic investment in minority-led non-profits.
Analyzing grant-making by the twenty-five largest national independent foundations, as
well as the ten largest in California, a recent report by that group declared that while
there has been an increase in recent years in terms of giving to minority-led non-profits,
the report shows that they, “continue to see a great disparity in minority giving among
the sampled foundations. We also continue to see that minority-led organizations
consistently receive a greater percentage of all grants than they do percentage of grant

194

dollars, meaning that minority-led organizations are receiving smaller grants than
mainstream organizations” (Gonzalez-Rivera et al., 2008). Maya called attention to this
report as a way to demonstrate that, without continued pressure from groups like NU,
such disparities would remain. Further, with such disparities in place, the organization's
broader social justice and social transformation goals could not come to fruition. As
Maya explained:
I just fundamentally believe that, for any movement to have validity, it has
to be led by (people of color). And defined by (people of color), even
more so. You know, because you can put a couple people of color in
leadership positions, but that don't mean shit. Right? So I say that very
purposefully – led by, but also defined by people of color. But not only by
people of color, but by the needs – really, it's more than even people of
color, but by the needs of those who most need to be served by that
movement. You know, so whether that be people of color or whether it be
low-income family farmers, or whether it be child farm laborers, or
whatever it is, it needs to be defined by those people.

Members of NU argued that the presence of people of color at the forefront of
social justice organizing, broadly speaking, and food justice efforts, in particular, had
been made even more important by the recent public salience of food system issues in
popular culture. They had mixed feelings about the public figures that had emerged in
recent years as spokespersons for the food movements – notably folks like Michael
Pollan and Michelle Obama. The public attention brought with it more opportunities and
interest from potential funding agencies. At the same time, the attention also brought
with it a number of well-funded and professionally-staffed non-profit groups – American
Heart Association included – who showed a new interest in food and agriculture, as well
as a number of well-meaning potential partners – Groundswell, for one – who sometimes
lacked a full understanding of the community in which groups like NU's work was
situated.

195

NU staff insisted that they were eager to work with funding agencies and other
partners who were sincerely interested in coming into the community from the outside in
order to facilitate long-term and sustainable change. But the partnerships needed to be on
NU's terms, as Maya described: “If they allow us to maintain our dignity and they
understand that we're not going to jump through hoops just because they say to jump
through hoops, then we can have a long-term partnership.” When a partnership did not
proceed in a way that respected the people-of-color led approach that NU prioritized,
critical interventions were put into action. Some funding agencies specifically built in the
space for conversations like these to take place, and NU staff took advantage of the
opportunity to speak their minds when they felt it needed to be done. They saw these
types of actions as setting the organization apart from others who were more averse to
conflict. Yet, with their broader social transformation goals in mind, they felt compelled
to do so – not just for NU, but for broader people-of-color-led social justice efforts.
Gretchen described the process:
There's been many times over the years when we've had foundations
who've worked with us, or done things with us in certain ways that were
just not the right way to do it. And we've come back and said, “No, that
wasn't right.” And I think a lot of people don't. They just say, “I don't want
to say anything, because hopefully next year we'll get to do it.” And that's
not how we roll. If we're going to say something that is true, it's not just
for us, but for other organizations in terms of how you work with non-
profits, And if you decide you don't want to give us money because of it,
ok.

Still, NU remained strategic in their initiation of conflict-oriented discourse,
always weighing the benefits of such an intervention with the time, effort and potential
risks that the action would entail. While strong and principled in their approach, they
were also pragmatic about the possibilities for change that existed when some of their

196

partnerships did not proceed optimally. Ultimately, they found themselves asking
whether NU could still pursue the ideals of its broader mission while working in a less
than ideal situation. Indeed, the following chapter will provide some greater detail about
NU's frustration with certain collaborative partners from the public health and medical
research domain. Despite some major epistemological differences, at times, NU chose to
find ways to work around their divergent approaches rather than call for an end to the
partnership all together and risk losing funding for what they saw as an important
community program. In essence, they could stomach less-than-ideal circumstances as
long as these were not a central driver of their work for the long-term.
These tensions speak to a bigger issue, one that has loomed large for NU since its
very beginnings, and which has a history that goes deep into its Panther roots. How can
the organization best pursue its goals while working in a landscape of funders and
partners who do not always share the NU's view of food justice? Can they maintain their
social justice goals while interacting with individuals and organizations who have
different visions of the future? Can they prove to be an authentic voice for community
concerns and develop a sustainable model for the future? Does it detract from the broader
movement for food justice if these hybrid coalitions are in place? The answer seems to be
an uneasy mix of yes and no. For one, NU has always stood on guard, aware that their
mission could be co-opted by larger forces, forces who might not understand the
importance of their race-conscious and place-based approach, and who might use NU as
a prop to advance counterproductive aims. Jaja spoke to this issue:
I think it's a tightrope walk, it is. You can be easily co-opted. They have a
history of co-opting. So you have to be true to your mission and your
spirits. But it's not impossible...You're fighting a system that just naturally
attempts to co-opt and dilute any kind of revolutionary fervor in terms of

197

real change. So there's a tension there. And it's just part of the
environment. So we just have to recognize that.

Staying on guard, recognizing the potential for co-option and intervening when
deemed necessary was part of NU's strategy of constructing boundaries in order to keep
its mission moving forward. But the organization resisted the idea of always remaining
reactive, and instead developed a plan for self-sustainability that they saw as the ultimate
outcome of their efforts in South LA. It would be through their social enterprise, which
will be detailed in greater depth in the following chapter, that NU believed they could
more proactively work to achieve their goals of building “a sustainable food system from
the ground up in South Central LA while training local youth, creating real jobs and
building the local economy.” As proud as the organization was to be able to bring in
substantial grants to support its programs, they looked forward to the day when their
operations were completely sustainable – socially, economically and environmentally. As
Maya put it: “It's about self determination. It's about creating income that ultimately isn't
dependent on any foundation or any funder or their whims.”
Conclusion
While NU's model for social change differed in many ways from the vision
proffered by the original BPP, the organization still saw its practice as a revolutionary
act. For NU, developing programs for a type of “survival pending revolution”, as David
Hilliard had once articulated, did not reflect the politics of possibility in the current
moment. Instead, they followed a tack closer to that articulated by Huey Newton, who
argued decades before that you must “contradict the system while you are in it until it's a
transformed into a new system.” Grounded in its revolutionary philosophy and its

198

commitment to community engagement, NU worked to build a model for social
transformation through the medium of food. Operating in the context of advanced
liberalism, the organization's communication ecology took on a varied set of elements
from within that very system it looked to transform. Their predicament was emblematic
of the broader brand culture described by Banet-Weiser (2012), who suggested that the
ambivalence that tends to emerge from such interactions is not only part and parcel of
contemporary activism, but also a potentially productive and generative force. Similarly,
McClintock (2013) argued that the entanglement of food justice efforts with neoliberal
processes should neither be overlooked by advocates of the approach nor seen as a
disqualification by critics; if we fail to understand such contradictions as internal and
inherent, he suggested, “we risk undermining urban agriculture’s transformative
potential” (1).
Indeed, imbricated in complicated and sometimes contradictory networks of
interaction, NU's work was hardly reflective of a pure and simply community-based
authenticity. Did the nature of grant funding, and the threat of co-optation from above,
call into question NU's stated mission to “foster the creation of communities actively
working to address the inequalities and systemic barriers that make sustainable
communities and self-reliant life-styles unattainable”? My research suggests that a
balance in this respect was tentatively accomplished through a mix of strategies. NU's
work was certainly influenced by the priorities of grant funding agencies. However, in
devising a plan for programmatic activity, the organization kept its mission as a guide, as
they set priorities and constructed boundaries that allowed NU to keep the organization's
long-term goals at the forefront of their efforts. In the case of NU, the complex blend that

199

composed their communication ecology was ultimately fundamental to the establishment
of their agenda for shifting values, reshaping institutions and moving forward
community-based social change. The hybridity of their communication ecology allowed
them to simultaneously tell a story of Black Panther-oriented social justice activism to the
community members of South LA, at the same time as they told a story of systematic
community capacity-building through alternative food initiatives to funders like the
USDA. Indeed, the journey from the Black Panthers to the USDA was fraught with
ambivalence, but the ever-present tension within the organization’s communication
ecology proved to be a driving force of its evolution and strategic action.

200

CHAPTER 5
FOOD JUSTICE ORGANIZING AND
THE NEIGHBORHOOD COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Cheryl, a long-time board member with Neighborhood United and a local public
school teacher, reflected on the challenge that the organization faced in its work to
motivate community action toward food justice. “Building a critical consciousness is
hard,” she said. “Critical consciousness takes years. It's grassroots organizing at its most
fundamental. You try to start to talk to someone about how they see the world – it's not a
one-shot deal. It's not even a two or three or four-shot deal. It's the kind of long-term
work that requires money and it requires personnel.”
This chapter continues the networked ethnography of Neighborhood United by
delving into the organization's community-level activities. It asks: how does
Neighborhood United go about building a level of “critical consciousness” among local
residents, such that NU can be a force to motivate structural and value-based changes
within the local community? The work remains guided by the communication ecology
approach, as it outlines the varied sets of communicative connections and partnerships
that the organization constructed as a way to achieve its localized movement goals. It also
integrates theoretical principles from Communication Infrastructure Theory (Ball-
Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006) to demonstrate the ways in
which NU's actions leveraged the neighborhood storytelling network and drew from
central elements of the neighborhood communication action context in these efforts.

201

Through its communication ecology, NU attempted to build connections between and
among local residents, local organizations and geo-ethnic media as a way to transform
spaces of South LA and build critical consciousness among local youth and adults.
The chapter provides a set of brief, intersecting case studies that are illustrative of
the key community-based activities that NU cultivated in recent years. It documents
several of the organization's primary strategies for carrying out grassroots organizing,
youth development, critical community education, agricultural cultivation, and the
building of a sustainable social enterprise. Consistent with previous accounts of the
organization's work, the chapter also demonstrates how these efforts were never fully
separate from the initiatives of institutional and individual allies who were not “of the
community” themselves. NU, I argue, worked hard to establish itself as an organization
that speaks with and for the community in which it operates. In doing so, the group often
constructed its organizational identity in opposition to dominant norms in public health
practice. This ethnographic account, however, demonstrates that a sharp juxtaposition
between “the community”, on one side, and those who are not “of the community”, on
the other, is not fully reflective of the reality. Instead, NU's efforts and strategies
remained embedded in tangled networks of relationships, as NU found itself compelled to
navigate varied sets of philosophical, organizational, and fiscal resources while still
maintaining a firm commitment to its guiding mission. The networked ethnography and
the communication ecology approach offer useful tools to continue to explore these
relationships, and the findings tell us a great deal about the potentials and opportunities
for motivating community-based social justice from within the advanced liberal
landscape.

202

Communication Infrastructure Theory and the Ecology of Community Organizing

The communication ecology approach that has guided this dissertation project
draws heavily from the framework of Communication Infrastructure Theory (Ball-
Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). This chapter focuses
specifically on communicative dynamics that are centered at the meso-level of the
community in which NU's work is primarily situated, as well as at micro-level of local
residents and their interpersonal networks. It is at this level of analysis that
Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) provides a solid framework for
understanding the workings of the organization's communication ecology.
Figure 7: Conceptual Model of Communication Infrastructure Theory

203

In Chapter 1, I provided a full overview of CIT, so only a brief review is in order
at this time. Figure 7, above, provides a model of the communication infrastructure
framework. In short, CIT calls for an attention to the “storytelling resources” that exist
within communities, and argues that local storytelling about neighborhood issues is
central to encouraging civic engagement and promoting community-level health. A
community's communication infrastructure has two primary elements – the neighborhood
storytelling network and the communication action context. The storytelling network is
made up of three primary neighborhood storytellers – local residents in their interpersonal
networks, community-based organizations, and local or ethnic media (called geo-ethnic
media). Fundamentally, it is when local organizations, geo-ethnic media and local
residents all come to focus on the same neighborhood story – for instance, on improving
healthy food access – that community-level action can be encouraged and expected on
that issue. A strong storytelling network – characterized by dynamic links between and
among these three key neighborhood storytellers – has been shown to encourage feelings
and behaviors of neighborhood belonging (Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001), civic
engagement and collective efficacy (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). CIT has also been
shown to serve as a useful framework to guide the design of action-oriented campaigns
that aim to reduce health disparities (Wilkin, 2013).
Importantly, this local storytelling network resides within a broader
communication action context. This action context encompasses pieces of the built
environment (such as parks, health care facilities or streets) as well as the social
environment (such as the quality of intergroup relations or residents' relationship with
law enforcement). Features of the communication action context can either encourage or

204

constrain neighborhood storytelling. Further, the relationship between the storytelling
network and communication action context remains dynamic, such that the storytelling
network can encourage changes to the communication action context, while the action
context can also be a force to encourage changes in the workings of the storytelling
network.
Working with my colleagues from the Metamorphosis Project, I have written
elsewhere about the ways in which urban community organizers, through their
communication ecologies, work as natural implementers of the communication
infrastructure approach. Drawing from interviews, focus groups and other methods of
engaged scholarship with social change-oriented community organizers from the South
Los Angeles area, we demonstrated how these practitioners tend to bring with them an
ecological understanding of neighborhood-level communication dynamics into their
everyday practices: “They worked to build trust with residents and families through
interpersonal connections, drew from a number of mediated sources to gain information
and raise awareness about their work, and collaborated with other like-minded
organizations who worked toward similar goals. They also saw great value in building
and maintaining community spaces that could be sites of this type of neighborhood
storytelling” (Broad et al., Under Review). Given the goal-oriented nature of the
communication ecology concept, those practitioners also drew distinctions between the
communicative connections and partnerships that could help motivate everyday change at
the level of the community, on one hand, and the connections that connected them to
more macro-level networks of action – including major funders and the mass media – on
the other.

205

Neighborhood United followed a similar communicative path in the organization's
efforts to, “build a sustainable food system from the ground up in South Central LA,
while training local youth, creating real jobs and building the local economy.” At their
foundation, members showed themselves to be grassroots community organizers,
working to share their story and mission with local community residents. They were also
educators and facilitators, helping to build skills and provide employment opportunities
for residents by bringing local and sustainable agricultural production and sales to South
LA. So, too, were they organizational connectors, serving as a central node in an inter-
organizational network that brought together social justice organizations, research
institutions, minority farmers, public institutions, and organizational allies from both the
local area and beyond. The organization's goal-oriented, grassroots community
organizing communication ecology was constructed through storytelling across
interpersonal, mediated and inter-organizational communication platforms, all of which
were situated in the spaces and places of the South LA region.
Subsequent sections of this chapter demonstrate this community-based
communication ecology at work. To be clear, I do not attempt to encompass the whole of
NU's community-based activities and connections – for an organization with such a
variety of programs, doing so would require a full volume in itself. Instead, I focus on
several intersecting case studies that serve as illustrative examples and point to key
themes in their approach. I begin with a discussion of NU's youth development and
community education programs, continue with a description of their agricultural
cultivation strategies, follow with an outline of their Earth Day festival, then conclude
with a discussion of their emerging social enterprise business.

206

Connecting with the Community – Youth Development & Neighborhood Education
As NU worked to use food as a medium to advance broader social justice, they
focused on “the community” as their locus of action. Earlier in this work, I drew from
Rose (1999) to argue that “the community” represents the logical (if limited) space for
the maximization of social justice within the contemporary advance liberal context. Yet,
the term community itself is highly contested and polysemic in its own right. Scholars
like Benedict Anderson (1983) have articulated the imagined nature of the community
concept, arguing that while some communities are based on face-to-face interaction,
many are socially constructed through discourse and imagination. Raymond Williams
(1976) outlined the complexity of the community term, and argued that, “unlike all other
terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used
unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term” (p. 76,
emphasis in original). In public presentations, private conversations, training sessions and
workshops, NU staff members consistently pointed to their work as speaking to the needs
and interests of “our community”. What did they mean with the use of the term? The staff
generally found little need to explicitly state the actual meaning of “our community”.
With that said, it was clear that its use had geographic, economic, and racial implications.
It referred primarily to lower-income people of color who resided in the general domain
of NU's work area. This material focus in the local South LA area, however, was
simultaneously combined with a more geographically-dispersed and imagined
community construct, one that emerged from NU's solidarity with other low-income
communities of color that shared South LA's history of social, environmental and food-

207

based injustice. In an interview with NU staffer Charles, he described what he meant
when he used the term:
Specifically, community is like, just people who I live amongst. The
regular mother, father, son, daughter, you know, student, high school kid
that I live amongst. That lives around here. You know, I'm walking down
the street or whatever, and I hope that these are people we work with in
the neighborhood.

NU was committed to this geographic focus in their work, as they believed that
their organization had to build a successful model for community-level change in the
food system before it could be scaled up to larger domains, which they hoped it would at
some point in the future.
32
However, they did see their work as part of a broader struggle
that went beyond their Los Angeles area. In the eyes of NU, systemic food justice issues
plagued communities of color across the nation, and it was time that these communities
were able to have a bigger say in how these injustices could be remedied. Maya explained
this perspective in an interview:
Unfortunately, the people who are most impacted by issues of food equity,
you know, are people of color. That's just, you know, I don't need to tell
you – I can give you 20 million statistics but you can find them yourself
too, and that's just a fact, right?...Whereas most of the people who are the
decision-makers and the power-brokers when it comes to decisions about
food systems stuff are not people of color, right? And they're certainly not
from the communities most impacted by those decisions, in the power
structures as they exist.

With this broader context as a framework for action, the thrust of NU's efforts
remained situated at the local geographic community. With their Black Panther Party
roots still as a guide, they worked to develop a series of community programs that would
provide an opportunity for residents to build skills, develop critical consciousness, and
meet the everyday needs of community members who lived in an unhealthy food

32
This topic is the focus of Chapter 6.

208

environment. Key programs included bringing pre-school children into NU's urban farm,
building gardens and integrating food and agricultural education into local primary
schools, training high school-aged youth as interns and apprentices employed by the
organization, and working with adults and senior citizens in public gardening and
cooking workshops. Thinking back to the organizational comparisons made in Chapter 3,
this intensive life-cycle strategy of community engagement represented a clear counter to
some of the other types of organizing around community-based food injustice. Indeed,
NU operated from a belief that simple and episodic engagement with gardening or
cooking, for instance, would not be enough to overturn the long-term and deeply
systemic injustice that had taken root in the South LA food system. Instead, their
programs aimed to develop a community-based alternative that brought together youth,
adults, senior citizens, and key institutions to attempt to transform the local food
landscape toward greater equity and sustainability. Once again, Maya articulated this idea
during a community workshop:
The issues are not simple – they're systemic and a result of things planners
have done, policies that have been made...That's what our belief is. That
it's systemic, there are systems based reasons around why access to
healthy and affordable food in our community is not as good as other
places...Just like the problem is systemic, we need systemic solutions to
these problems...So what we've created with community members is a
series of programs to confront those issues systemically.

Growing Healthy
NU's efforts to build skills and critical consciousness among residents of the
South LA region began with an entrepreneurial and committed organizational work ethic.
Staff members put in long working hours and there was an additional organizational
expectation that they would volunteer at various community programs above and beyond

209

their paid hourly wage. Working with NU was not simply a job, but it was engagement in
a movement, and those who were not committed to that movement for food justice in
South LA were unlikely to last long as members of the organization. Fundamentally, the
organization believed that this movement must begin with the youth of the South LA
community. In an interview, NU staff member Charles articulated their reason for
focusing on youth as a primary component of their community building strategy:
That's who's going to lead the world. Those are the people that we have to
impact...At this point in time in the world, they're the ones being sold this
package of failure. Our community is literally dying, because of food and
all these other things. We gotta change it, and they're the ones who are
going to be around to do it.

NU's “Growing Healthy” program represented the organization's efforts to reach
out to the youngest in the community as a way to embed an understanding of health, food
and agriculture from the earliest of ages. Partnering with a nearby pre-school, NU staff
members could be seen on a sunny June day parading around their mini-urban farm with
lines of twenty four-year-olds from a nearby day-care center in tow. The children were
tasked with helping the staff pick the vegetables that would then go into a salad that they
would make together, all the while chanting: “We are the salad pickers!” NU staff also
led the children in an art project under the shade of trees, and the children proudly held
up their crayon-drawn works of flowers and trees for a picture. When it came time for the
salad taste test, the results were more mixed – a few declared that it was one of the best
things they ever tasted, while others remained less enthused, leaving some fresh
blackberries and greens to be dumped in the compost bin. The day-care teachers
remarked that it was always a fun way to spend an afternoon, and a great way to get the
kids outside and active. With that said, NU staff remained realistic about the impact that

210

an occasional salad pick would have on these kids – it was a fun and useful experience,
and a great way to demonstrate to young children where food comes from and the
importance of fruits and vegetables for health. But given NU's systemic perspective, an
exercise such as this was hardly enough to motivate social transformation on its own.
The engagement with youth, then, did not stop there, as “Growing Healthy” also
extended into partnerships with a nearby elementary and middle school. NU's work at
South LA Elementary, for instance, had been ongoing for nearly a decade, as they had
worked to build a demonstration garden on school grounds, integrated food and
agricultural curriculum into a weekly class with a selected teacher each year, and
collaborated with the directors of the after-school program to get kids working in the
garden. In all, NU connected to several hundred students through these various programs
on a yearly basis. The school's principal, Hector, compared NU to a “stealth jet” in their
work at the school. They would come in and do their work – building gardens,
beautifying the school, working with the children – with their activities often out of sight
of the very busy principal. But he saw the products of their efforts all around the school
grounds, and he was gracious for what he saw as an element of doing, “God's work – the
giving of self.”
Hector pointed to several concrete changes in food-related attitudes and behaviors
that had occurred at South LA Elementary, many with direct influence from NU's work.
“Kids don't really see healthy restaurants around here,” he said. “They don't see the need
to eat healthy. NU brings that education to say we can plant our own things, we can feed
the mind, the soul.” Hector, himself, had suffered from high cholesterol and had been
hospitalized a few years back, but had changed his diet to eat more fresh vegetables and

211

less red meat on the recommendation of NU staff. He tried to model that behavior for his
student body, and went onto institute a “junk food-free zone” in the school. “Kids still
sneak it in,” he said. “Across the street there are the guys at the ice cream trucks, selling
Hot Cheetos. Kids are kids, but we try to keep that stuff off and try to bring healthier
alternatives.” As a counter to the junk food vendors, NU set up its own stand out front of
the school selling locally grown produce. And, as another example of the changing
consciousness around food within the school, Hector pointed to the changed menu of the
faculty's holiday brunch. In the most recent December gathering, the familiar croissants
and candied baked goods were replaced with a fresh fruit and vegetable smoothie bar:
“We pushed the healthier alternative and people are grateful.”
With its connection to young children through school-based programs, NU
worked to integrate its story of community-based food justice into the interpersonal
networks of youth and their families, as well as school faculty and staff. These efforts
also worked to reshape a key element of the communication action context, as it clearly
turned local schools into sites of discursive interaction around food justice issues. NU's
communication ecology thus strategically constructed dynamic links between the
organization, residents, and this central community institution as a building block of its
broader food movement goals. Of course, the hard work of the “stealth jet” that was the
staff of NU had always been at the heart of these efforts. Yet, consistent with the
networked ethnographic approach, it remains important to keep in mind the ways in
which allies from outside of the organization, and even outside of its community of
service, also facilitated the functioning of these community-based activities.

212

For instance, in the case of “Growing Healthy”, NU received multiple grants from
the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), totaling approximately $75,000 in
fiscal support, which helped them pay for staffing and supplies in these agricultural and
educational efforts. The curriculum taught within the schools had been influenced, in
part, by the priorities of the EPA. In these settings, NU placed a particular emphasis on
the ways in which organic food production and consumption can also reduce exposure to
lead and pesticides, as well as how it might mitigate risks related to climate change.
While these were certainly issues that NU cared about independent of the EPA, the
issues' prominence was amplified on account of the funding agency's priorities. By all
accounts, the partnership proved to be beneficial for both of these parties, and NU was
recently honored with an EPA Environmental Award for its work advancing
sustainability within an EPA-designated environmental justice community.
From the Ground Up

As valuable as NU believed their engagement with pre-school and primary school
residents of the community was, they saw an even greater opportunity to forge lasting
relationships and build vital skills among slightly older South LA youth. Their “From the
Ground Up” program was developed with the intention to train mostly high school-aged
youth in all aspects of NU's operations – including agricultural cultivation, retail and
office work, as well as community-based research. For two-to-three months in seasonal
rotations, youth interns would train in cohorts of about ten, and the standouts of the
groups would often stay on board to take part in organizational apprenticeships that
would last from one-to-two years. The program coordinator, Kenneth, recruited interns
by making presentations at local schools, through connections with other youth-based

213

community programs, and through the interpersonal networks of youth alumni's friends
and family. They were paid a small stipend, educated about the social justice mission of
NU, and expected to participate as contributing members of the organization. Importantly
to NU staff, the youth were not simply there to learn about the food system, although
agricultural and food-related skills were a major part of the curriculum. Rather, they were
also expected to develop the critical thinking skills that would allow them to analyze key
cultural and social issues that shaped their lives, as well as to build the practical skills that
would make them more successful as students and workers moving forward. “Food is the
vehicle to do things this organization has always been interested in doing,” Kenneth
described at a meeting with parents of youth interns. “We use it as way for self-
improvement, as a way for youth to be improving themselves. It's about things like
understanding what it's like to have a job, to be accountable, to have to show up on time.”
Indeed, it was clear in the curriculum and activities of “From the Ground Up” that
both critical thinking skills and basic work-related skills were seen as much more
fundamental building blocks than developing the youth into “foodies”. Staff members
consistently pointed to the historic disinvestment and oppression of the South LA
community as the reason for this focus. As always, rooted in both a place-based
understanding of the South LA community and its challenges, as well as in a commitment
to the imagined community of historically marginalized people of color, NU expressed
that cultivating these characteristics in youth was central to any effort to build a model
for structural transformation in South LA and beyond.
In practice, this meant a heavy dose of storytelling between and among the youth
and the staff of NU. Through “dialogue sessions” with the youth – who were made up

214

almost exclusively of African-Americans and individuals of Mexican or Central
American descent – they delved into the interns' everyday challenges, beliefs,
misconceptions and visions of change. Maya explained:
It's really designed to get them to think about, what is culture? What is
food culture? How does it relate to their history? And what is their food
culture now? And why has it shifted so much from what it was historically
to what it is now? So maybe historically it was whatever it was, but now
it's, you know, chips and soda. What has created that change? What are
the things that have acted upon it? And if they wanted it to be different,
what's the reality, what can they do now to make it different?

NU was able to boast about several youth success stories of interns who made
their way through “From the Ground Up”, gained valuable critical and practical skills,
and went onto be productive and engaged young adults. In conversations with youth
interns, they pointed to skills gained around agricultural work, public speaking, critical
thinking and more. Not surprisingly, however, the program did not prove to be a fully
transformational experience for all involved, and there were instances in which some
youth interns were difficult to motivate, proved unresponsive to the message regarding
the importance of healthy food and the quest for social justice, and ultimately did not
follow through entirely on their obligations. Kenneth, as the coordinator of the program,
attributed these setbacks to several influences, including a broader social and peer
environment that was not always supportive of this type of engaged activity, as well as a
need for the organization to consistently improve its curriculum and programming to
better suit the needs of the youth.
For many of those who did make it through the program, however, the impacts on
youth development and skill-building were clear. They saw NU as providing an authentic
voice for the community in South LA – a neighborhood that had seen its fair share of

215

service organizations promise to improve the quality of life for local residents. Sabina, a
life-long South LA resident who went through an internship program before eventually
becoming a member of the staff, reflected on how meaningful it was to her that NU staff
members, including the Executive Director, had actually lived in South LA. “NU is
based, strategically, they're based in South Central. They're really working for food
justice where we need it. In South LA for South LA. I really like that about them.”
NU staff and successful youth interns also insisted that a key part of the approach
was to demonstrate that the knowledge and skills were located inside each of them. They
saw their collaborative efforts as an attempt to reclaim several key cultural and social
competencies that had been gradually diminished across the community due to the area's
history of racial, economic and environmental injustice. “Living a healthy lifestyle hasn't
always been disconnected from their culture. A lot of youth, their reality is, they do eat
fries, burgers, eating unhealthy.” Kenneth argued. “But, ok – where do most of those
things come from? Corn. Where does corn come from? Corn comes from the natives who
were living on this land before it was taken from them. It's having them connecting with
themselves, understanding where they're from. Healthy living is not something that's
alien to them in connection to their history and who they are.” Through local storytelling
with youth, as well as activities that instilled a strong work ethic, NU worked to change
the narrative within the minds of South LA's young residents about who they were and
who they could become. They saw youth as fundamental building blocks of new
institutional formations within the South LA area and beyond, as they would help
propagate those critical thinking and practical skills through their own interpersonal

216

networks, as well as into the organizations and workplaces that they would now be
prepared to join.
Community Knowledge and Cultural Difference in the Garden Gateway Workshops
Through their youth programs, NU emphasized the built-in skills and knowledge
that youth residents already possessed; the organization positioned itself as a facilitator to
help the community better understand its own predicament, positions and possibilities.
This ethos remained present in another one of NU's key community programs, the
“Garden Gateway Workshops” that served as a primary space of interaction between the
organization and the adults and senior citizens of the South LA area. On dozens of
weekends throughout the year, NU staff, volunteers, apprentices and interns could be
found in the organization's South LA Mini-Urban Farm, guiding a dozen or more local
residents in cooking and gardening workshops. The stated purpose of these gatherings
was to not only impart information that would build skills among these residents, but also
to demonstrate that residents already had many of the necessities to make agricultural
self-sustainability in South LA more of a reality. Several of the most regular participants
were senior citizens who were recruited through an adjacent senior center, others were
mothers who would bring their young children along, still others simply were walking by
and decided to drop in to check things out.
Workshop topics ranged from ways to test the soil for toxicity, to a focus on the
Mexican and Central American tradition of growing corn with beans and squash, to foods
that are natural bodily cleansers. Throughout, it was made clear that the status quo of the
industrial food system – across levels of production, distribution and consumption – put
the world's health at stake. This was especially true in “a community like this,” as both

217

staff members and workshop participants often referred to the neighborhood. Together,
they would reflect upon a history of health disparities amongst themselves and other
community members – related to poor nutrition, environmental hazards, poverty and
other issues – and would advocate for their rights to rise above these threats. In this sense,
the Garden Gateway workshops were sites in which NU and the participants advocated
for their own biological citizenship (Petryna, 2002) – that is, a conception of citizenship,
based on their embodied experience of risk, that called for special recognition within the
discursive, legal, or political arenas. With this biological citizenship established, together
they demanded that action should be taken to improve overall community well-being,
while insisting that any proffered solutions must come from the community members
themselves whose biological citizenship was at stake.
Indeed, as NU and the participants consistently pointed to the risks of systemic
environmental and food-related threats to their community's well-being, these discussions
were always matched with community-based solutions. NU worked to develop these
solutions by activating local and cultural knowledge systems, educating community
members, and empowering residents to take action to improve and preserve their health
and the health of their families and neighbors. As NU staffer Charles articulated:
We don't try to pretend like we're experts in this, that, or the other.
Although in some sense we probably are. We don't really like to aspire to
that language, because the people in our community, that's not really what
they need. They're the experts about it – it just hasn't been asked, they
haven't been asked, they haven't been in this conversation about what
change can be or what change should be or what might be the challenges
that you face.

Still, through observation and participation in the Garden Gateway workshops,
some of the internal contradictions of NU's communication ecology also came to light.

218

These were tensions, in fact, that NU had faced going back to its early days as a
community organization operating in the contemporary non-profit landscape.
Specifically, the workshops emerged as sites in which NU had to actively manage an
epistemological conflict with a funding agency, at the same time as the organization had
to face up to the challenge of community organizing in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual
community. Both of these issues, as well as NU's attendant management strategies, say a
great deal about the ways in which their organizational communication ecology served to
shape, and was shaped by, the complex nature of their organizational network.
Notably, NU consciously cultivated partnerships with local universities to
develop these gardening, nutrition, health education and skill-building workshops in the
local community. Collaborative projects between community-based groups like NU and
professional public health and medical researchers represented the types of initiatives that
university-based and external funders were often interested in supporting. NU
appreciated the opportunity to provide community programming through these funds, and
saw a strategic benefit in building long-term relationships with university partners, as
these institutions certainly played an important role in the local neighborhoods in which
NU's work was situated, not to mention the fact that they often had access to significant
funding opportunities. Yet, NU staff members had at times been quite disappointed by
the approach of some of the professional research scientists and their students who
collaborated in this work. In the eyes of NU staff, too often, these groups seemed largely
uninterested in learning anything from the community members themselves – community
members who NU felt had a great deal of knowledge about their own understandings of

219

healthy living that would be useful for those scientists to understand. As NU staff
member Charles put it after one of the gardening and cooking workshops:
It's like they come in feeling they've got all the answers...I almost feel like
we need to have an orientation with these groups to give them sort of the
NU worldview.

Maya echoed Charles' sentiments, but demonstrated a level of ambivalence in
how best to proceed.
With some of our partners we're able to do that type of orientation. And
I've tried, I've argued for that before with the University, try to tell them
like, hey, you're going to have people coming into this community, you
have to really understand what you're coming into. But the people who run
that stuff are just not interested in putting the time into that. There's really
not much more I can do there.

Failing a more substantive intervention, NU looked for modest workarounds. For
instance, during a discussion of “foods that cleanse”, NU staff members handed out a
sheet that listed a variety of foods that had been “scientifically proven” to be useful for
medicinal purposes. While handing this out, Maya editorialized:
We partner with the University Medical School, and you can see aloe is
not on your sheet there. What we can put in writing here is only the stuff
that has Western Science backing. So I can share with you verbally, but
we can't put it in writing. Aloe has been used for thousands of years as a
medicinal and cleanser...I drink it every morning, I put it in a blender with
some citrus.

From there, Maya asked the workshop participants to share some of their own stories
about their use of plants and herbs like aloe for medicinal or cleansing purposes. Over
the next several minutes, a discussion took place in which a number of residents
discussed their practices of relying on a variety of naturally grown and culturally
important plants for treating various ailments. In some ways, the contradiction within
NU's communication ecology was itself a generative force for community-based

220

discourse. Participants were excited to talk about how their parents or grandparents had
passed down a long-held family remedy. Ultimately, NU's aim to construct its
organizational perspective partly in opposition to the status quo of the mainstream food
and medical establishment was more clearly delineated through NU's direct
collaboration with members of this status quo.
The other key tension that emerged in these workshops surrounded the challenge
of operating in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual community. While NU had its roots in
the struggles and experiences of African Americans, intercommunal solidarity had
always been a part of their Black Panther ethos, and the improvement of intercultural
relations between African Americans and Latinos had been central to the work of NU
since the organization first began to operate its own programming. Yet, working on
limited staff meant there were times when the multicultural but English-language
dominant organization did not fully provide for the needs of local Latino residents.
Certain handouts of gardening and cooking information went untranslated from English
to Spanish and some workshops lacked a Spanish-speaking staff member or volunteer to
work closely with mono-lingual Spanish residents. Throughout my time as a participant
observer, there were several instances in which Spanish speakers seemed to feel left out
and surely did not get the same value out of the experiences as those who spoke English.
To NU's credit, however, this was a topic that was clearly on the table, and over time
they worked to do a better job of always having an intern or staff member present who
could help minimize these challenges.
Increasingly over time, multi-lingual and, in particular, Latina staff members and
interns were to be called upon to perform important bridging functions across linguistic

221

difference (see Katz, 2007, for a broader discussion of linguistic bridge-workers).
Spanish speaking NU staff members, apprentices, and interns played an important role
communicating to residents about the broader ideas of the food justice organization as
well interacting on a practical and conversational level. This was the case at a fruit tree
giveaway event when Charles, a senior staffer, relied on Wendy, a high-school aged
apprentice, to handle almost all of the interaction with community residents who were
interested in obtaining a tree. Wendy was new to the organization, but was quickly
placed in a position of responsibility because Charles was unable to make the same type
of connection to the Latino residents. In some cases, this bridging function was primarily
functional, in which the bridge worker was needed to complete a transaction or provide
information. In other instances, bridge workers played a key role in connecting on a more
personal level to community members. Carmen, a Latina staff member for a time with
NU, described how, “all the Spanish speakers were just flocking around” her during
workshops and other gardening activities. Their conversations often went well beyond
the task at hand into other storytelling arenas: “I don't feel like I'm really teaching them.
I'm learning from them just as much as they're learning from me, if at all.”
Once again, NU's efforts to connect with the community encouraged a vibrant
variety of neighborhood storytelling. With food as a medium for conversation, together
they explored issues of systemic inequality, the nature of local expertise, and the
challenges of communicating across linguistic difference. This discursive interaction
emerged in spite of – or, perhaps, partly because of – the complicated nature of their
sometimes contradictory communication ecology. Indeed, NU's reliance on public health
researchers to obtain funding went on to inspire a conversation about the limits of

222

scientific authority and the value of cultural knowledge. The obstacles they faced in
reaching out to mono-lingual Spanish speakers required a reflexive conversation within
the organization as well as a concerted effort to more thoroughly integrate Latina voices
into all of their activities. Importantly, as well, all of this occurred within a constructed
space of the communication action context. At the sites of their mini-urban farms, NU
forged communicative arenas for discursive interaction – as Communication
Infrastructure Theory would suggest, these spaces strengthened the nature of the
neighborhood storytelling at the same as the neighborhood storytelling strengthened the
importance of the spaces themselves. Responding to a question about the democratic
function of public spaces, Maya explained the importance of the program:
On the face of it, the Garden Gateway workshops are very simply about
coming and learning how to garden and learning how to eat out of your
garden in a very nutritional, healthy and inexpensive way. So it seems
really simplistic, and what the hell does that have to do with democracy
and democratic processes? Well, actually it has a lot to do with it...For
example, here is this plant that you can make a tea with and it can cure
your indigestion, you don’t actually have to go out and buy these tablets
that can actually give you all kinds of other problems when you are trying
to deal with indigestion and cost a lot of money. You can actually grow
this plant and get a corner of it, right here, and it costs next to nothing to
grow, there are no side effects to it and you can make a medicinal tea with
some hot water...There have to be some spaces where we can do this stuff.
To me, a community garden and urban farm, these are democratic spaces,
where you can actually engage in this way.

A Celebration Of and By the Community – Earth Day

On a Wednesday evening in February, I made my way into the auditorium of
South LA Elementary School for an organizing committee meeting of NU's Earth Day
Festival. While Earth Day events were common throughout Los Angeles, few, if any, had
ever taken place in the South LA area before NU decided to organize its annual event.

223

The theme for this year's event was “P.O.W.E.R. Shift – People Organizing With Each
Other Resourcefully”, and we got set to transform South LA Elementary School's
playground into a site for musical and dance performances, gardening and cooking
workshops, children's games, mural paintings, craft and art sales, as well as information
tabling from dozens of local social justice and service organizations. Key partners
assembled for the meeting included NU staff and board members, a local high school
teacher, staff from the elementary school's after-school program, the directors of a South
LA arts program, and staff from SafeWaters
33
, a national public interest organization that
advocated for safe and sustainable food and environmental policies.
The conversation turned toward the team's strategy for publicity and outreach for
the event. Susan, a recent college graduate and current intern with the Southern
California office of SafeWaters, said that their group was focused on getting the attention
for the event from major city and state elected officials, as well as from big publications
like the LA Times. Getting elected officials attached could be a great way to generate
media attention quickly, she said, to highlight the work of NU for a bigger audience, and
to generate even more attention for future Earth Day events. The suggestion was not met
with enthusiasm from the rest of the group. One NU staff member said that a city
councilperson had come to the first year of the event to do a ribbon cutting ceremony, but
that the media coverage focused almost entirely on the councilperson, not on the work of
NU or the vision of the festival. Perhaps if the elected official brought some money to
support the event, a volunteer suggested, it might make more sense. A staff member
argued that, while getting coverage from the LA Times might be nice, they'd rather focus

33
Along with other organizational names featured in this chapter, this is a pseudonym.

224

their efforts on getting attention from media that better understood food justice issues, if
media attention was important at all.
It quickly became clear that reaching out to local officials for some support – in
the way of funds or in-kind donations like tables and chairs – would be part of the
committee's plan, but making officialdom the centerpiece of any outreach push would not
be a focus. It came down to the vision of the event – a vision that was about building
connections between and among local residents and organizations, providing a space for
local artists and musicians, and advocating for collaborative organizing to shift the power
toward justice and sustainability. It was a telling moment that said a lot about NU's
philosophy and strategic action – if their goal was to motivate community-based action,
their outreach must be focused in that community.
Indeed, the organization had been somewhat disappointed with the turnout during
the first year of the event – the one that more prominently featured public officials and
attendant mainstream media coverage – not due to an overall lack of people, but due to
too low a percentage of local residents in attendance. In future years, they worked to get
upwards of 90% of the 1,000-1,500 people or so who attended to be from the nearby
area. “We are really happy about that,” Maya described. “And we are also really happy
that there is a good smattering and a good mix of folk from outside the neighborhood,
from all over LA. And people of much more diverse backgrounds – South Asians,
Caucasians, all kind of folk were there. And that’s what we want to see. But if we are
really serious about building in our neighborhood, then we need to preference the folks in
it. And so if the stuff that we are doing doesn’t speak to them and doesn’t attract them,
then it’s not really inclusive.”

225

In the coming weeks of preparations, they would do their best to draw from a set
of communication channels from within their communication ecology to best achieve
that goal. This included a few appearances in geo-ethnic media, including a featured spot
on a public radio program and some locally-focused online news websites. Yet, NU's
faith in journalists to give any coverage to the event, let alone coverage that would truly
reflect the broader vision of the organization and its festival, was minimal. Ultimately,
NU staff suggested that intensive media outreach in this manner required more effort
than it was worth. Indeed, as we described in Broad et al. (Under Review), such a
perspective of media coverage was quite common among the community organizers of
South LA, who had given up the expectation long ago that media outlets would be
excited to tell their stories of social justice organizing when invited to do so. Instead,
these organizers worked to create their own geo-ethnic media outlets in order to connect
to the community, often on a one-on-one basis.
In particular, NU used its online newsletter as a way to let folks who were already
familiar with the organization know about the upcoming event. They also publicized the
festival over Facebook, with an invitation that reached over a thousand people through
the online social networks of friends and supporters. When it came to investing in a
particular strategy for outreach, it was the very low-technology solution of a well-
designed flyer and some personal conversations that emerged as the central tool. “Spark
the P.O.W.E.R Shift,” the flyer declared in bold letters, with images of windmills,
bicyclists, and an electrified light bulb surrounding a tree, all superimposed upon an
image of a South LA street. Names of key partners, sponsors, and supporters were
inscribed alongside the date and time for the free family event. Thousands of Earth Day

226

flyers were printed, at a substantial portion of the festival's budget, and distributed
throughout the local community. Flyers were sent home with students of South LA
Elementary, with the hope that local families from the school itself would make up much
of those in attendance.
The biggest outreach came on the weekends leading up to the festival, as NU
amassed hundreds of volunteers – including friends and family of the organization,
members of partner organizations, and dozens of students from a university-affiliated
volunteer association – to walk the streets of South LA. They canvassed in groups of six
to eight, usually with a few bilingual English-Spanish speakers in each, as they stuffed
flyers in doorways, left stacks in the front windows of local businesses, and stopped to
chat with local residents who they passed on the street. This door-knocking strategy was
a key one for NU in much of their outreach work, but as they worked across several
square miles of South LA over the course of multiple weekends, this was their biggest
outreach effort of the year. Cheryl, a board member, explained how this “person to
person” outreach was central to both the philosophy and action of the organization:
We practiced a methodology called door-knocking. You literally go door
to door in a community to meet community members face to face, to give
them information about whatever program or whatever event that you're
doing....It's a time-tested method of meeting with people, interacting with
people, introducing yourself, the work that you do, who you are, and
establishing a relationship that forms the basis of any community service
organization.

By all accounts, the intensive outreach paid off, and the festivals were considered
a great success. With upwards of 1,500 people in attendance, the events engaged children
in a variety of educational and recreational activities, provided attendees with practical
tips for maintaining a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, highlighted the works of a

227

talented set of musical and fine artists, and connected local residents to dozens of social
change-oriented and social service organizations. Importantly, NU did not design Earth
Day simply as a platform to advance a narrow organizational mission, but also saw it as
an opportunity to leverage the inter-organizational and inter-institutional elements of its
organizational communication ecology to strengthen the broader communication
infrastructure of the community. Indeed, those organizations represented at information
booths included partners, sponsors and supporters from dozens of local institutions, with
focus areas that included health care, housing rights, performing arts, gardening, energy
conservation, environmental education, bicycling, anti-hunger campaigning and local
community organizing. The key point here was that the Earth Day festival would not
simply be a one-off event, disconnected from everyday community action. Rather, it
would serve to more fully integrate local residents into the landscape of organizational
activity that was in line with NU's guiding mission and focus in South LA, including, but
hardly limited to, the specific activities of NU. Through its organizing of Earth Day, NU
worked to establish itself as a central node within an organizational ecology of South LA
social justice organizing.
The Earth Day event was hardly a moneymaker for NU. A suggested donation of
$5 was asked at the door, but no one was turned away if they chose to enter, regardless of
funds. As in much of their work, NU drew from some modest monetary and in-kind
donations from a variety of sources – local public officials, organic food companies, a
public radio station, and a small foundation that supported vegetarian advocacy, among
others
34
– and was also able to cover some of their costs through an on-site raffle.

34 The event was made entirely vegan, in part because I pointed to a potential funding opportunity from a
vegan advocacy foundation. After NU staff considered the idea, they suggested going all vegan was in line

228

Ultimately, its success depended on the willingness of staff and volunteers to allocate
much of their time to its preparation, with another big contribution coming from South
LA Elementary School, which gave NU full access of its building and other resources.
Hector, the school's principal, could be seen on the day of the event, leading kids
in a jump-rope competition and organizing a basketball tournament. In his mind, the
event was well worth any support that he could provide. “I think Earth Day is so
important for a school community like ours. Not just our school, but for all of South
Central LA.” He particularly appreciated the high quality murals that were produced by
artists during the event, which had helped to beautify the outside of the elementary
school, turning the drab tan exterior into a vibrant site of artistic production. “Certainly
when people walk into our school they say – ‘Wow, we didn't expect to see such colorful
and artistic work here.’ And what's amazing to me is that people respect the art work, so
we have not had any of those murals get hit with graffiti...I think the community is
inspired by them. There's a lesson there, they see themselves there.”
Indeed, community members at the event continually remarked that Earth Day
was an example of the positive action that existed within South LA – a story that was
rarely told in mainstream accounts of the neighborhood that had become synonymous
with crime and urban blight in popular culture. A week after one of NU's Earth Day
festivals, an online commenter on the website of The Los Angeles Times responded to yet
another South LA story that highlighted homicides in the area around South LA
Elementary School. Going by the anonymous username “The Positive”, she argued that
other stories could be told:

with the ethos of the event, given the negative environmental and social impact of industrial meat
production. It also provided an opportunity to discuss the value of reducing or eliminating meat
consumption in a community that has a history of diet-related disease connected to this consumption.

229

You know, I clicked on the news for the South LA section of the LA
Times and frankly I'm tired of this one sided story. Can you guys write
about anything positive? I just went to an Earth Day fair two days ago in
my neighborhood at South LA Elementary School. It was an amazing
event with artists, craft vendors and people of every color loving life, the
event and a nice Saturday. How come I never see articles about things like
this?

For this single day of the year, NU worked to turn the blacktop of South LA
Elementary into a space of dynamic conversation, experiential education and artistic
production. As their event’s vision statement outlined, “Together, we envision an annual
Earth Day event where community residents in South Central come together in a safe
environment to have fun, celebrate our foods and cultures, learn about and participate in
sustainable practices, and connect with each other and organizations working to make
positive change in our neighborhood.” Once again, the organization actively drew from
its multi-level communication ecology in order to connect with local residents, facilitate
inter-organizational cooperation, and tell the story of their organization's mission through
geo-ethnic media platforms that could best reach their community of practice. The efforts
also continued to improve the capacity of South LA Elementary to serve as a primary
space of discursive interaction about health, wellness and sustainability within the
community. Through their Earth Day event, NU did its best to continue to establish itself
as a central piece of the neighborhood storytelling network, motivating dynamic
storytelling about the issue of food justice and community empowerment in South LA.
Growing Good Food in the Heart of South LA

Into the second decade of the 21
st
century, local residents still lived with both the
memory and the material reality of the civil unrest, commonly known as the 1992 LA
Riots, which had burned and destroyed over 1,000 buildings across the city, with much of

230

that damage in South LA. Organizations like Revitalize South LA had emerged from
beneath the rubble to re-build the area through commercial economic development and
youth programming. Their headquarters sat next to two vacant lots, both of which had
been burned down during the 1992 events and had lain dormant ever since. One lot was
covered in concrete, soon to be developed into a skate park for local youth. The other
was overgrown with grass and weeds, untouched in nearly two decades. The space was
fertile ground for a new partnership between Revitalize and NU, and a series of intensive
workdays were scheduled to dig deep, to reclaim the land, and to build a new mini-urban
farm directly where the ashes had once fallen.
On one such weekend workday, I pulled through a set of stubborn weeds that had
attached to a fence, working alongside Bella, a native of South LA who was finishing up
the internship program and preparing to become a member of NU's staff. “I wish we just
had a big machine that could turn this whole thing over,” she said. Indeed, some heavy
farm machinery would have made for quick work in the initial stages of the project, but
we had to make due with our hands instead. So, slowly but surely, over the course of
several months, dozens of local residents, NU staff members, interns, partners, friends
and volunteers got their hands dirty and put in the hard work that was required if the
long-forgotten space was to be turned into another productive agricultural site that NU
had constructed across South LA.
When I asked members of NU about the core values of the organization, several
common terms emerged – community, cultural awareness, critical thinking, relationship
building, hard work and rigor, to name a few. The efforts that went into NU's agricultural
cultivation were prime sites to see these core values in action. Urban farming was

231

continually conceptualized as a foundational building block through which the broader
social change goals of NU could be realized. The creation, maintenance and productivity
of urban farm sites provided a safe and peaceful space for community residents and
partner organizations to gather, to build skills, to think critically about problems and
solutions in the contemporary food system, and to move toward environmental and
economic sustainability in South LA.
Anyone interested in learning more about the work of NU, or in getting involved
more substantively, was generally first asked to lend a hand at one of their urban farm
sites. While they might get a brief orientation to the broader goals and missions of the
organization, it was made clear from the start that the first priority would be an ability to
put in a good day's work, just like everyone else. Much of that work took place at NU's
primary mini-urban farm, adjacent to the South LA Community Center. On any given
day of the week, anywhere from a handful to a few dozen staff and volunteer workers
could be found tending this soil – working in the shadow of one of the largest freeways in
the city, directly below a large billboard that advertised the thirst-quenching satisfaction
of a sugary soda product.
A painted sign and an iron gate would greet entrants to this mini-urban farm. At
about an acre in size, the land was technically city-owned property, under the auspices of
the Department of Recreation and Parks, but NU had full direction of its everyday
maintenance. About fifteen rectangular plots held dozens of different seasonal fruits and
vegetables – tomatoes, several varieties of squash, leafy greens, carrots, strawberries and
more. Fruit trees grew in the southeast corner, a large compost machine sat in the
northeast, and a Central American chayote gourd grew upon a shaded workbench in the

232

northwest. Many of the foods grown had specific cultural relevance to the Mexican,
Central American and African American populations who lived in the area. All were
grown without any petrochemical pesticides or fertilizers. They called it “Beyond
Organic” – while NU lacked the official USDA certification, which is costly and
designed mostly by and for farmers working at a larger economy of scale, the food grown
by NU was fed only water, sunlight and other naturally and environmentally sound
products.
“You can't come in with an ego,” Kevin, a staff member, described. “That's one
reason why I think we start working out in the garden. Everyone weeds.” NU staffer
Charles, who would go onto become the Financial and Administrative Manager, first
found his way to the gardens through an unlikely pathway – he got a traffic ticket. Given
the option of paying several thousands of dollars or putting in fifty hours of community
service, he did a Google search for community service opportunities in his South LA
neighborhood and soon found himself putting in his time at NU's office and in gardening
projects. While working in the garden, NU staff members and other volunteers would
talk about the mission of the organization: “It was kind of on the fly. While we were
doing it, this is why we're doing it,” Charles recalled. “That's something we still do.
We're not just here to weed, to do gardening. Here's the bigger picture, the bigger
context.” Through his time in the garden, Charles became part of the first graduating
class of the internship program, and worked with NU as a staff member ever since.
The organization's ability to fulfill community service requirements for those
convicted of a traffic court violation spoke to the ongoing hybrid embeddedness of NU's
operations with official structures of power. There they worked – on city-owned

233

property, alongside local residents who had been pulled over by the LAPD – with an
ultimate aim to create an agricultural, social and economic space that would directly
counter years of public neglect and police persecution in South LA. Of course, not all the
volunteers who found their way into NU's gardens – through the traffic court, through
university service programs or other domains – were particularly interested in either
getting their hands dirty or in critically analyzing the nature of social change in
contemporary South LA. There were often complains from NU staff, for instance, about
student volunteer workers who would come in and show little initiative to get any work
done. At times, community service volunteers had little idea what their service would
involve, and often bailed before finishing. “Sometimes people show up in flip-flops and
nice sweaters, and they don't know what they're getting into,” Gretchen described. “It's
nice to have them (volunteers), but we don't depend on them.”
In other instances, however, a volunteer would find great value in the work itself,
and would prove to be valued by the staff at NU. Charles was a prime example of
someone who got involved this way and then became an integral part of the organization
moving forward. Miguel was a young Central American immigrant who needed to fulfill
about 80 hours of community service over the course of two months. He had grown up
with agriculture as a big part of his life in his native of El Salvador, but had not had a
chance to do much gardening or farming since his family moved to South LA a few years
back. Over the course of several weeks, he proved to be a great asset to the organization,
helping across all aspects of their work, but proving himself especially adept in the urban
farm. While he enjoyed the chance to contribute his skills, when his community service
time was up, he simply went back to his regular life and work. Still, with his home just a

234

few blocks away, he knew that he contributed to making his neighborhood a better place,
and NU was happy it had the chance to get another young member of the community
involved in its agricultural and community building work.
Looking around South LA, NU also could see that there was great agricultural
capacity not just in its own urban farms, but also in the backyards and neighborhoods of
local residents from around the community. That realization was at the heart of NU's
Garden Gateway workshops, described above, that worked to demonstrate how much
community members could do with the skills and initiative that they already held inside
of themselves. “Everything is about what you can grow here,” Maya explained. “It's very
practical, not theoretical.” NU was also aware of the fact that not all residents would be
interested in coming out to work or learn in their urban farm, so they devised other ways
to draw from the agricultural capacity of local neighbors that would require little to no
effort on residents' behalf.
This came to fruition most clearly in the Tree of Life program, an initiative to
collect otherwise unused fruit from trees in the backyards of local residents across South
LA. The effort was initially created in partnership with another Los Angeles-based non-
profit group whose entire mission focused on the gleaning and distribution of locally
grown fruits from private homes and public spaces. That group had collected over a
million pounds of produce in its first several years, but had done most of their outreach
through farmers' markets and in more middle- and upper-income communities in Los
Angeles. NU would expand those operations deep into the heart of South LA, and the
fruits of those labors would then be directly filtered into NU's social enterprise or

235

donated to another partner organization that provided free fresh-cooked meals to the
homeless and the hungry.
Ivan was a part-time staff member with NU, who also worked as an employee
with a downtown homeless and poor-peoples' rights organization. He led the Tree of Life
Effort, putting in several hours per week canvassing the neighborhood to find willing
participants. It was a little tougher to recruit in South LA than in some more affluent
neighborhoods, he said, because folks in the area were more likely to actually be using at
least some of the fruit that they grew in their backyards. On a Sunday morning in South
LA, I made my way with Ivan into the backyard of a small home – we were joined by
two of his friends, all in their early 20s and African American residents of South LA, as
well as an NU volunteer and her ten-year-old daughter, both Caucasian, she the wife of a
university employee who had collaborated with NU on a research project. The
homeowner was not there at the time, but had left the back gate open so we could enter.
He was a patron of NU's produce bag sales program and was apparently happy to open
up his backyard to cultivation – otherwise, most of his oranges would have fallen and
gone to waste, as they had done for years before.
We quickly went to work, standing on ladders and on a ledge, using a fruit
picking tool with an extended arm to grab higher into the trees. Once rustled, dirt and
leaves came tumbling down on top of us, but so too did the oranges begin to fall. It was
not a huge picking operation, with only one main tree showing ripe oranges at the time.
But within forty-five minutes, we had filled several crates to the brim, bringing in over
sixty pounds of fresh, locally grown, beyond organic Southern California oranges. The
produce would be trucked back to NU's kitchens a few miles east, and soon it would be

236

fed right back into the community, a valuable part of the organization's efforts to
cultivate fresh food from right within the heart of South LA.
NU's varied agricultural cultivation activities continued to demonstrate the
organization's ability to actively strengthen the neighborhood's communication
infrastructure. Their reclamation and maintenance of urban space for the purposes of
growing food established the foundation for neighborhood storytelling. Some of that
conversation was practical and mundane – the best methods to plant a row of squash
plants, the ideal time to harvest a strawberry, the proper way to pull weeds so they would
not return. If these conversations remained simply at a basic level, as they often did, they
still represented significant value within the neighborhood, as they passed along useful
food and agricultural-related skills and knowledge that residents could take with them
and spread to their networks of family and friends. In some instances, however, those
conversations reached a higher level of abstraction, as staff, volunteers, interns and even
local passers-by could dig into discussions about the history of South LA, the cultural
traditions of local residents, the injustices of the industrial food system, and the politics
of possibility that were being enacted through the work of NU and their partners.
Regardless of whether they knew it or not, those taking part were players in a
community-based movement for change. With each weed picked from a once-vacant lot,
each orange picked from a local resident's tree, and each plot of tomatoes harvested from
their urban farms, they were all contributing to NU's mission of building a model for
food-based community economic development that they hoped would transform the
region and beyond.

237

Creating a Sustainable Social Enterprise
On a Wednesday afternoon in October of 2010, Charles and I returned to NU’s
mini- urban farm, ready to unload the back of NU's truck, which he had just filled with
crates of mixed fruits and vegetables, picked up from a nearby farmers' market. Our next
step was to start to pack produce bags for subscribers, as well as set aside some of the
produce to be sold at NU's Community center farmstand. Several years into the Great
Recession, NU was starting to place a particular emphasis on building up these revenue-
generating aspects of its operations. The strategic move had its roots not only in the
realities of an economic climate that was seeing much less in the way of philanthropic
and grant-based giving, but also in a philosophy of community-based economic
development that had been part of NU's ethos since its inception. Writing in The Black
Panther Intercommunal News Service in 1999, Jaja had argued that, “The conceptual
roots of community-based economic development (CED) had emerged in a relatively
hostile environment dominated by the private, market-driven, American capitalist
economic system" (Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Summer 1999, p. 18).
Into the second decade of the 21
st
century, NU was poised to become an actor in that very
system, testing out a model of a social enterprise that would feed the community, train
youth and create jobs through a capitalistic model of “beyond organic” food sales.
Realizing that their farm operations were producing an excess of fresh produce,
NU began to make sales through its produce stand at their mini-urban farm. Branded as
the Village Market Place, the operations grew slowly over the next few years, expanding
to include value added products like dried herbs and jams, as well a subscription-based
produce bag program. A small bag of seasonal produce cost $10/week and the large bag

238

cost $20/week for the “Neighborhood Resident” rate, with the prices increasing to $12
and $24 for the “Supporter Rate”. Bags could be picked up at the produce stand,
delivered by bicycle, or dropped off to institutional buyers, which included a few social-
justice oriented organizations in the South LA area. With growing demand, NU worked
to incorporate produce from other local farmers to supplement the food grown in their
own urban farms. With little effort put into marketing or business development, results
were modest but steady. 2007 saw an income of around $7,000, rising to $14,000 in 2008
and $18,000 in 2009, with approximately $4,000 of purchases made from local farmers
in that third year. By 2010, the Village Market Place was supplying produce bags and
hosting two neighborhood produce stands, as well as supplying the fruits and vegetables
for a produce stand at a Los Angeles medical center. As they started to see the potential
of the operation to directly support the programs of NU, the staff began to put a greater
emphasis on outreach, strategic planning and marketing. Income rose to $28,000 in 2010,
then over $40,000 in 2011.
In 2012, they took the Village Market Place to a new level, relocating their
operations to a newly established storefront, kitchen and office in a South LA community
marketplace. This gave them a full-time space to sell produce and bag subscriptions, as
well as serve hot lunch meals made from their own produce. 2012 also saw continued
expansion of wholesale operations, as they began to sell produce to restaurants, to nearby
corner markets, and to the South LA Elementary School as the foundation of grocery bag
giveaways to students. 2012 saw approximately $90,000 in income generated through the
various Village Marketplace programs, representing nearly 20% of NU's entire operating
budget. And rapid growth was continuing – in the first two months of 2013, the storefront

239

alone accounted for $16,000 in sales, a number that eclipsed their sales for the first
several years of the social enterprise. All of this, as well, with a dependence on mostly
word-of-mouth, some door-to-door canvassing, an online newsletter, and of course a
leveraging of some of their long-held neighborhood partnerships. With all of their
different sales venues taken into account, NU staff estimated that they reached well over
300 families on a weekly basis, with about 7 out of 10 of those being local residents who
lived right in the South LA area. Looking forward to 2013, they saw these numbers
growing even further, and estimated that they would see their revenue jumping well over
$100,000. In the broader context of food service world, these margins would be
considered small, but with that revenue accounting for up to 30% of the organization's
operating budget, it was clearly reshaping how NU went about its work.
Importantly, NU staff consistently pointed out that the Village Market Place was
not a program that had developed separately from their other community-based
operations. Instead, it was a foundation that could serve to integrate and support the long-
term sustainability of those very programs, as Kevin articulated:
It's just like we're teaching folks through gardening and healthy eating
classes to make their own gardens and make their own food, to help build
a local food system, a personal food system in a way. We as an
organization are looking to become self-reliant in that we take in less
money from organizations, foundations, things like that, and more of our
money comes from our social enterprise, so we can run our youth
programs, gardening programs, things like that, with the money from the
social enterprise.

Even as they worked to minimize the centrality of outside funding, the Village
Market Place in many ways proved to be a major selling point to funders. This should
hardly come as a surprise, of course, in an advanced liberal landscape in which economic
thinking and economic measurement is so central to the guiding logic of the time.

240

Quentin, the director of the Statewide Association for Community Economic
Development (SACED), saw social enterprises of all sorts developing across the country,
and had encouraged NU to go in that direction if they ever wanted to increase capacity. “I
used to tell Maya – small and funky is great, and I admire small and funky,” he said in an
interview, adding, “But in community revitalization, the name of the game is still
capacity. The groups you see prosper and have long tenure, it’s not necessarily that
they’re relevant to the development of the community – it’s that they have the capacity to
attract money and attract attention.”
Indeed, NU’s enhanced focus on economic development opened up several new
funding streams, exemplified by a large grant that was acquired from the federal
Department of Health and Human Services Community Economic Development (CED)
grant program. In 2010, the Obama administration had created the Healthy Food
Financing Initiative within the CED, an effort that specifically looked to fund programs
that would expand the availability of nutritious foods in low-income communities. NU's
Village Market Place was one of the first major projects to be funded through this
initiative. In addition, during this time, NU began to tap online, crowd-sourced funding
strategies, specifically as a way to provide support for the organization's move in 2012.
Over $5,000 were raised during an online campaign, offsetting some of the major costs
associated with that transition. Further, as the social enterprise began to attract some
money and attention, it also provided flexibility in the way NU’s various grant funds
were used. With its integration into the youth development and job training programs, for
instance, they were able to draw from funds that were earmarked for these purposes to
support further development of the social enterprise.

241

In addition to providing a chance to promote organizational sustainability, as well
as provide job training and employment opportunities to local youth, NU's Village
Market Place also represented a chance to support several other local businesspersons.
The organization was on the leading edge, for instance, in bringing fresh fruits and
vegetables to some of the many corner markets that dotted the landscape of South LA,
most of which were owned by ethnic minorities. They partnered with a graduate student
at a local university to conduct a feasability study of potential corner market partners in
the area. Groups of staff and volunteers went into dozens of markets to interview store
owners and managers, to get a sense of the types of produce, if any, that were being sold,
and to find out whether these markets would be interested in expanding the options that
they gave the community by bringing some of NU's beyond organic produce into their
stores.
“These corner stores are like allies in this work. They're folks that have been in
the community for thirty or forty years. Folks who have been able to withstand all kinds
of stuff that's gone on over the years," Charles explained. "For them to start selling fruits
and vegetables, it isn't necessarily a plus for them. For a lot of stores, they're probably
initially going to lose money, to get folks used to in the community that they're serving.”
Recognizing the importance of these markets in the neighborhood, as well as the
challenges of converting the store's produce options, NU did their best to facilitate this
process – selling produce at a consignment rate, getting youth interns involved in
marketing and store design, and going to door-to-door in the community to let local
residents know about the market's changes.

242

Another key constituency supported by the Village Market Place's operations
were the local farmers whose produce accounted for nearly 80 percent of the total fruits
and vegetables sold through NU's retail and wholesale operations. The partnerships with
local, organic producing family farmers began quite organically, as Maya got to know
those selling produce at her local South LA farmers' markets. Those informal
relationships developed into business partnerships, and in recent years NU's purchases
went from around $4,000 in 2009 to over $35,000 in 2012 – equaling some 50,000
pounds of produce in total, with that number consistently rising. Throughout the process,
NU was explicit about the type of farmers they were dedicated to supporting. Production
processes mattered, as they worked only with those who produced organic foods,
although they did not require that the farmers had been granted the official, and
sometimes prohibitively expensive, USDA organic certification. Further, their emphasis
remained on seeking out partnerships with ethnic minority farmers, groups that have
historically been marginalized and discriminated against in the broader food production
system. This effort, at times, did not always represent the path of least resistance –
throughout, NU had to help several farmers build up their managerial and technological
infrastructure to ensure that the ordering and delivery process would go smoothly on a
regular basis. Such efforts, however, were in line with the organization's broader strategy
for skill building and economic development, as well as their mission for advancing
racial and social justice through food. As Charles described:
We prioritize these small farmers and farmers of color because a lot of
them are being run out of business...A lot of these farmers don't make a lot
of money there, but with our model, they can at least come to a farmers'
market and they'll know we're earmarked for 500 dollars or something.
That makes their trip worth it...With our mission, as far as folks that need
it the most, farmers of color are folks that really need the support and the

243

business. That's attached to our mission, not only when we're doing our
programmatic work, but also when we're doing our purchasing. We try to
purchase from the guys that really need that support.

In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I outlined the critique that has emerged regarding
the neoliberal nature of many alternative food projects, even those that come from the
food justice perspective. Scholars like Guthman, Allen and Slocum have argued that
community food initiatives place too much emphasis on neoliberal values of
entrepreneurialism, self-improvement and community-based economic development
(Allen, 1999; Allen & Guthman, 2006; Guthman, 2011a, Guthman, 2011b; Slocum,
2007). Authors like Mares and Peña (2011) have tried to argue for a type of food justice
model that exists somewhere outside of capitalism, although as I outline in that section,
their case study arguments fail to fully demonstrate that this has ever been the case at all.
Indeed, NU's work is demonstrative of a different type of politics of possibility than what
these critics suggest. It is a strategy that finds itself more closely aligned with the type of
ambivalent relationship to liberal values that Banet-Weiser (2012) and McClintock
(2013) outline, and one that does its best to operate within the advanced liberal landscape
that Rose (1999) described as providing a chance for social justice to be maximized.
NU staff members consistently pointed out that they were reluctant capitalists, but
they were capitalists nonetheless. "I think at this point, the stage of society and
capitalism, I don’t see another way yet," Charles described. "In this society,
unfortunately you need to have funding to be sustainable. You need to be able to support
yourself." With this system so strongly entrenched, what other options did NU have if it
wanted to make a difference in the everyday lives of the community that it serves?
Charles continued:

244

It's much more beneficial to the community for us to be that actor, because
we have a longer investment. And our bottom line is not dollars, our
bottom line is for the better of the community. So we're more suited as an
actor in that place, because any other actor is not really going to care about
the community in the way that we do...People are going to buy the stuff
somewhere, so they might as well be buying into something that is for
their benefit. Not only for the food that they eat, but for the community
that they live in.

As NU staff described the difference that they brought to the local food system
through their entrepreneurial efforts, it very often came back to the concept of
storytelling. When folks interacted with the dominant structures of the food system – the
industrial farmers, the mass market grocery chains, the fast food restaurants – so many
stories went untold. There was no discussion of toxicity, or of workers' rights, of local
economic development or of community health. With NU as an actor in this landscape,
the neighborhood storytelling network around issues of food – as well as issues of social,
economic and racial justice – could be transformed. Kenneth described an interaction
with a youth intern in which this type of storytelling was on display.
One of our youth, in front of our customers at our produce stand, said
"$1.50 for three peaches, that's too much!" (I told her) you can't say that!...
Yeah, those peaches are expensive. But the reason the peaches are so
cheap at Ralph's or at Von's, at the grocery store, is because the farmers
who picked that stuff, they get paid pennies, they're like slaves. A lot of
them are Mexican and Central American immigrant workers who don't get
paid anything at all. They work in harsh environments and the food doesn't
even taste good. All these things – the transportation of the food, the
pesticides that are sprayed on it, how it gets from the farm. Our pricing on
the food has to do with that, and it pays for your participation in this
internship program. You've got to think about those things.

Conclusion

This chapter traced the community-based activities of Neighborhood United
through its organizational communication ecology. Drawing from the theoretical tenets of

245

Communication Infrastructure Theory, it demonstrated the ways in which the
organization’s various programs motivated neighborhood storytelling about food justice
issues in South Los Angeles. This storytelling project was constructed through dynamic
interactions between Neighborhood United, local residents and their interpersonal
networks, as well as diverse forms of geo-ethnic media. All of this activity was situated
within the communication action context of South Los Angeles, as NU’s agricultural and
community development work reshaped several spaces in the local community that went
onto facilitate dynamic interaction in the neighborhood storytelling network; the
neighborhood storytelling network also showed itself to be a driving force in the creation
and maintenance of those very spaces.
At the same time, the analysis of Neighborhood United’s community-based
communication ecology showed that the organization faced a consistent set of
communication-related challenges and obstacles in its effort to motivate structural and
value-oriented change in South LA. At times, for instance, the organization struggled –
or, alternately, showed little interest in – getting attention from and building relationships
with professional journalists and media producers. Instead, they tended to focus on a
strategy of person-to-person outreach, or created their own forms of geo-ethnic media to
reach out to residents. Yet, given professional geo-ethnic media’s potential importance in
the motivation of community-level social change, their lack of collaboration in this arena
may have hamstrung optimal neighborhood storytelling. On another tack, NU was faced
with the realities of motivating change in a mutli-lingual community, and was compelled
to modify their communication ecology as a way to cater to local residents in their

246

language of choice. Dealing with linguistic difference remained a challenge necessary of
constant reflection and action on the part of NU staff.
Another key tension that again surfaced in this analysis related to NU’s attempts
to position itself as an authentic voice of community-based action, all while engaged in
an entrepreneurial model for community development that relied on a varied set of
network partners – from both within and outside of the local community. Indeed, in order
to advance their community-based goals, NU constructed diverse sets of networked
interactions, blending their radical political philosophy with capitalistic economic
entrepreneurialism, public and private funding with youth and community support, local
social justice organizational efforts with the work of national environmental groups, and
much more. The development of their social enterprise, in particular, was characteristic
of the organization’s broader approach to food justice organizing in that it brought these
diverse and sometimes divergent connections into a unified purpose. These complicated
networked formations, it seems, are part and parcel of community-based action within the
contemporary advanced liberal landscape. The community-based communication ecology
of NU shows that there is great generative potential that can emerge from the very
ambivalence that arises from these seemingly contradictory connections.

247

CHAPTER 6
THE FOOD JUSTICE MOVEMENT –
EXTENDING BEYOND THE LOCAL

At a brainstorming meeting with NU staff and board members, we began to throw
around ideas for the theme of the upcoming “Youth Food Justice” national network
summit. With NU at the helm, South LA was to be the host city for this annual event, one
that would bring together hundreds of youth and dozens of organizations, all of whom
worked on food justice issues in mostly low-income and ethnic minority communities
across the United States. What type of concise statement, we pondered, would best serve
to frame NU's perspective on youth involvement in the food justice movement? In the
moment, our conversation moved toward a focus on the importance of having access and
control of land as a fundamental building block for any effort to advance social,
economic, and environmental justice. Indeed, as Maya pointed out, this was the
perspective of the Black Panther Party, who argued in Point Number Three of their Ten-
Point Platform that, “Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as
restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment
as currency which will be distributed to our many communities.” That evening, members
of the organizing group suggested that the conference theme should reflect a similar,
albeit less specific, demand to empower youth of color to take control of the land in
which they lived and worked. Their ancestors, of course, had cultivated the land for
centuries, while often being exploited and unable to enjoy the full fruits of their labors.
Several permutations of a tag-line were offered – “Our Right to Land” and “Reclaiming

248

the Land”, to name a few. Eventually, the group decided on “Claiming our Land,
Claiming our Roots” as the line that would set the tone for the conference to come.
This chapter of the dissertation interrogates several key questions about NU's
involvement in a broader movement for food justice. It delves into the challenges and
opportunities that come with engagement in networks of social justice-related action that
extend beyond the local community. It asks: in what ways does NU actively construct its
communication ecology to advance food justice not only in South Los Angeles, but also
in cities and towns across the nation and around the globe? What types of benefits and
constraints emerge through direct involvement in regional, national and international
collaboration, as well as through engagement in the political system? As a way to
respond to these questions, the networked ethnography continues through several
additional mini-case studies. First, I describe the work of Youth Food Justice Network
and discuss NU's role as a player in that network of food justice advocates. Next, I
discuss NU's involvement with the Hathor Collective, a US-based non-profit that worked
to facilitate connections between community-based social justice organizations across
five continents. Finally, I describe NU's engagements in politics and policy-making,
including the organization's interactions with the Statewide Association for Community
Economic Development , as well as in Los Angeles-area political action.
35

The research presented remains informed by participant observation and
interviews, as well as through primary and secondary document analysis, including
internal organizational documents, publicly available reports and online materials. The
chapter further demonstrates the utility of the communication ecology approach and

35
In keeping with the general practice of this dissertation, all organization and individual names featured in
this chapter’s networked ethnography are pseudonyms.

249

networked ethnography for understanding the actions of community-based social
movement organizations. It suggests that connections that build solidarity beyond the
local level are central to the broader movement for food justice. However, there remains a
constant tension in that these extra-local actions can detract from building and sustaining
a community-based model for change. In the case of NU, their connections beyond the
local area proved to be moderately strong but nascent, as this represented an area for
growth if the organization hoped to spread its model for change to new and bigger arenas
in the years to come.
The Organizational Communication Ecology and the Broader Storytelling System
Earlier chapters of this project drew from the work of DeFilipis, Fisher and
Shragge (2010) as a framework to think through the type of community-based action that
can motivate substantive social change. Several of their requirements pointed directly to
the need for community-based organizations to find ways to extend beyond the local
community itself in these efforts. They wrote: “Community organizations can be a part of
a wider force of social and political opposition and can make claims to redress social
inequality and injustice. In order to do so, however, those organizations which aspire to
greatest impact have to raise their consciousness, situate themselves in the broader social
struggles, and understand the underpinning ideologies and analysis, as well as the stakes
involved and the contemporary opportunities of the present moment” (p. 166). Scholars
like Guthman (2011b) have argued that, in the alternative food and food justice
movements, community-based initiatives have generally obscured some of the central
systemic injustices in the food system. Too often, she suggested, food justice efforts have
offered a politically ambiguous agenda for action that focuses primarily on “bringing

250

good food to others” or “teaching people how to eat” (p. 156). For critics like Guthman,
food justice efforts have failed to reach the type of political consciousness that DeFilipis,
Fisher and Shragge (2010) described, in large part because they rely upon the value
systems and proffered solutions that are central to neoliberal logic.
The past several chapters of this dissertation have provided a counter to this
claim, as I have used Neighborhood United as a case study to explore how groups do
indeed work to advance social and racial justice through community-based food
movement activities. Earlier chapters of this work clearly demonstrated that NU
grounded itself in an ideological worldview that situated food injustice in South LA
within an intercommunal social, economic and environmental struggle. The organization
has been shown to carefully navigate a complex set of sometimes contradictory
relationships and partnerships, all in an effort to promote a model for community-based
food justice. To be clear, the majority of NU's work focused at the level of the local
community, and in Chapter 5, I used Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) to
demonstrate how the organization's communication ecology promoted neighborhood-
based storytelling about food justice through its interpersonal, institutional and mediated
communication connections. The act of storytelling about food justice issues – as a
complement to the creation of sustainable institutions that promoted economic,
agricultural and youth development – operated as a driving force for NU's efforts to
motivate community-level social change. However, throughout this process, NU claimed
that they were also committed to a broader concept of social transformation, one that
extended beyond the South LA community alone. To put this commitment into action, it
would require that the organization's communication ecology also promoted storytelling

251

– through discursive interaction, partnerships and collaborations – that allowed their food
justice message, and their model for food-related social change, to extend beyond the
geographically defined neighborhood storytelling network.
In an initial exploration of Communication Infrastructure Theory, Ball-Rokeach,
Kim & Matei (2001) delineated the multiple aspects of what they referred to as the
storytelling system, which operated across macro, meso, and micro-levels. The micro-
level included the interpersonal networks of local residents, while the meso-level
included the geo-ethnic media and community-based organizations of a local area –
together, these two elements were at the heart of the neighborhood storytelling network.
However, the authors were clear to not discount the influence of the macro-level
storytelling agents, which came, “in the form of media, political, religious, and other
central institutions or large organizations that have storytelling production and
dissemination resources (e.g., mainstream media and agencies or corporations with public
information/relations capacities)” (397). A key difference between these storytelling
levels is that the micro- and meso- storytellers are more likely to tell stories about
neighborhood issues, while macro-level storytellers tell stories primarily about cities,
nations or even the world, “where the imagined audience is broadly conceived as the
population of the city, county, or region” (397).
In the field of media and communication studies, there has been a long-standing
focus on the influence of macro-level storytellers like the mass media in influencing
public opinion and shaping social movements. A primary contribution of CIT has been its
theoretical toolset for understanding how communication dynamics motivate or constrain
social change at the community level. To reiterate, however, the theory has never

252

discounted the importance of the macro-level storytelling system in its ability to shape
the nature of community, political action or civil society. As Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei
(2001) described, “Although our discussion privileges neighborhood storytelling, we do
not suggest that the ideal outcome is for people to commune in their neighborhoods and
forget the rest of the world. Civil society is most likely to emerge when there is
integration between storytelling systems that imagine cosmopolitan or global referents in
a way that is meaningfully connected to local referents” (398). The communication
ecology approach employed in this project allows for a multi-level analysis that follows
this recommendation. Specifically, the sections to follow in this chapter look at several
elements of Neighborhood United's communication ecology that are explicitly outside of
the South LA neighborhood in which its work is primarily situated. In what ways have
these communicative interactions and partnerships brought NU's story of food justice
organizing into new discursive arenas? Have these interactions allowed NU's activities to
influence not only the neighborhood storytelling network of South Los Angeles, but also
broader storytelling systems across the region, nation and around the world? What does
this mean for the prospects of shifting values and social structures en route to advancing
food justice at these broader scales?
Youth Food Justice – A National Network for Change
The work of the Youth Food Justice national network (YFJ) was spurred on by
youth involvement in the 1998 conference of a major national community gardening
conference. As the story is told, a group of youth from a Boston-based organization that
involves young people in sustainable agriculture was in attendance – these youth
members, however, were disappointed to find few other young people represented. From

253

there, several groups involved in that conference worked together to convene a youth-
focused food and agriculture conference in Boston in the summer of 1999. YFJ went onto
find a fiscal sponsor and supporter in a California-based environmental organization that
was founded by a well-know environmental activist. Today, YFJ is joined by nearly sixty
other projects that benefit from that broader organization's 501(c)3 non-profit status,
administrative and fiscal support.
On the website of its fiscal sponsor, YFJ described itself as a, “a national network
of groups of youth and adults working for food justice. We connect through an annual
conference, regional gatherings, curriculum sharing, and our listserve to provide
opportunities for alliance and capacity building, sharing of best practices, and meaningful
experiences for youth to have a voice in the food justice movement.” Upwards of 100
community-based organizations, all working on issues related to food justice, agriculture
and youth development, with nearly all of those groups centered in mostly low-income
and ethnic minority communities, were affiliated with the YFJ network at the time of this
writing. By connecting diverse food justice groups from across the country, the
organization listed three primary goals – to increase organizations' knowledge and skills
for doing food justice work, to increase public awareness of food justice work, and to
foster and promote leadership in young people working in their own communities.
The signature of YFJ's efforts centered on its annual conference. Held over a
period of three to five days in a different city each summer, the conference generally
depended on a primary host organization to help lead these efforts, although at times
coalitions of planning groups came together to this end. Past conference sites included
Milwaukee in 2003, Olympia in 2005, and Philadelphia in both 2007 and 2011. The

254

schedule of events varied from year to year, but each would generally include workshops
on topics related to food justice, including agricultural and social justice histories,
community organizing strategies, arts and cultural expression; trips to local sites,
including historic places in the host city, as well as places in which food and agricultural
projects were underway; and a chance for youth to have fun and get to know each other,
including dinners, dance parties and “open mic” sessions.
The 2011 conference in Philadelphia proved to be a high point for the network,
with more than 175 attendees in full, including 125 youth, and an operating budget –
derived from registration fees, donations, and support from the YFJ central staff – of over
$40,000. Workshop titles included “Food Justice vs. Food Injustice”, “Youth Leadership
beyond tokenism: Utilizing consensus in your youth urban agriculture program”, and
“Storytelling to Build Collective Power”, among dozens more. A key outcome of the
2011 conference, as well, was the “Youth Food Bill of Rights” – composed in the same
city in which the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were signed, it
asserted, “In order to reshape our broken food system, we the youth have come together
to name our rights,” before it listed 17 demands with subsequent descriptions, excerpted
below:
 We have the right to culturally affirming food.
 We have the right to sustainable food.
 We have the right to nutritional education.
 We have the right to healthy food at school.
 We have the right to poison-free food.
 We have the right to beverages and foods that don't harm us.
 We have the right to local food.
 We have the right to fair food.
 We have the right to good food subsidies.
 We have the right to organic food and organic farmers.
 We have the right to cultivate unused land.
 We have the right to save our seed.

255

 We have the right to an ozone layer.
 We have the right to support our farmers through direct market transactions.
 We have the right to convenient food that is healthy.
 We have the right to leadership education. (Youth Food Bill of Rights, 2011)

Fernando, a co-director with YFJ, argued that recent years had seen a shift in the
annual convening – he preferred to refer to the event not simply as a conference, but
rather as a “summit”. Central to the move toward the summit was Fernando's emphasis
on arts and cultural expression as a driving force of the gathering. Whereas the early
years focused almost entirely on food, nutrition and agriculture, organizers found that
their story was too often isolated in its reach, confined to those already engaged in food
justice issues. By integrating Paulo Freire’s methods of popular education and theatrical
performance with other modes of visual and performing arts, Fernando helped to bring in
what he called the “artivism.” The arts were seen as a tool for social awakening and
transformation, all based in discussions of the food system. Through this artivism, youth
engaged in the YFJ network could then have a way to tell their story in their local
contexts, all across the nation. As Fernando described:
At the end of the conferences now we have a day of action. On that
Saturday, the youth showcase all their stuff, and we film it and we blast it
out. And they take that home with them, and they give presentations about
it and they report back to us all the successes. Their homies didn’t give a
shit about food or farming. They don’t want to go back to the fucking land
like their slavepeoples’ work. But when it’s presented with art, when it’s
presented with art it gets them excited. They want to get into it. They
recognize this is revolutionary, this isn’t just foodie shit. So we make it
hot. There’s a big thing coming through with the hip hop culture piece.
We’re asking people what do they want, in the arts, in the celebration?
Because it’s got to be fun, it’s got to be dope, it’s got to compete with
other shit going on in the streets.

Staff and youth leaders from NU had participated in the last several YFJ
conferences before agreeing to serve as the host for the 2013 summit in Los Angeles.

256

Involvement in the network proved useful for Kenneth, in particular, who led the charge
of developing NU's youth program in recent years. He had the chance to get to know
leaders from organizations around the country working on similar projects, was able to
share resources, learn new approaches, and get a sense of where NU's work fit within a
broader movement. He also pointed to an online toolkit hosted by YFJ – which contained
curriculum, workshop ideas, icebreaker activities and visual aids – that brought together
resources from the conference and affiliated organizations for use by food justice
organizers affiliated with the network. In all, involvement in YFJ gave a sense of being
part of a collaborative movement that extended beyond South LA.
Leila, a youth organizer with YFJ, explained that this kind of connection to a
broader analysis of food justice issues was exactly what the networked hoped to spur
among youth participants and community-based organizers. Involvement in the YFJ
network could allow for the contours of a broader movement to take shape, allowing
local organizations to do their community-based work, while shedding light on the fact
they were still engaged in a collective and broad-based struggle. There was a need, she
argued, for it to be made explicitly clear to the youth that, while they lived in different
parts of the country, they experienced similar problems within their locally specific food
environments. This type of understanding was offered up as central to motivating social
justice action – at both the local and national levels – moving forward. Leila explained:
The social justice piece, I think that really comes with a framework of
analysis that looks at systems. And sometimes in our local level, we're
looking at just our local community, it's easy to see lots of different
reasons, or locally specific reasons, for injustice in the food system. But I
think when we look at it in the national framework, it helps youth to really
understand the root causes more. And I think that almost, in a sense,
amplifies the social justice aspect of any program that's locally working on
food access.

257

NU was seen as a natural host for the YFJ's summit in Southern California.
Leaders from YFJ pointed to the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Community
Program as some of the first food justice work ever done in the country, and admired
NU's historical connection to that philosophy and action. They also argued that NU's
attention to the traditional cultural identities of the youth involved in their program had a
strong influence on how YFJ went about mentoring other food justice organizations
across the nation. Leila explained that, “Encouraging the youth to consider their
traditional and cultural foodways, and to consider the oppressive forces that would have
us eat otherwise,” proved to be a powerful first step for youth to think critically about
food justice issues. Further, these exercises emerged as tools to unite youth from
different backgrounds to see their common struggles. Fernando suggested that NU's
fierce commitment to its everyday work and broader philosophical vision were inspiring
to the YFJ network. He also argued that NU's social enterprise had the opportunity to be
one of several models that might be adopted by other food justice organizations.
There's a whole range (of potential models). Some are grant-funded and
just doing youth development, some are grant funded and growing food
but giving it away. Some selling it to break even. Some starting
businesses, cafes. We want 25 models throughout the nation...I see that
(NU) has an opportunity, with some of the social enterprise work, to be a
model, to inspire other youth programs nationwide as well, to really think
about the self-sufficiency component and bringing in some money.

While retaining much of the format of previously successful YFJ summits, NU
hoped to put its own organizational stamp on the convening. Tours of key historical sites
across South Los Angeles would be key to demonstrate the place-based approach that
undergirded all of the organization's efforts. Further, NU aimed to place an emphasis on
community-based research and knowledge construction as central to any effort that could

258

build critical consciousness and challenge dominant power structures. Such a perspective
had been a driving force for NU's operations going back at least to its initial Community
Food Assessment, and they hoped to spread the story of capacity building through data
collection and analysis to other members of the network. A flyer for the summit
described this important aspect of the event:
This year's summit will lift stories of community-led research strategies
that honor the inherent wisdom and social capital of our communities.
Youth and mentors will share tools to ensure that community development
efforts create LEADERSHIP opportunities, green jobs and youth social
enterprise.

NU's hosting of the summit also came at a critical point of strategic development
and growth for the YFJ network, as they moved from a mostly volunteer organization to a
group that provided full and part-time support to its leadership. Engaged in a long-term
fundraising drive, YFJ hoped to expand its activities to host a higher volume of smaller
regional summits, as well as to coordinate a variety of online campaigns, better engage
with media, train spokespersons to travel the country, and eventually move to having a
greater influence on the policy process at local, national and international levels. Indeed,
many of the organizations in their network had little background in policy advocacy, and
providing more substantive tools to make this happen was a key goal of future efforts.
Organizers also hoped and expected that their “artivism” would provide a force to
attain greater media attention, but thus far were disappointed with the extent to which
their on-the-ground and social media activity had not been picked up by mainstream
media that could help shape a national discussion. “The people who are getting media
coverage are the people who are already getting media coverage,” Leila reflected. Too
often, she said, the conversation at the national level was dominated by folks like Jamie

259

Oliver and Michelle Obama – potential allies for the movement, but certainly not
authentic voices of youth food justice activists. “We've got all this power, all this
potential,” Fernando explained. “And we're really just aligning right now and strategizing
how to channel it.” As NU had found in its community-based work – especially in its
conflicts with groups like the American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens – some
food and farming groups were more “brandable than others” (Banet-Weiser, 2012). The
YFJ network found itself grappling with the very same tension, and similarly sought to
improve its brandability while maintaining its guiding food justice mission.
NU's connection to the YFJ network was representative of a communication
ecology that extended beyond the local community of South LA. Integration into YFJ
provided an opportunity to connect with other organizations and youth from across the
nation, share tools and practical ideas, and collectively strategize ways to tell the story of
food justice in a diverse set of communities, as well as in policy circles and in
mainstream media. At the time of this writing, YFJ was very much in a moment of
growth and opportunity, and NU's presence as the host of the annual summit was
illustrative of the influential role that the organization could play in future activities of the
network. In a landscape of community-based food justice, in which local action
predominated, the YFJ network represented an important piece of NU's long-term
strategic plan to develop a model for food justice organizing that could be adopted and
reshaped to fit local contexts across the country. Involvement in the network also opened
up conversation about extra-local action – including involvement in the policy process
and engagement with macro-level media storytellers – that could expand the impact of
food justice organizations in the years to come.

260

The Hathor Collective – An International Network for Social Innovation
Formed in 1991 and active for over twenty years, the Hathor Collective was
founded by a writer and management consultant who specialized in systems-based
approaches to understanding organizational behavior and social change. In its early years,
Hathor served as a host for a number of dialogues that brought together mostly US-based
thinkers and practitioners to think through ways that scientific and ecological theories
might inform new styles of organizing. Into the 21
st
century, Hathor's activities became
increasingly global, as they worked with young leaders from over thirty countries to form
their own dialogue groups that could help facilitate leadership and community
development. Hathor began to link those involved in these global activities through a
newsletter and events, then took these efforts a step further through the development of
what they called the Hathor Exchange. This initiative connected community-based
leaders from around the world to each other through a variety of learning exchange trips
and activities.
Throughout its history, staff and leaders from Hathor published extensively,
articulating a philosophy that called for the promotion of global networked relationships
that would link community-based social innovators from around the world. A Hathor
pamphlet outlined the central tenets of their networked organizational philosophy:
When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then
strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new
system emerges at a greater level of scale... We focus on discovering
pioneering efforts and naming them as such. We then connect these efforts
to other similar work globally. We nourish this network in many ways, but
most essentially through creating opportunities for learning and sharing
experiences and shifting into communities of practice. We also illuminate
these pioneering efforts so that many more people will learn from them.
We are attempting to work intentionally with emergence so that small,
local efforts can become a global force for change.

261

In 2012, Hathor decided to enter a “period of rest”, invoking a systems theory
philosophy in a statement on their website that suggested their respite would allow them
to, “gather nutrients in our roots so that we might again emerge as a healthy, vibrant,
contributor to our world.” Staff from the organization pointed to an intersecting set of
issues – related to leadership, staff relationships, funding, and a legitimate interest in
iteratively reformulating their mission to best advance their long-term goals –as the basis
for taking a break. At that moment, Hathor maintained its non-profit status and online
presence, but scaled back its active role in promoting global networks of exchange, at
least for the time being.
Before Hathor’s respite, Neighborhood United was one of dozens of organizations
involved in the Hathor activities that linked community-based leaders from across North
America, Central and South America, Southern Africa, Western Europe and India. Over
the course of several years, NU participated in a variety of learning exchanges, as the
organization hosted diverse global community leaders and NU staff visited other
communities across the world. Sites of these learning exchanges included Boston,
Montreal, Oaxaca, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Some of those organizations with whom
NU’s exchanges took place were specifically involved in food and agriculture related-
work, while others took part in a variety of other environmental sustainability and
community development projects. NU staffers pointed to a number of benefits that
participation in this global network brought into their community development work.
Engagement with Hathor provided them with insights into the types of practical solutions
that might or might not work in different social and cultural contexts, helped them forge
strong relationships with other dedicated leaders from communities across the globe, and

262

gave them a chance to see their place in a broader global movement for community-based
social change.
A few examples are in order to demonstrate the types of impacts that NU's
interaction with the Hathor Collective had on both the practical and conceptual activities
of the organization. For a time, Hathor facilitated a North American exchange project that
brought NU into direct relationship with a Boston-based youth-oriented food and
agriculture organization
36
, as well as a Montreal-based food and agriculture organization
whose core activity was an intergenerational, bicycle-based Meals-on-Wheels food
distribution program. Over the course of about two years, the organizations met on
various occasions – in Los Angeles, Boston and Montreal – as part of a North American
community of practice focused on sustainable food systems. Betsey, a staff member with
Hathor, explained the logic behind the convening:
When we got together for our first meeting, we said – it’s feeding
ourselves sustainably, it’s young people, it’s in urban environments. And
the purpose was really to look at how learning moves, using this idea of
the trans-local. So, the context is always important, but we believe there
are important things we can learn from one another because we’re
working in a similar field. And we believe that we’re also in a place where
we have the capacity to work at this level.

The insights gained from these exchanges pushed participating organizations in
new directions, or, perhaps more accurately, gave the organizations the confidence to dig
deeper into areas that they had been tentatively exploring. In the case of NU, a visit from
Roger, a staff member from the Montreal-based group, spurred NU to integrate bicycling
and bike-delivery more directly into the operations of their budding social enterprise. As
Maya reflected in an internal Hathor document: “I think eventually these connections

36
This Boston-based group was the same organization that helped to found the YFJ network, a fact that
reinforces an understanding of how organizations operate within networked multi-organizational fields.

263

around bikes would have happened anyway, but I don't think it would have already
happened if Roger hadn't have come to visit… The presentations and sharing gave us a
little more inspiration to do things that we were planning to do already but now we have
more motivation to get them underway sooner.”
For his part, Roger also gathered concrete takeaways from his visit to Los
Angeles. Helping with NU’s produce bag program gave him the confidence, he said, to
go ahead and pilot a community-supported agriculture program back in Montreal, one
that was tailored to the local context but drew from lessons learned from NU’s
experience. At the same time, Roger also pointed to more affective benefits that
engagement in the exchange brought to his work, as he explained in an internal Hathor
document: “It was refreshing – I have come back to work from the perspective of the
person who stepped out of my bubble, I am coming back with more motivation, more
inspiration about my own work than I had before I left.”
Indeed, the personal and emotional insights gained by Hathor participants were
central to the broader goal of the network, and ultimately were seen to lead toward
practical applications. Christine, a co-founder of the group, described this aspect:
At the level of the personal, when you are deep, deep in your work, as
everyone who is in this work is…when you step out of it and you go to
someone else’s community, you get refreshed. And when you go back
home, you see your community very differently. And when you receive
visitors, you get to see your community through their eyes. So, what
happens is, it’s a way of creating learning and reflection for how we
perceive our work and what’s possible.

This type of critical reflection on NU’s community work came through clearly for
Maya after she took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. During a two-week learning exchange and
workshop, almost all of the proceedings were held entirely in the Spanish language. Of

264

course, issues related to linguistic difference and intercommunal solidarity-building had
always been of interest to NU. As was discussed in Chapter 5, the organization did their
best to offer as many multi-lingual community programs as possible, but lack of funding
and staffing sometimes got in the way of providing full coverage for the mono-lingual
Spanish-speaking community of South LA. As Maya returned from Oaxaca, she felt
compelled to make tackling this challenge an even greater priority than it had been in
previous years. “It really showed me what it's like to be on the other side,” she explained
days after the exchange. “Because most of our stuff is conducted in English. And now
here I am, and I always knew it, I understood it. And I knew that we should have
translation and all that. But here I could really feel it. I could feel it in here (placing her
hand on her heart) and not just up here (pointing to her head).” In the time since this took
place, NU had indeed made a concerted effort to bulk up the number of staff and interns
fluent in Spanish, and this impact was seen in the number of Spanish-language speakers
who took part in the organization's community programs. While these issues had been
part of NU's organizational conversation for some time, the global exchange reinforced a
conceptual commitment in their locally-focused activities.
Charles similarly pointed to the learning exchanges as providing both practical
skills and a more abstract understanding of community development in international
contexts. On a trip to Zimbabwe, NU staff members were impressed by the work of
residents from a local “learning village.” Local residents there were engaged in a variety
of works around permaculture design, organic farming, herbal remedies, nutritional
health, eco-building and renewable energy, among other domains. Charles was struck by
the sophistication of the group's sustainable practices and the efficiency of their

265

agricultural systems. As he and other NU staff returned to South Los Angeles, they
worked to bring some of those practical pieces of knowledge into their own agricultural
production work. “As we're doing things here,” Charles described, “the things we've seen
on these trips have always been in the back of our minds.”
At the same time, Charles described how some of the community development
practices that he encountered through his own visits, as well as through the visits of
others to South LA, demonstrated the creativity that community practitioners must bring
to their work within their own contexts. He heard from one visitor, Lesedi, about a
project in which his South African organization paid local homeless residents to collect
used bottles for recycling. “Here, in the US, not only is there not a value placed on doing
that, but it's actually criminalized,” Charles recounted. “It was just something that stuck
with me. Building an understanding of how these different things operate in other
contexts, and just always thinking of creative ways to promote community economic
development.”
Lesedi himself had an opportunity to travel across the United States on account of
his involvement with the Hathor Collective, including a week in South Los Angeles,
where he was embedded with Neighborhood United. In South Africa, his program
focused on five general programmatic areas – permaculture landscaping and organic
agriculture, water efficiency and sustainable water technology, energy efficiency and
renewable energy materials, recycling and composting, and green construction and
design. His travels brought him to Boston, to the New York/New Jersey area and to Los
Angeles. He had a chance to get to know a number of Hathor-connected groups, with
focus areas that cut across issues of community development, education, homeless

266

advocacy, food and agriculture, and environmental sustainability. Lesedi was particularly
struck by the openness with which Americans were willing to discuss the challenges and
issues they faced in their work, suggesting that there is, “no holy subject that you can't
talk about.”
Overall, his impressions of the United States were mixed. He was shocked by the
lack of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, in particular, as well as by the disconnect that
many local residents had with respect to the local environment. He said he had heard
before about the environmental problems related to certain aspects of the American
lifestyle, but having a chance to experience things firsthand allowed him to develop a
critique, as well as see similarities and differences in his own South African context.
Lesedi described a conversation he had with two South Los Angeles residents while
working in one of NU's mini-urban farms as illustrative of this topic:
One of the things that was highlighted for me, this came from the
conversation with the two ladies, is that in general, Americans do not
connect with the earth. So there is a broken relationship there. One of
them made a very telling example – if and when kids play outside, you
say, “Stop playing with dirt!” And that would be one of the challenges that
I see NU having to navigate. A change in the power of the word. So that
the power of the word works for, it doesn't work against. Precisely in
shifting the mind, and by so, helping people – although it has to come
from the people – making people aware of the inseparable relationship that
they have with nature and earth. And if they don't see it is as inseparable,
then we see in my experience some of what we have in the US.

At the same time as he developed this critique, he was also inspired by the work
that he saw happening on the ground in South Los Angeles. In his own work, he was
struggling to maintain community engagement in some of the environmental
improvement projects with which his organization was engaged. Seeing the ways that

267

NU faced up to its own challenges got Lesedi to think critically about ways that he might
integrate new strategies into his own work:
I think the work that NU is doing is very impressive. In many areas of
their work, they are two, three steps from where we are...The way they
framed food and culture and history and relationships with earth – it's out
of this world...The one key thing that I'm taking with me from this trip is
that the US is not the best model for people to follow. But the second one
complements the first. There are people in the US who are aware of it, and
they are rolling their sleeves and really getting into doing what can be
done. There is a fair measure of community-based work.

Connections like the ones made with Lesedi, as well as through the other learning
exchanges facilitated by the Hathor Collective, brought NU into a broader storytelling
network around food, agriculture, community development and social transformation that
crossed linguistic and national borders. The experiences operated as a vehicle to share
knowledge on practical ways to promote community-based organizational missions, at
the same time as they helped these community-based practitioners concretely
conceptualize their work as part of an international network for change. Having such
international connections would be key to any movement that would attempt to influence
the macro-level storytelling systems that helped to shape the contexts for community-
based change across the world. The Hathor Collective looked to play a role in doing just
that, as they forged relationships across five continents, facilitated storytelling among and
between local community groups, and produced books and other multimedia materials
that highlighted the impact and importance of these emergent systems.
With that said, at the time of this writing, the Hathor Collective itself had gone
into a “period of rest”. While NU had enjoyed and benefited from its experiences with
Hathor, even before this dormant period, they had begun to scale back some of their
involvement. Indeed, NU staff suggested that it had been difficult to balance these

268

regional and international exchanges while the organization concentrated on building its
community-based programs. “For a while, we were doing a lot of these types of things,”
Maya explained. “But we felt like we needed to take a step back, because we were
building all of this in our community. We needed to be able to have this all be set up,
have people who are skilled to be up and running this. And from there I think we can step
back in.” The experience was not uncommon among members of the Hathor community.
Dealing with small non-profits around the world, Betsey continually pointed to capacity
as the biggest challenge that stood in the way of broader engagement in the network.
There was this desire to have the impact go beyond the local, even though
we were really wanting to focus on the local and make sure that never left.
And not only that sense of wanting to go further with that idea, or spread
your theory of change or your model. It was also this sense of a longing
for belonging to something…That was another piece of it, wanting to be
part of this bigger community where they felt like being seen or heard or
recognized like they were part of something. But it was so hard for most
of them to find the time and energy and capacity to engage in the way that
we as exchange organizers needed them to do.

In the context of contemporary social justice movement-building, it seems
inevitable that community-based organizers would necessarily find themselves in the
tenuous position described by Bestey. Organizations like NU understand that true social
justice transformation will require efforts that extend beyond locally-focused community
programming. Yet, at the same time, they also know that this locally-focused
programming must be functioning optimally if that extra-local movement has any chance
to survive. Finding the capacity to bring these multi-level and geographically-dispersed
networks together was a conflict with which NU, for one, consistently found itself
struggling. It remains to be seen whether any future incarnation of Hathor – or of some

269

new networked organization – might be able to help organizations like NU sustain these
communities of practice and maintain trans-local movements moving forward.
The Potentials and Perils of Policy and Politics
When making public presentations about their organization’s work, staff members
from NU were quite often asked about their interaction with the policymaking process.
“Have you been involved in advocacy around the Farm Bill?” interested audience
members would ask. “Have you been working with the LA Food Policy Council?” or,
“What about the local Neighborhood Councils?” The response from NU was generally
diplomatic and ambiguous. They would reply that they had indeed been involved in a
number of initiatives around mostly local policy issues. They might mention that Maya
was a key member of the coalition that pushed forward a “soda ban” that was adopted by
the Los Angeles Unified School District in the early 2000s, or that Charles had served for
a time as a member of a South LA Neighborhood Council, or that they had received
official recognitions for their work from several LA City Councilpersons, State Senators
and other elected officials. Yet, they would generally stop short of outlining a broader
plan of action with respect to politics and policymaking. The conversations would
quickly revert back to NU’s primary focus on community economic development through
food, leaving a number of underexplored questions about the importance of politics and
policy in their food justice organizing.
As earlier chapters have outlined, within all of Neighborhood United’s activities,
they integrated a strong political philosophical vision about the enduring impacts that
systemic inequality had on low-income and ethnic minority communities. This political
philosophical vision – one that emphasized social, economic and racial justice across

270

multiple levels of the food system – served to set the organization apart from many others
involved in the alternative food movements of recent decades. Yet, the question remained
as to whether groups like NU shared with those alternative food movement groups either
an unwillingness or an inability to influence key decision-makers in the political and
policymaking arenas. Indeed, Guthman (2011a) argued that, “Efforts to address
inequality, through, for example, ‘food justice’ might make good food more accessible,
but it still does not fundamentally challenge the dynamics that cause the vast majority of
Americans to eat vacuous food and to be exposed to appreciable amounts of toxins by
dint of the way most food is produced” ( p. 141). How would NU respond to such a
critique? Did they see the policymaking process as an important piece of their agenda? If
so, had that been reflected in the actual activities of the organization?
Through my ethnographic work with Neighborhood United, it became clear that
direct engagement with politics and policy was not a current priority of the organization.
Yes, they continued to cultivate relationships with certain local elected officials, and yes,
they had been involved in a few policy-related initiatives over the years, but at no point
did they devote significant staff time and resources such that these emerged as key
organizational initiatives. Fundamentally, a lack of engagement with these political
processes was a function of time – both in the short term and the long-term. In one sense,
NU lacked the time to assign staff to focus on these activities when so much other work
needed to be done. In another sense, NU simply believed it was not yet time for them to
fully engage with these dynamics; rather, more work needed to be done at the level of the
local community before they could exert any significant influence in the policymaking
arenas in which they did hope and expect to one day have a voice.

271

On a day-to-day level, NU simply found much of the activities of local food
policy-making, and of other advocacy efforts around social justice policy-making,
difficult to fit into their busy schedules – as well as sometimes tedious exercises on the
whole. With food policy-related meetings often lasting several hours at a time, often in
the middle of a workday, NU generally made the decision to focus on their own work
rather than devote a staff member to attend. They also complained, at times, about the
slow-moving and repetitive nature of many food policy discussions. Having worked on
food justice issues for over a decade, NU staff had seen various local and city policy
initiatives related to food production, procurement and access come and go, often having
done little, in their estimation, to impact the daily lives of local residents. Rather than
spend all day sitting in a meeting near City Hall, they would suggest, NU would be happy
to have folks come to their South LA headquarters to see the progress they had made, and
to talk about ways that policy changes might push things forward even more.
NU was slightly less flippant when it came to the political advocacy efforts of
their friends and collaborators from other social justice organizations. In the case of an
ally social justice group who was pushing forward a particular initiative, calling for
support at a protest, or asking for help to reach out to local residents, NU’s interest in
lending a hand was hamstrung by the realities of their own heavy workload. “We get
asked by people all the time to come and support their initiatives,” Kenneth explained.
“We just don't have the time and the staff to support that while we're doing everything
else. It doesn't mean that we don't support what they're all doing, it just means we can't
always be there to support them.”

272

With respect to policy-oriented connections in NU’s organizational
communication ecology, however, their efforts did not begin and end in the local
community. Instead, NU did find itself involved in other networks that could enhance
their ability to help shape certain aspects of the policymaking process. One key
connection came directly from their founder, Jaja, who had also been the founder of the
Statewide Association for Community Economic Development (SACED). NU had been
a long-time member and collaborator with the group, which billed itself on its website as
a “clearinghouse for information and action that advances the field of community
economic development through training and continuing education, technical assistance,
and advocacy on public policy.” Indeed, the blending of the on-the-ground community
economic development work with more politically focused organizations that could
concentrate at the city, regional and national levels was key to Jaja’s conception of what
NU should be as an organization. He explained in an interview:
We can't just ignore the political reality. We need to understand that has to
be transformed in a way to create space to thrive for community economic
development. Without that political force, there's going to be those natural
limitations. The economics can go only as far as the acceptance
politically… But ultimately, I think everything has its limitation. NU has
its limitation, too. Because it is a community economic development
organization, it's not a quote “political organization”. But it cannot
separate itself from the political realities, and it has to be engaged in one
way or another with those political realities. But I think it takes a different
type of vehicle to ultimately bring the political change that's necessary.

Current staff members with NU took a similar perspective as Jaja. They
saw their organization’s work as deeply connected to the political realities of the
time, but they asserted that the community economic development in which they
were engaged was actually central to these political realities being altered to better
reflect their mission. Before joining NU, for instance, Gretchen had worked in

273

both California and Washington, D.C. in groups that focused on policy advocacy
for sustainable foods and small farmers. One of the reasons the work with NU had
so resonated with her was that it provided an everyday face to food system issues
that were often lost in the abstractions of policy discussions. Building stronger
connections between these two areas seemed to be a key area for future growth in
the food justice movement in general, as she explained:
I don't have that personal feeling of like, it has to happen on the ground, or
it has to happen in policy. I think both are important…So, you have
policies that are being passed at a city level – oh, “it’s so great, there’s a
soda ban,” or, “it’s so great, there’s a school food initiative.” Well, if
people don’t know about it, people aren’t educated about it, people don’t
have the resources around them to benefit from it, then what’s the
point?...For NU, the thing is, people are right here. They have the
opportunity to create something for themselves, to realize their hopes for
their own future right here. So why wouldn't you support and cultivate that
to happen, instead of just waiting for policy to reach these people?
Because no matter what the policies are, if people don't have the
knowledge, the skills, the resources, they're not going to realize the
benefits from that.

For the last several years, then, NU believed the time was simply not right for
full-on engagement in the political and policymaking processes. They understood the
critique that argued that, if alternative food system initiatives fail to enter in the
policymaking arenas, they would ultimately fall short of achieving their social
transformation goals. At the same time, they pushed back against this critique, suggesting
that in order for food justice voices to actually make an impact in the world of politics
and policy, they first had to demonstrate their value on the ground. This perspective
remained consistent with NU’s overarching strategy of finding ways to put forward their
agenda for change while operating within an advanced liberal system. They knew they
could not do all things at once, and they knew as well that in an audit-based culture, one

274

must first demonstrate results in order to be taken seriously by government and other
influential decision-makers. Their challenge, then, was to build their model for
community-based social justice first, to maintain a presence in networks that would keep
them connected to politics and policymaking, and then, when ready, to shift toward an
agenda that made such efforts a higher organizational priority.
This perspective was echoed, in part, by leaders of the Statewide Association for
Community Economic Development (SACED). While that organization billed itself as
providing three types of services – continuing education, training assistance and policy
advocacy – through the years of the Great Recession, policy advocacy had taken a
backseat to the other organizational functions. Quentin of SACED recounted an
interaction with a State Senator around 2009, a time of historic budget deficits in the state
of California. “The Senator said to me – ‘You know, if you’re going to come and talk
public policy to me when there isn’t any money, all we’re doing is talking public policy.
So thank you very much – stay away from me.’” From there, SACED had shifted toward
a much stronger emphasis on direct technical assistance to community economic
development groups, working to help those organizations build capacity, measure impact
and strategize for growth. NU, for one, had benefited from some of that assistance, most
clearly in their move toward the development of their social enterprise. As the state and
the nation had emerged – at least slightly, and at least temporarily – from the doldrums of
the economic downturn in the second decade of the 21
st
century, SACED was once again
moving toward more active engagement in the policy process.
Would the time come for NU when they, too, would move toward more active
engagement with economic and food-related policymaking? At the time of this writing,

275

the answer to that question remained unclear, although a small but steady momentum had
been building. The organization was bringing in more revenue, was able to support a
growing staff, was connecting to a variety of partners outside of the South LA area, and
was beginning to get recognition from players in government, university and food
movement circles. In the minds of NU staff, the key strategic move was not to jump in
fully at either the local or national level of policymaking, but rather to be sure that their
base was fully developed before their organizational activities could fully evolve into
those areas. Only with this foundation in place could they be able to tell their story in
such a way that would meet the demands of the contemporary social, political and
economic climate. In order to shift cultural values and social structures at a broader scale,
NU believed it first had to clearly demonstrate that task was achieved in their South LA
community of practice. “People will not support you unless they see what you’re doing is
actually making an impact,” Maya argued, continuing:
If you're going to move into the political system, you better be damn sure
you're coming from a place of real strength. From a place of community
support, with the community really understanding what you're about.
Because when we go into the political system, we ain't coming to lose.
We'll be coming from a place of political strength.
Conclusion
This chapter explored the organizational communication ecology of
Neighborhood United to assess its connections to networks of action that extended
beyond the local community. Drawing from researchers that included DeFilipis, Fisher
and Shragge (2010), as well as Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei (2001), it suggested that
community-based social change movements have inherent limitations when it comes to
motivating extra-local changes to social structures and underlying cultural values. In

276

order to make this substantive leap, community-based organizations must not only have a
vision for change that extends beyond the neighborhood, but also must be integrated into
communicative relationships and partnerships that expand the scope of their
interpersonal, inter-organizational and mediated storytelling. An organization whose
communication ecology features these types of connections has the opportunity to spread
their local model for change, learn from like-minded others, and ultimately re-shape
macro-level storytelling systems and institutions.
This chapter’s investigation of Neighborhood United’s communication ecology
illustrated that the organization’s interest in and ability to motivate food justice beyond
the South LA area was fraught with tension. They expressed a sincere belief that
engagement in regional, national and international networks was important if food justice
was to ever become a broad-based reality. Befitting the advanced liberal landscape, they
went about constructing new sets of hybrid coalitions, those that brought together locally-
focused actors into a geographically diverse common cause. The theory of change
undergirding these partnerships was that interaction in these networks could help them
refine their local action at the same time as their collective power could better integrate
their social justice story into the perspectives of diverse global citizens, of influential
media sources, and of institutional and governmental policy-makers. The results of these
efforts were mixed, at best. Indeed, one key outcome of these networked interactions was
that NU became increasingly convinced it needed to first demonstrate impact at the
community level before it could more thoroughly devote itself to action at these broader
geographic scales. Still, the organization remained committed to the trans-local concept,

277

and believed that, in time, they would be able to turn their attention more substantively
toward cultivating these connections.
One might read this account as confirmation of Guthman’s (2011a) contention
that, in their locally-focused action, food justice efforts still do not fundamentally
challenge the dynamics of social injustice across multiple levels our food system. Based
on the analysis of this chapter, this critique certainly carries some weight, as groups like
NU have indeed struggled to find the time and willingness to encourage changes to the
institutional structures and cultural values, beyond their local community, that shape our
broader food and agricultural systems. Yet, it remains important to recognize, as well,
that such macro-level changes to storytelling and policymaking cannot simply emerge on
their own. Rather, these efforts must be grounded in the interests, needs and desires of
local community constituents, those whose voices must be recognized as demanding that
a change is needed.
Indeed, in the field of media and communication studies, a similar perspective
was aptly articulated by Gibson (2010). That author critiqued the elite-oriented and
macro-level media advocacy approach to encouraging social change, a strategy that urges
activists to use mass media storytelling as a way to influence political and institutional
power-brokers to address their issue of concern. Absent from media advocacy theorizing,
Gibson argued, was an understanding of the work required to build grassroots movements
that could push for broader change: “Instead, their work most often assumes these
subaltern groups are always-already organized, always-already unified around particular
policy proposals, and thus ready to bend the ear of the policy-making vanguard using the
powerful tools of mainstream, polity-wide media coverage” (p. 61). Ultimately, the

278

importance of advocating for change through macro-level storytelling – as well as
through networked action that pressures regional, national and international institutions –
should not be underestimated. However, as this chapter has shown, constructing an
organizational communication ecology that is able to maintain and sustain this extra-local
action is a significant challenge, especially for groups like Neighborhood United, whose
primary allegiance remains to their local community of practice.

279

CONCLUSION

Several years into the second decade of the 21
st
century, a bright light continued
to shine on an intersecting set of issues related to food, nutrition and agriculture. Often
taken for granted and relegated to a marginalized space in the public consciousness, in
recent years, problems and solutions related to the contemporary food system had taken
on a new level of prominence. In the work of journalists and in popular entertainment,
among activists and in the domain of policymakers, in academic journals and in the
conversations of the general public at large, food gained a foothold as an important story
that was deemed worthy of significant exploration. In researching and writing for this
dissertation, I hoped to provide several novel theoretical and empirical contributions to
this already vibrant discussion. In what ways might my work improve the study of food
system issues, as well as advance social change in the contemporary food system and
beyond?
What took shape was a project that had clear empirical and methodological goals.
Focusing in on issues related to food justice in South Los Angeles, I sought to engage in a
broader debate about the efficacy of community-based efforts to advance race-conscious
and social justice-oriented social change. I also aimed to interrogate the relationship
between what I, drawing from Rose (1999), referred to as the advanced liberal context,
on one hand, and these food justice efforts, on the other. From there, I worked to explore
the extent to which food justice could or could not thrive from within these overarching
political and economic systems. Before moving forward with any of these empirical
questions, however, I also sought to develop a sufficiently grounded, qualitative,

280

ethnographic methodological framework that could allow for an analysis of the multi-
level phenomena under study.
The research presented throughout this dissertation has provided direct responses
to these challenges. First, from a methodological perspective, I argued that networked
ethnography, guided by a communication ecology approach to the study of social
movement organizations, represented a valuable method for qualitative researchers
interested in understanding both why and how social movement organizational activity
took shape. Indeed, by documenting the communication ecology through which an
organization constructed its identity, built partnerships and acquired funding to support
its efforts, found solidarity with like-minded groups, and connected to local community
residents, I asserted that a realistic portrait of what it takes to motivate social change
could be ascertained.
With this communication ecology approach in place, the subsequent empirical
chapters focused more directly on the practices, possibilities and constraints of food
justice organizing today. Ultimately, the findings suggested that there is indeed a genuine
politics of possibility that can be cultivated by community-based groups who operate
within the context of advanced liberalism. By tracking their multi-level and temporal
network of communicative connections, I demonstrated that, while the communication
ecology of a food justice organization like Neighborhood United was always fraught with
contradictions, their actions could still be effective, even if limited, as a means to
advance their race-conscious social justice goals. Ultimately, understanding and
managing the tensions that emerge from hybrid coalitions – those that are made manifest
in the communication ecologies of social justice organizations – should be a critical task

281

for both scholars and practitioners. This holds true, I contend, not only in the domain of
food justice, but also in other social change efforts.
The remainder of this conclusion provides a review of the central methodological,
theoretical and empirical contributions of the project. Following this, I point to areas for
future research, then discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the work for
both scholars and activists interested in the advancement of social justice-oriented social
change.
Primary Contributions of the Dissertation
The interdisciplinary nature of this work meant that a diverse set of literatures,
theoretical frameworks and research perspectives were all brought into common
conversation. Throughout the process of research and analysis, I attempted to bring
together insights from communication and media studies, social movement studies,
cultural studies, political economy, food studies, science studies, geography and urban
planning, to name a few. In order to synthesize these disparate threads of research into a
cohesive entity, it was clear that a unifying theoretical and methodological framework
would have to be developed and deployed. The communication ecology approach and the
attendant method of networked ethnography were able to step into this analytical space.
The impetus for and merits of the communication ecology approach to the study
of social movement organizations have been consistently articulated from the start of this
project. To quickly summarize, building upon the foundation of researchers such as
Castells (2000, 2009) and Diani (1992, 2003), I outlined the value of applying a
networked approach to the study of social movements. In an age when networked logic
“transforms all domains of social and economic life,” (Castells, 2000, 368), network-

282

oriented studies of social movements are equipped to examine the links and relationships
that typify the multi-level and inter-organizational actions of social movement efforts.
Yet, as I described, while often framed as applicable among both quantitative and
qualitative researchers, little in-depth research had actually been conducted that applied
this networked logic to ethnographic research.
I introduced the communication ecology approach as a theoretical bridge that
could bring networked thinking in line with ethnography. I drew from the work of Ball-
Rokeach and colleagues to define the organizational communication ecology as the
network of communication resource relations constructed by an organization in pursuit
of a social movement goal and in the context of their organizational environment.
Grounded at the meso-level of the organization, but with a focus on its multi-level and
temporal communicative interactions as the primary site of analysis, I suggested that the
communication ecology approach could allow researchers to investigate both the why and
how of social movement activities. The method of networked ethnography was seen as
operating hand in hand with this theoretical framework. In practice, this entailed
employing the traditional practices of ethnography – including participant observation,
interviewing and document analysis – and then extending those methods into the multi-
level and temporal links of that organization’s communication ecology. With the use of
networked ethnography, I argued that a researcher could develop a grounded
understanding of a social movement organization’s historical identity construction, its
resource acquisition activities, its partnership building and its community organizing,
among other social movement practices.

283

Much of Chapter 2 provided a broad overview of the major problems in the
contemporary industrial food system; it then followed with an outline of several different
types of food movements that had emerged in recent years as a way to minimize risk
and/or transform that food system into one that was more environmentally, economically
and socially sustainable. As I delved into the growing body of literature that had focused
on these food movement efforts – of which food justice represented one philosophical
idea and organizing strategy among several – it became clear that work informed by the
communication ecology approach could provide a valuable contribution to this area of
research. Too often, I argued, researchers and activists in this domain had focused upon
isolated links within the food system. This could be seen, for instance, in researchers’
case studies of low-income communities’ struggles over urban community gardens, or of
practitioner efforts to advance food justice by improving healthy food access in urban
grocery stores. What was missing from these approaches was attention to networks of
power and action, those that extended well beyond their initial sites of study. In the case
of food justice through healthy food access – did that justice extend to the laborers who
grew, distributed and sold the food? In the case of urban community garden struggles,
what links beyond the local community facilitated residents’ efforts to challenge
dominant power brokers? Through a networked ethnography that interrogated
organizational communication ecologies, I had a tool to evaluate the efficacy of food
justice organizations to promote social and racial justice throughout their multi-level
links of communicative interaction.
Another key asset of the communication ecology approach proved to be the
framework’s ability to serve as a bridge between critical and applied approaches to the

284

study of social change. With its focus on the agency of organizations and actors to
construct a set of communication connections in order to achieve a social movement goal,
I have made it clear that the approach is at least moderately optimistic. This optimism
pushes back, in some ways, against a tendency toward negative over-determination in a
good deal of critical scholarship – that is, in critical research that analyzes the food
movement as well as other social change initiatives. Indeed, I have argued that some
critical scholars tend to suggest that neoliberal capitalism has made the realization of
social justice in the contemporary world basically impossible (Brown, 2005; Guthman,
2011b). This is a contention that, while not without critical merit, I suggest is absolutist,
at best, and paralyzingly unproductive, at worst.
In contrast to research that identified an extreme and determining set of power
relations at the level of the macro-institutional structure, the multi-level nature of the
communication ecology approach allowed for alternate interpretations of macro-level
political and economic influences to enter the conversation. Indeed, as was clear
throughout the networked ethnography that unfolded, several influential dynamics of
what I call the advanced liberal political and economic context served to shape the action
of the empirical cases under study. In their work, Foucault (2003, 2007), Rose (1999),
Power (1997), Epstein (2007) and others had outlined several of the driving logics and
mechanisms that they argued characterized contemporary liberal governmentality. This
included, to name a few, a focus on the community as a preferred site of action, a shift
toward governmental decentralization, an overall faith in audit culture, and the
development of hybrid coalitions to advance social change. Like these authors, I still
remain critical of some of the central operations of liberal governmentality, yet I maintain

285

that there also exists a productive politics of possibility that can emerge from efforts that
operate within this landscape. The communication ecology approach provided an outlet
for exploring how these macro-level critical theoretical constructs were actually made
manifest in the networked action of meso-level social movement organizations and their
partners at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels.
It was an exploration of this politics of possibility that became the focus of the
empirical work that composed much of the remainder of the dissertation project. Chapters
3, 4, 5 and 6 all demonstrated both the utility and the flexibility of the communication
ecology approach. First, I compared the communication ecologies of three different
organizations, all of whom were engaged in tackling food injustice in South Los Angeles.
Analysis of their networks showed that an interest in and/or an ability to advance race-
conscious social justice through community-based food movement activities was not a
common thread among all three. Through a comparative analysis of the organizations’
histories, philosophical visions for change, media and communication strategies, inter-
organizational partnerships and funding support, I demonstrated that, among the three,
Neighborhood United was uniquely situated to actually push forward an agenda for
change that could use food as a medium to promote a broader social justice project, in
South LA and potentially beyond the local area.
The remaining chapters continued with a deep dive into the organizational
communication ecology of Neighborhood United. I dug into the organization’s roots as
the non-profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party, then followed its
journey toward becoming a 21
st
century non-profit organization that operated a variety of
community programs related to urban agriculture, youth development, and community

286

economic development. The final chapters drew directly from the insights of
Communication Infrastructure Theory (Ball-Rokeach, Kim & Matei, 2001; Kim & Ball-
Rokeach, 2006) to demonstrate how, through its organizational communication ecology,
Neighborhood united worked to advance its story of racial and social justice through food
at the community level, as well as in regional, national and international contexts. It was
in these chapters that the primary empirical contributions of the dissertation came to the
fore.
Indeed, as I tracked the organizational communication ecology of Neighborhood
United across space and time, several primary insights emerged from the research. The
first was that there are, indeed, successes in the work of community organizing toward
food justice. Early in the dissertation, I defined social justice-oriented social change as
alterations to social structures and value systems that lead to a more equitable distribution
of fundamental resources and respect for human dignity and diversity. In their work in
South Los Angeles, Neighborhood United constructed and activated its organizational
communication ecology in order to shift the values of local residents, as well as transform
local structures and institutions. Through local storytelling about intersecting issues
related to food systems, environmental sustainability, community empowerment and
economic opportunity, NU encouraged youth and adults to embrace their cultural
histories, to stand up for their rights, and to build self-reliance. As Hector, Principal of
South LA Elementary School, articulated, “ NU brings that education to say we can plant
our own things, we can feed the mind, the soul.”
The organization was sure to demonstrate, as well, that in order to “serve the
people, body and soul,” attempts to shift or reinforce residents’ value systems must

287

necessarily be supported by community institutions that embodied the ideals of food
justice. The efforts of Neighborhood United to create spaces in the community that could
facilitate neighborhood storytelling about food and justice – through their school-based
projects and the development of mini-urban farms, among other initiatives – were central
to this task. Their growing social enterprise, the Village Market Place, was developing
into a broader embodiment of these goals – their work supported local, beyond organic,
minority farmers; it provided employment to local youth of color; and it gave local
residents an opportunity to purchase fresh, healthy food with money that would then
support their ongoing community programs, those that then helped to shape social
justice-oriented values in the community. A multi-level, systems-based analysis and plan
of action was a driving force of the organization’s strategic goals. Or, as Maya explained
to local residents, “The issues are not simple – they're systemic…Just like the problem is
systemic, we need systemic solutions to these problems.”
This leads to the next primary insight, which is that, in order to push forward
systemic solutions to food injustice, Neighborhood United knew that they had to work
from within that very system. “You can't very well drop out of the system without
dropping out of the universe,” Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, had declared
decades before. “You contradict the system while you are in it until it's transformed into a
new system” (Quoted in Nelson, 2011, 63). Decades later, Neighborhood United found
itself following the lead of Newton’s philosophy, using urban agriculture and nutrition
education as vehicles to transform the social, environmental and economic landscapes of
South Los Angeles. Working as a non-profit in a system that was embedded within the
age of advanced liberalism, they also knew they could not move forward alone. Instead,

288

NU’s entrepreneurial model for community development relied on a varied set of
network partners, from both within and outside of the local community, and from a varied
set of philosophical and practical backgrounds. As I traced their organizational
communication ecology into the present day, what emerged was a complex story of social
change through the development of hybrid coalitions. Indeed, in order to advance their
goals, NU constructed diverse sets of networked interactions, blending radical black
liberation political philosophy with capitalistic entrepreneurship, depending on grant
funds in addition to community support, forming partnerships with local social justice
organizations as well as national environmental groups, and the list goes on. The
development of their social enterprise, in particular, was characteristic of the
organization’s broader approach to food justice organizing in that it brought these diverse
and sometimes divergent connections into a unified purpose.
Embedded in these complicated networks – going from the Black Panthers, to the
USDA, to an entrepreneurial social enterprise – was the source of significant tension and
ambivalence on the part of NU. Throughout these processes, NU remained vigilant to
make sure that their mission of advancing racial and social justice through food was not
co-opted, and they constructed a set of clear organizational priorities and boundaries as a
way to maintain their focus. At times, adherence to their historically-oriented mission
might have held them back from increasing their organizational capacity – indeed, they
were not necessarily “safe” enough for some potential partners and sponsors in the
corporate, governmental or foundation worlds. Yet, without their mission firmly in place,
NU staff knew they could not maintain their credibility with their community of service,
which was a fundamental building block for all future action. Drawing from researchers

289

such as Banet-Weiser (2012) and McClintock (2013), I outlined how these tenuous
interactions were not only characteristic of contemporary activism in the advanced liberal
age, but also a key site for advancing the transformative potential of social justice
movements in the food system and other domains of action. As Charles explained, NU
saw little other choice but to try to advance their goals in the world as it was, not in some
imagined alternative reality: “It's much more beneficial to the community for us to be that
actor, because we have a longer investment. And our bottom line is not dollars, our
bottom line is for the better of the community. So we're more suited as an actor in that
place, because any other actor is not really going to care about the community in the way
that we do.”
While this dissertation was guided by a level of optimism about the potentials of
community-based food justice organizing, it was important, as well, that the analysis
maintained a critical stance about its limits and its room for growth. In taking this stance,
I followed DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge (2010), who argued that, “community efforts
can play a critical role in challenging contemporary neoliberalism, but it is essential not
to romanticize the power and potential of local efforts” (12). The empirical work that
unfolded pointed to several enduring limitations of Neighborhood United’s current work
that had to be dealt with if they hoped to expand the impact of their model moving
forward.
At the level of the local community, optimal storytelling about food justice in
South Los Angeles was hamstrung by several ongoing challenges. One centered on the
obstacles of organizing in a multi-lingual community. Neighborhood United had made
conscious efforts over the years to provide services that connected not only to English

290

speakers of African American and Latino descent in their community, but also to
residents who came from mono-lingual Spanish speaking households. Despite NU’s
efforts to appeal to all community members through their work, limited capacity on the
part of the staff stood in the way of ideal multi-lingual outreach. During my fieldwork,
the organization had both successes and setbacks in shaping their organizational
communication ecology to meet these challenges. For the long-term, the promotion of
food justice through value-based and structural changes in the community would require
continual reflection and adaptation in this cultural and linguistic domain.
Another limitation of Neighborhood United’s approach involved the
organization’s lack of engagement with professional geo-ethnic media in the local
community. Discouraged by previous failures in getting journalists’ and media’s
attention, they had doubled-down on a strategy of person-to-person outreach and
depended on their own forms of geo-ethnic media to connect to residents. However, as
was outlined in my review of the literature, the power of the neighborhood storytelling
network is always most effective when the work of local organizations is being covered
by the media that residents regularly connect to in order to stay on top of what is
happening in their community (Chen et al., 2013; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006). It must be
said, as well, that the lack of connection between Neighborhood United and geo-ethnic
media producers was not unique to the organization. Rather, it was part of a broader
disconnect that existed between local organizers and local media in communities like
South Los Angeles (Broad et al., 2013). Regardless, improving flows of communication
between these influential storytellers should be seen as important for motivating future
community-based social change.

291

The lack of media coverage of Neighborhood United’s efforts at the local level
was mirrored by the food justice movement’s difficulty gaining media attention in the
macro-level storytelling system. As my case study of the Youth Food Justice network
(YFJ) explored, organizers of this national group struggled to get their story told in a
crowded landscape of food-related media coverage. As Leila, an organizer with YFJ,
explained, “The people who are getting media coverage are the people who are already
getting media coverage.” As Neighborhood United engaged in networks that moved
beyond the local community, they found themselves wading through a similar struggle as
had taken place back home – how could these network maintain a guiding justice-
oriented mission while improving their brandability in an advanced liberal, digital media
age?
The YFJ network saw itself as in a stage of aligning and strategizing for ways to
impact the broader storytelling system around food justice issues, such that they could
motivate more substantive value-based and structural changes in local communities and
nationwide. Through connections to groups like the YFJ network, as well as the Hathor
Collective and the Statewide Association for Community Economic Development,
Neighborhood United saw that there was a need to extend their work beyond the local
area. This was seen as necessary in order to not only support and expand their local
efforts, but also to help support and expand the efforts of like-minded groups and
individuals working across the region, nation and globe. Yet, during the time of my
fieldwork, most of Neighborhood United’s extra-local efforts seemed to be at a similar
stage of alignment and strategizing. The organization knew that engagement in broader
networked action, coverage in major media, and influence in the political and

292

policymaking processes would be necessary to achieve their ultimate social
transformation goals. Yet, staff continued to point back to the need to establish a
successful model for change at the local level before being able to devote greater
resources elsewhere. As Maya argued, “People will not support you unless they see what
you’re doing is actually making an impact.” Like many community-based social justice
organizations, NU simply lacked the capacity to encourage social changes that could
more fundamentally alter the values and institutions of broader society. Time will tell
whether or not they will be able to make this challenging, but imperative, transition
toward local and extra-local social change into the future.
Beyond Food Justice: Thoughts for Scholars and Practitioners
As in all qualitative research, this dissertation bears the mark of a work that is
necessarily limited in terms of its outright generalizability. This caveat might require an
even increased emphasis than usual, given the prominence with which a single food
justice organization was focused upon for much of the project. With that said, earlier
chapters of this work clearly demonstrated that Neighborhood United was not alone in its
efforts to advance race-conscious, social-justice oriented changes through alternative
food initiatives. While their style of organizing came with its own historical uniqueness
and geographic specificity, their philosophical ideals were shared by other groups and
individuals involved in similar work around the nation and around the world. Further, the
strategies and practices that came through in an analysis of NU’s organizational
communication ecology undoubtedly had parallels in the work of other groups who were
similarly striving to advance food justice in the context of our contemporary global
society.

293

These inherent limitations, of course, lead to associated opportunities for future
research. The study of food movements would benefit from additional applications of the
communication ecology approach in other local, regional, national and global contexts.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of this project, as well, researchers from diverse fields
might adapt and tailor the perspective to better meet their own scholarly orientations.
Guided by a background in communication and media studies, my focus often returned to
the role of communicative interaction and storytelling in the motivation of social change.
It is quite reasonable to think that geographers, for instance, might adapt the
communication ecology approach to more fully explore the impact of space and place in
the networks of food justice organizing, while sociologists might pay greater attention to
the role of economic structures, corporations or government institutions in the food
system. Each approach would bring with it a new set of opportunities and constraints, but
the communication ecology approach and the related networked ethnography could prove
consistently useful as theoretical and methodological guides.
There is no reason, of course, that such research should be confined within the
study of social movements around food. As networked logic maintains its place at the
foundation of contemporary society, the communication ecology approach and networked
ethnography could be useful as tools for those interested in any social change activity.
From the start of this project, I argued that the key to understanding a social movement
organization was to look at its network of communication connections, the
communication ecology through which it derived its organizational identity, built
partnerships with other groups, found solidarity with other social movement
organizations, and connected with the community in which it operated and worked to

294

effect change. Any number of social movement efforts are rife for exploration by
qualitative researchers who view organizational activities through this networked
theoretical lens.
It is my hope, as well, that this dissertation might make contributions to engaged
scholarship and practice that advances the cause of social justice, in the food system as
well as in other contexts. As I have mentioned on several occasions in this work, I am
normatively committed to research and activism that aims to reshape social values and
social structures in order to promote greater social, environmental and economic justice.
The movement for engaged scholarship in American academia is growing, but it still
faces strong institutional barriers that need to be worked through over time. It is my hope
that this project might serve as one model among many that demonstrates a path that
engaged scholars might take. Indeed, if it were not for my active engagement in food
justice efforts in Los Angeles, and in particular my years of collaboration with
Neighborhood United, I never would have been able to gain the types of insights that
stood as the foundation for the ethnographic project that developed. By applying
scholarly theory to our activist efforts, engaged scholars can advance the interests of
those practitioners with whom we act in solidarity, as well as advance a scholarly agenda
that meets the requirements for our academic profession.
This leads directly to another key question, and the response to this will serve as
the final thoughts of this dissertation. That is, after all of the research presented in this
project, what might practitioners – including those engaged in food justice as well as
other social justice causes – actually learn that they might put into practice? In many
ways, I would reiterate the points outlined earlier in this conclusion about the primary

295

contributions of the work, and would add that each of these insights has practical
implications.
At a basic level, I hope this work demonstrates to social justice practitioners
something that they already know, but can certainly always use more confirmation about
– that their work does matter, and it does make a difference in the everyday lives of those
with whom they collaborate and serve. In the face of often daunting inequities in power,
community-based practitioners have the enviable tenacity to push forward an agenda for
change. Further, I would also encourage practitioners to apply ecological and networked
thinking to their everyday practices. In fact, developing the type of conceptual
organizational communication ecology maps that were presented in Chapter 3 can serve
as useful exercise to give an organization a sense of the depth and breadth of their multi-
level connections and partnerships. In addition, an understanding of one’s own
organizational communication ecology can help a group differentiate itself from others in
crowded and competitive non-profit landscapes, as well as look for opportunities to build
new partnerships and connect with others who might help them advance their driving
mission.
Finally, I also hope this dissertation demonstrates that, in struggles for social
justice, communication matters. It is in no small part through communicative interaction
that identities are shaped, partnerships are forged, values systems are refined, and social
structures are altered. Whether at the local, regional, national or international levels,
understanding and promoting storytelling about the issues that matter – in our media
systems, in our organizations and institutions, and in our interpersonal networks – is
fundamental to any movement for social change. In the case of our global food system,

296

specifically, our system of storytelling has generally failed to make the case for why food
justice matters, and it has certainly failed to articulate how our food system might be
transformed toward greater health, equity and sustainability. For better or for worse, it is
up to us to change the way that story is told, and I hope this dissertation can be a part of
that ongoing conversation.

297

REFERENCES

Abron, J.M. (1998). “Serving the people”: the survival programs of the Black Panther
Party. In C.E. Jones (Ed.) The Black Panther Party reconsidered. Baltimore:
Black Classic Press, 177-192.

Adam, B. (1999). Industrial food for thought: Timescapes of risk. Environmental values,
8(2), 219–238.

Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (2011). Introduction: The food movement as polyculture. In
Alkon & Agyeman (Eds.), Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and
sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Allen, P. (1999). Reweaving the food security safety net: Mediating entitlement and
entrepreneurship. Agriculture and human values, 16(2), 117–129.

Allen, P. (2008). Mining for justice in the food system: perceptions, practices, and
possibilities. Agriculture and Human Values, 25(2), 157–161.

Allen, P., FitzSimmons, M., Goodman, M., & Warner, K. (2003). Shifting plates in the
agrifood landscape: the tectonics of alternative agrifood initiatives in California.
Journal of rural studies, 19(1), 61–75.

Allen, P., & Guthman, J. (2006). From “old school” to “farm-to-school”:
neoliberalization from the ground up. Agriculture and human values, 23(4), 401–
415.

American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens (n.d.). Retrieved from heart.org/
teachinggarden.

Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism. London: Verso.

Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (1985). The origins of individual media-system dependency.
Communication Research, 12(4), 485.

Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (1998). A theory of media power and a theory of media use: Different
stories, questions, and ways of thinking. Mass Communication & Society, 1, 5-40.

Ball-Rokeach, S.J., Gonzalez, C., Son, M., & Kligler-Vilenchik, N. (2012).
Understanding Individuals in the Context of Their Environment: Communication
Ecology as a Concept and Method. Paper Presented at the Conference of the
International Communication Association, Phoenix, Arizona.

298

Ball-Rokeach, S.J. & Jung, J-Y, (2009). The Evolution of Media System dependency
theory. In R. Nabi and M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Media Processes
and Effects. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Kim, Y.-C. & Matei, S. (2001). Storytelling neighborhood: Paths to
belonging in diverse urban environments. Communication Research, 28 (4), 392-
428.

Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). Authentic: The Politics ofAmbivalence in a Brand Culture. New
York: New York University Press.

Basok, T., Ilcan, S., & Noonan, J. (2006). Citizenship, human rights, and social justice.
Citizenship studies, 10(3), 267–273.

Beaulac, J., Kristjansson, E., & Cummins, S. (2009). Peer Reviewed: A Systematic
Review of Food Deserts, 1966-2007. Preventing Chronic Disease, 6(3).

Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage

Beck, U. (1995). Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, U (2009). Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision.
Constellations, 16(1).

Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An
overview and assessment. Annual review of sociology, 611–639.

Blumer, H. (1951). Collective behavior. In AM. Lee (Ed.), New outline of the principles
of sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble, 166–222.

Bonanno, A. (1994). From Columbus to ConAgra: the globalization of agriculture and
food. University Press of Kansas.

Bottemiller, H. (2011, June 21). Senate Bill Addresses Antibiotics in Animal Feed. Food
Safety News. Retrieved from http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/06/bill-to-
ban-antibiotics-in-feed-re-introduced-in-senate/.

Boyd, D. M. (2008). Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics.
Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. ProQuest.

Broad, GM. (2012). Revolution on Primetime TV – Jamie Oliver Takes on the US School
Food System. In Frye, J. & Bruner, M. (Eds). The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse,
Materiality & Power. New York: Routledge.

299

Broad, GM. (2013). Ritual Communication and Use Value: The South Central Farm and
the Political Economy of Place. Communication, Culture and Critique, 6 (1), 20-
40.

Broad, GM., Ball-Rokeach, S., Ognyanova, K., Picasso, T., Stokes, B., Villanueva, G.
(Under Review) Understanding the Communication Ecologies of Community
Organizers to Bridge Communication Research and Community Action.
Submitted to Journal of Applied Communication Research.

Broad, GM., Gonzalez, C., & Ball-Rokeach, SJ. (Under Review). Intergroup Relations in
South Los Angeles – Combining Communication Infrastructure and Contact
Hypothesis Approaches. Submitted to International Journal of Intercultural
Relations.

Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton Univ
Pr.

Bullard, R. D. (1993). Confronting environmental racism: Voices from the grassroots.
South End Press.

Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological theory, 16(1), 4–33.

Burawoy, M. (2005). For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70(1), 4-28.

Burrell, J. (2009). The field site as a network: a strategy for locating ethnographic
research. Field Methods, 21(2), 181–199

Castel, R. (1991) From Dangerousness to Risk. In Burchell, Gordon & Miller (Eds.), The
Foucault Effect – Studies in Governmentality. University of Chicago Press.

Castells, M. (2000). End of millennium. The Information Age: Economy, Society and
Culture Vol. III. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxfard, UK: Oxford University Press.

Charmaz, K. (2000). Grounded theory in the 21st century: Applications for advancing
social justice studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of
Qualitative Research (2nd ed., pp. 509–537 ). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications.

Chen, N.-T. N., Dong, F., Ball-Rokeach, S., Parks, M., & Huang, J. (2012). Building a
new media platform for local storytelling and civic engagement in ethnically-
diverse neighborhoods. New Media Society, 14(6), 931-950.

300

Cheng, L. & Yang, P. (1996). Asians: the 'Model Minority' Deconstructed. In Roger
Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (Eds.), Ethnic Los Angeles. NY: Russell Sage
Foundation, 305-344.

Clemons, M. L., & Jones, C. E. (1999). Global solidarity: The Black Panther party in the
international arena. New Political Science, 21(2), 177–203.

Cohen, B. E. (2002). Community food security assessment toolkit. USDA Economic
Research Service. Retrieved from http://www.uc.edu/cdc/urban_database/
food_resources/community_food_security_assessment_USDA.pdf.

Coleman-Jensen, A., Nord, M., Andrews, M., & Carlson, S. (2011). Household food
security in the United States in 2010. USDA-ERS Economic Research Report,
(125). Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com.libproxy.usc.edu/sol3/
papers.cfm?abstract_id=2116606.

Community Food Security Coalition (n.d.). Community Food Assessment Program.
Retrieved from http://www.foodsecurity.org/cfa_home.html.

Compa, L. A. (2004). Blood, sweat, and fear: workers’ rights in US meat and poultry
plants. Articles and Chapters. Paper 331. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/
articles /331.

Cress, D. M., & Snow, D. A. (2000). The outcomes of homeless mobilization: The
influence of organization, disruption, political mediation, and framing. American
Journal of Sociology, 105(4), 1063–1104.

Cribb, J. (2010). The coming famine: The global food crisis and what we can do to avoid
it. University of California Press.

Curtis, R. L., & Zurcher, L. A. (1973). Stable resources of protest movements: The multi-
organizational field. Social forces, 52(1), 53–61.

Deadline Hollywood Team (2012, June 6). Ron Meyer Set As UCLA Commencement
Speaker. Retrieved from http://www.deadline.com/2012/06/ron-meyer-set-as-
ucla-commencement-speaker-gil-cates-to-be-honored/.

DeFilippis, J., Fisher, R., & Shragge, E. (2010). Contesting community: The limits and
potential of local organizing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Diani, M. (1992). The concept of social movement. The Sociological Review, 40(1), 1–
25.

Diani, M. (2002). Network Analysis. In Klandermans, B. & Staggenborg, S. (Eds).
Methods Of Social Movement Research. University of Minnesota Press, 173-200.

301

Diani, M. (2003). Networks and social movements: A research programme. In Diani, M.,
& McAdam, D. (Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to
collective action. Oxford University Press, USA.

Diani, M., & McAdam, D. (2003). Social movements and networks: Relational
approaches to collective action. Oxford University Press.

Drewnowski, A., & Specter, S. (2004). Poverty and obesity: the role of energy density
and
energy costs. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 79(1), 6.

Dunn, E. (2007). Escherichia coli, corporate discipline and the failure of the sewer state.
Space and Polity, 11(1), 35–53.

Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The politics of difference in medical research. University of
Chicago Press.

Evans, S. & Clarke, P. (2011). Disseminating Orphan Innovations. Stanford Social
Innovation Review. Retrieved from http://www.ssireview.org/images/articles/
2011WI_Feature _Evans_Clarke.pdf.

FAO Media Centre (2011). World hunger report 2011. Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/ news/story/en/item/92495/icode/.

Farm Forward (2008). Factory Farming. Retrieved from http://www.farmforward.com/
farming-forward/factory-farming.

Fernandez, R. M., & McAdam, D. (1988). Social networks and social movements:
Multiorganizational fields and recruitment to Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Sociological Forum, Vol. 3, 357–382).

Fisher, W. (1985). The narrative paradigm: In the beginning. Journal of Communication,
35,74-89.

Food First (2009). Labor in the Food System. Retrieved from http://www.foodfirst.org/
sites/www.foodfirst.org/files/pdf/Labor%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf .

Foucault, M. (1984). Right of Death and Power over Life. In Rabinow, P. (Ed.), Foucault
Reader. Pantheon Press.

Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1976
– 1977. Picador Press.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory and Population: Lectures at the College de
France, 1977 – 1978. Picador Press.

302

Freidberg, S. (2004). French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an
Anxious Age. Oxford University Press, USA.

Friedland, L. A. (2001). Communication, community, and democracy: toward a theory of
the communicatively integrated community. Communication Research, 28(4),
358–391.

Frye, J., & Bruner, M. (2012). The Rhetoric of Food: Discourse, Materiality, and Power.
Routledge.

Game Changers (2011). Kelly Meyer talks healthy food. Retrieved from http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/27/game-changers-2011-kelly-_n_1035082.html.

Gibson, T. A. (2010). The Limits of Media Advocacy. Communication, Culture &
Critique, 3(1), 44–65.

Giddens, A. (1990). Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gold, M. (2004). The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat. A Report for the
Compassion of World Farming Trust. Retrieved from http://www.ciwf.org.uk/
resources/publications/environment_sustainability/default.aspx.

Gonzalez-Rivera, C., Donnel, C., Briones, A., & Werblin, S. (2008). Funding the new
majority: Philanthrophic investment in minority-led nonprofits. Greenlining
Institute.

Gottlieb, R. (2009). Where We Live, Work, Play... and Eat: Expanding the
Environmental Justice Agenda. Environmental Justice, 2(1), 7–8.

Gottlieb, R., & Joshi, A. (2010). Food justice. MIT Press.

Grades of Green (n.d.). Kelly Meyer: environmental activist. Retrieved from
http://www.gradesofgreen.org/biographies/kelly-meyer.

Gupta, A. K. (2004). Origin of agriculture and domestication of plants and animals linked
to early Holocene climate amelioration. Current Science, 87(1), 54–59.

Gurian-Sherman, D. (2009). Failure to yield: Evaluating the performance of genetically
engineered crops. Union of Concerned Scientists. Retrieved from
http://www.ucsusa.org/ food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/science/
failure-to-yield.html.

Gussow, JD. (1999). Dietary guidelines for sustainability: twelve years later. Journal of
Nutrition Education, 31, 194–20

303

Guthman, J. (2011a). “If they only knew”: The unbearable whiteness of alternative food.
In Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and
Sustainability. MIT Press.

Guthman, J. (2011b). Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism.
University of California Press.

Guthman, J., Morris, A. W., & Allen, P. (2006). Squaring Farm Security and Food
Security in Two Types of Alternative Food Institutions. Rural sociology, 71(4),
662–684.

Hacking, I. (1990). The Taming of Chance. Cambridge University Press.

Hamm, M. W., & Bellows, A. C. (2003). Community food security and nutrition
educators. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 35(1), 37–43.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA

Harvey, D. (2009). Social justice and the city (Vol. 1). Univ of Georgia Pr.

Hayes, F.W. & Kiene, F.A. (1998). “All power to the people”: the political thought of
Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party. In C.E. Jones (Ed.) The Black
Panther Party reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 157-176.

Hendrickson, M., & Heffernan, W. (2005). Concentration of agricultural markets.
Columbia, MO, Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri, 4.

Holt-Gimenez, E. (2011). Food Security, Food Justice, or Food Sovereignty? In Alkon,
A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and
Sustainability. MIT Press.

Holt-Gimenez, E., & Patel, R. (2009). Food rebellions: the real story of the world food
crisis and what we can do about it. Fahumu Books and Grassroots International,
Oxford.

Howard, P. (2006). Consolidation in Food and Agriculture: Implications for Farmers and
Consumers. The Natural Farmer, 2(68).

Howard, P. H. (2009). Visualizing consolidation in the global seed industry: 1996–2008.
Sustainability, 1(4), 1266–1287.

Howard, P. H., Kleiner, A., & Green, J.. (2009). Visualizing food system concentration
and consolidation. Southern Rural Sociology, 24(2), 87–110.

Howard, P. N. (2002). Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: new
media, new organizations, new methods. New Media & Society, 4(4), 550–574.

304

Innes, J. E., & Booher, D. E. (2000). Indicators for sustainable communities: a strategy
building on complexity theory and distributed intelligence. Planning theory &
practice, 1(2), 173–186.

International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (2007). Declaration of the
Forum for Food Sovereignty, Nyéléni. Retrieved from
http://www.foodsovereignty.org.

Iton, A. (n.d.). Health happening in 14 places. Retrieved from http://www1.calendow.org/
Article.aspx?id=5865.

Jasanoff, S. (2005). Designs on nature: Science and democracy in Europe and the United
States. Princeton University Press.

Johnson, O.A. (1998). Explaining the demise of the Black Panther Party: the role of
internal factors. In C.E. Jones (Ed.) The Black Panther Party reconsidered.
Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 391-416.

Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2009). Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet
foodscape. Routledge.

Jones, C.E. (1998). Reconsidering Panther history: the untold story. In C.E. Jones (Ed.)
The Black Panther Party reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1-24.

Jones, C.E. & Jeffries, J.L. (1998). “Don’t believe the hype”: debunking the Panther
mythology. In C.E. Jones (Ed.) The Black Panther Party reconsidered. Baltimore:
Black Classic Press, 25-56.

Joseph, H. (2009). Guidance for preparing community food projects proposals.
Community Food Security Coalition. Retrieved from http://www.foodsecurity.org
/CFP/CFP_Planning_ Guide -2009.pdf.

Kato, Y. (In Press). Not Just the Price of Food: Challenges of an Urban Agriculture
Organization in Engaging Local Residents. Sociological Inquiry.

Katz, V. (2007). From Conversation to Conversion: Children’s Efforts to Translate Their
Immigrant Families’ Social Networks into Community Connections. Unpublished
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Southern California.

Kenner, R. (Director). (2009). Food Inc. [Motion Picture]. New York: Magnolia
Pictures.

Khan, A. S., Swerdlow, D. L., & Juranek, D. D. (2001). Precautions against biological
and chemical terrorism directed at food and water supplies. Public Health
Reports, 116(1), 3.

305

Kim, Y. C. & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2006). Civic engagement from a communication
infrastructure perspective. Communication Theory, 16, 173-197.

Klandermans, B. (1992). The social construction of protest and multiorganizational
fields. In Aldon Morris & Carol McClurg Mueller (Eds.) Frontiers in social
movement theory. Yale University Press, 77–103.

Kloppenburg, J., Hendrickson, J., & Stevenson, G. W. (1996). Coming in to the
foodshed. Agriculture and human values, 13(3), 33–42.

La Via Campesina (2001). Organisation: the international peasant's voice. Retrieved from
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/organisation-mainmenu-44.

Lang, T. & Heasman, M. (2004). Food wars: The global battle for mouths minds and
markets. London: Earthscan.

Larson, N. I., Story, M. T., & Nelson, M. C. (2009). Neighborhood Environments:
Disparities in Access to Healthy Foods in the U.S. American Journal of
Preventive Medicine, 36(1).

Lee, H. (2012). The role of local food availability in explaining obesity risk among young
school-aged children. Social Science & Medicine, 74(8), 1193–1203.

Leigh, G. J. (2004). The world’s greatest fix. Oxford University Press.

Lester, J. P., Allen, D. W., & Hill, K. M. (2001). Environmental injustice in the United
States: Myths and realities. Westview Press.

Lewis, L. V. B., Sloane, D. C., Nascimento, L. M., Diamant, A. L., Guinyard, J. J.,
Yancey, A. K., Flynn, G., et al. (2005). African Americans’ access to healthy food
options in South Los Angeles restaurants. American Journal of Public Health,
95(4), 668.

Lincoln, A. (1859). Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. Retrieved
from http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm.

Los Angeles Times (n.d.). Mapping LA – South LA. Retrieved from
http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/region/south-la/.

Mares, T. M., & Peňa, D. G. (2011). Environmental and Food Justice. In Alkon, A. H., &
Agyeman, J. (Eds), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability.
MIT Press.

306

Matei, S. A. & Ball-Rokeach, S. J. (2005). Watts, the 1965 Los Angeles riots and the
Communicative construction of the fear epicenter of Los Angeles.
Communication Monographs, 72(3), 301-323.

Matsaganis, M. & Wilkin, H. (Under Review). Communicative Social Capital and
Collective Efficacy as Determinants of Access to Health-Enhancing Resources in
Residential Communities.
McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1973). The trend of social movements in America:
Professionalization and resource mobilization. General Learning Press,
Morristown, PA.

McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A
partial theory. American journal of sociology, 1212–1241.

McClintock, N. (2013). Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to
terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environment.
DOI:10.1080/13549839.2012.752797.

McCutcheon, P. (2012). Community food security "For us, by us": The Nation of Islam
and the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. In Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J.
(Eds), Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Melucci, A. (1995). The process of collective identity. In H. Johnston & B. Klandermans
(Eds.), Social movements and culture. University of Minnesota Press, 41–63.

Meyer, K. (2010, April 5). National Launch of the First "Teaching Garden". Retrieved
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-meyer/national-launch-of-the-
fi_b_522498.html.

Meyer, K. (2012, April 25). The teaching garden. Parenting. Retrieved from
http://www.parenting.com/blogs/mom-congress/kelly-meyer/teaching-garden.

Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power. Penguin Books.

Mintz, S. W., & Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The anthropology of food and eating. Annual
review of anthropology, 99–119.

Monteiro, C. A. (2009). Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so
much as processing. Public health nutrition, 12(05), 729–731.

Moore J.W. (2012) Cheap food and bad money: Food, frontiers, and financialization in
the rise and demise of neoliberalism. Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel
Center, 33, 2-3.

307

Morello-Frosch, R., Zavestoski, S., Brown, P., Altman, R. G., McCormick, S., Mayer, B.,
& others. (2006). Embodied health movements: Responses to a “scientized”world.
The New Political Sociology of Science, 244–271.

Morris, A., & Herring, C. (1984). Theory and research in social movements: A critical
review. CRSO Working Paper #307. Retrieved from http://deepblue.lib.
umich.edu.libproxy. usc.edu/handle/2027.42/51075

Morton, J. F. (2007). The impact of climate change on smallholder and subsistence
agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19680–
19685.

Murray, C. (2005). Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In M.K. Asante & A. Mazama
(Eds.) Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Sage Publications.

Nash, K. (2001). The `Cultural Turn’ in Social Theory: Towards a Theory of Cultural
Politics. Sociology, 35(1), 77–92.

Nelson, A. (2011). Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against
Medical Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press.

New Panther Vanguard Movement (1999, Summer). Community economic development:
its origins and philosophy. Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 18-19.

New Panther Vanguard Movement (2000, Autumn). The demise of the Black Panther
Party and the rise of a black independent political movement. Black Panther
International News Service, 8-9.

New Panther Vanguard Movement (2002, November). The struggle continues: the
origins, platform and program of the new panther vanguard movement.
Unpublished Document.

New Panther Vanguard & Mexica Movements. (1999, Summer). Education in our
interests. Black Panther International News Service, 11-13.

Oliver, P. E. (1993). Formal models of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology.
Vol. 19, 271–300.

Ong, P., Firestine, T., Pfeiffer, D., Poon, O. & Tran, L. (2008). The State of South LA.
UCLA School of Public Affairs.

Pachirat, T. (2011). Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of
Sight. Yale University Press.

Patel, R. (2008). Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.
Melville House.

308

Park, A., Watson, N., & Galloway-Gilliam, L. (2008). South Los Angeles Health Equity
Scorecard. Community Health Councils. Retrieved from http://chc-
inc.org/downloads/South% 20LA% 20Scorecard.pdf.

Perfecto, I., Vandermeer, J. H., & Wright, A. L. (2009). Nature’s matrix: linking
agriculture, conservation and food sovereignty. Earthscan/James & James.

Petryna, A. (2002). Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton
University Press.

Pichardo, N.A. (1997). New Social Movements: A Critical Review. Annual Review of
Sociology, Vol. 23, 411-430.

Pimentel, D., Hepperly, P., Hanson, J., Douds, D., & Seidel, R. (2005). Environmental,
energetic, and economic comparisons of organic and conventional farming
systems. BioScience, 55(7), 573–582.

Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: an eater’s manifesto. Penguin Pr.

Pollan, M. (2010). The food movement, rising. The New York Review of Books, 10.

Polletta, F. (2008). Culture and movements. The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 619(1), 78–96.

Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. M. (2001). Collective identity and social movements. Annual
review of Sociology, Vol. 27, 283–305.

Popkin, B. M. (1999). Urbanization, lifestyle changes and the nutrition transition. World
Development, 27(11), 1905–1916.

Poppendieck, J. (2010). Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (1st ed.). University
of California Press.

Pothukuchi, K. (2004). Community Food Assessment. Journal of Planning Education
and Research, 23(4), 356–377.

Pothukuchi, K. et al. (2002). What’s Cooking in Your Food System?: A Guide to
Community Food Assessment. Community Food Security Coalition. Retrieved
from http://www.foodsecurity.org/CFAguide-whatscookin.pdf.

Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

PR Newswire (2010, September 27). American Heart Association and activist Kelly
Meyer team up to plant 'Teaching Gardens' nationwide. Retrieved from

309

http://www.prnewswire.com /news-releases-test/american-heart-association-and-
activist-kelly-meyer-team-up-to-plant-teaching-gardens-nationwide-
103857488.html.

Project7Ten (n.d.). About. Retrieved from http://www.project7ten.com/.

Pulido, L. (1996). Multiracial organizing among environmental justice activists in Los
Angeles. In Dear, M., Schockman, H., & Hise, G. (Eds.) Rethinking Los Angeles.
Thousand Oaks: Sage. 171–89.

Rokeach, M. & Ball-Rokeach, S.J. (1989). Stability and Change in American Value
Priorities, 1968-1981. American Psychologist, 44, 775-784.

Rose, N. S. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge Univ
Press.

Ross, E. D. (1929). Lincoln and Agriculture. Agricultural History, 3(2), 51–66.

Rosset, P. (2009). Fixing our Global Food System.: Food Sovereignty and Redistributive
Land Reform. Monthly review, 61(3), 114–128.

Sanchez, J., & Ito, J. (2011). Changing Demographics of South LA. USC Program for
Environmental and Regional Equity. Retrieved from http://dornsife.usc.edu/pere/
documents/SLA_COCO_Demographics_web.pdf.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (2010, April 22). Will Rogers Elementary
School hosts a nationwide kickoff of the teaching garden. Retrieved from
http://www.smmusd. org/press/press0910/WillRogersTeachingGard.htm.

Sawicki, D. S., & Flynn, P. (1996). Neighborhood indicators: A review of the literature
and an assessment of conceptual and methodological issues. Journal of the
American Planning Association, 62(2), 165–183.

Schlosser, E. (2004). Fast food nation: The dark side of the all-American meal. Harper
Perennial.

Scott, J. (2000). Social Network Analysis. Sage Publications.

Seiler, A. (2012) Let's Move: The Ideological Constraints of Liberalism on Michelle
Obama's Obesity Rhetoric. In Frye, J. & Bruner, M. (Eds). The Rhetoric of Food:
Discourse, Materiality & Power. New York: Routledge.

Shaffer, A. (2002). The Persistence of L.A.'s Grocery Gap: The Need for a New Food
Policy and Approach to Market Development. Published by the Center for Food
and Justice. Retrieved from http://uepiapps.oxy.edu/cfj.php?x=publications

310

Shiva, V. (2000). Stolen harvest: The hijacking of the global food supply. Zed Books.

Simpson, J. L., & Seibold, D. R. (2008). Practical Engagements and Co-Created
Research. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36(3), 266–280.

Sloane, D. C., Diamant, A. L., Lewis, L. V. B., Yancey, A. K., Flynn, G., Nascimento, L.
M., Carthy, W. J., et al. (2003). Improving the nutritional resource environment
for healthy living through community-based participatory research. Journal of
General Internal Medicine, 18(7), 568–575.

Slocum, R. (2007). Whiteness, space and alternative food practice. Geoforum, 38(3),
520–533.

Smelser, N. J. (1962). Theory of collective behavior. Taylor & Francis.

Snow, D. A., & Trom, D. (2002). The case study and the study of social movements. In
Klandermans, B. & Staggenborg, S. (Eds). Methods Of Social Movement
Research. University of Minnesota Press.

Staggenborg, S. (2002) The 'Meso ' in Social Movement Research. In David S. Meyer,
Belinda Robnett , and Nancy Whi ttier (Eds.), Social Movem ents, Identity,
Culture, and the State. Oxford University Press.

Stoecker, R. (1999) Are academics irrelevant? Roles for scholars in participatory
research. The American Behavioral Scientist, 42:5.

Strate, L. (2004). A Media Ecology. Communication Research Trends, 23(2), 1–48.

Sturm, R., & Cohen, D. A. (2009). Zoning for health? The year-old ban on new fast-food
restaurants in South LA. Health Affairs, 28(6), w1088–w1097.

Turner, R. H., & Killian, L. M. (1957). Collective behavior. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall.

Umoja, A.O. (1998). Repression breeds resistance: The black liberation army and the
radical legacy of the black panther party. New Political Science, 21(2), 131-155.

US Census Bureau. (2011). American fact finder. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.
census.gov/main.html.

USDA Grants (n.d.). Community Food Projects Competitive Grants. Retrieved from
http://www.nifa.usda.gov/fo/communityfoodprojects.cfm.

Walder, A. G. (2009). Political sociology and social movements. Annual review of
sociology, 35, 393–412.

311

Walker, P., Rhubart-Berg, P., McKenzie, S., Kelling, K., & Lawrence, R. S. (2005).
Public health implications of meat production and consumption. Public Health
Nutrition, 8(4), 348–356.

Wargo, J. (1998). Our Children’s Toxic Legacy. Yale University Press.

Wilkin, H.A. (2013). Exploring the potential of Communication Infrastructure Theory for
informing efforts to to reduce health disparities. Journal of Communication,
63(1), 181-200.

Wilkin, H. A., Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Matsaganis, M. D., & Cheong, P. H. (2007).
Comparing the communication ecologies of geo-ethnic communities: How people
stay on top of their community. Journal of Electronic Communication, 17(2).

Youth Food Bill of Rights (2011). Retrieved from http://www.foodfirst.org/en/
Youth+Food+Bill+of+Rights

Zeder, M. A. (2008). Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin:
Origins, diffusion, and impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
105(33), 11597–11604.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Understanding normative influence of neighborhoods: a multilevel approach to promoting Latinas’ cervical cancer prevention behaviors in urban ethnic communities

PDF

Civic games with 'local fit': embedding with real‐world neighborhoods and place‐based networks

PDF

The role of social control in promoting healthy eating behavior among Chinese immigrants: an ecological approach

PDF

"There are enough people here to wage that war:" a communication infrastructure theory approach to identifying factors of anti-gentrification mobilization

PDF

Digital creativity and innovation in Chinese social network sites industry

PDF

Understanding alliance building and communication across multiple technology platforms among California's immigrant-serving NGOs

PDF

The food truck phenomenon: A successful blend of PR and social media

PDF

Supper and segregation: navigating difference through food in Chicagoland

PDF

Voice, participation & technology in India: communication technology for development in the mobile era

PDF

Rebels with a cause: Youth, social movements, and media

PDF

Contagious: social norms about health in work group networks

PDF

The role of social media for community-based organizations focused on environmental justice in southeast Los Angeles

PDF

Organizational mimicry in American social movement communities: an analysis of form communication effects on the evolution of crisis pregnancy centers, 1989-2009

PDF

Intermedia agenda setting in an era of fragmentation: applications of network science in the study of mass communication

PDF

Se ve, se siente: transmedia mobilization in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement

PDF

Collaboration: is it worth it? The Magnolia Community Initiative from the perspective of initiative partner participants

PDF

Evolution in the processed foods industry: exploring the impact of the health foods movement

PDF

A multitheoretical multilevel explication of crowd-enabled organizations: exploration/exploitation, social capital, signaling, and homophily as determinants of associative mechanisms in donation-...

PDF

Pathways to immigrant civic engagement: the storytelling network and church participation

PDF

Creating community online: the effects of online social networking communities on college students' experiences

Asset Metadata

Creator Broad, Garrett M. (author)

Core Title Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/09/2013

Defense Date 07/09/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag advanced liberalism,communication,communication ecology,communication infrastructure theory,ethnography,food,food justice,governmentality,networks,OAI-PMH Harvest,qualitative research,social change,social justice,social movements,urban studies

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Ball-Rokeach, Sandra J. (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Lakoff, Andrew (committee member)

Creator Email garrettmbroad@gmail.com,gbroad@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-286316

Unique identifier UC11295045

Identifier etd-BroadGarre-1748.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-286316 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BroadGarre-1748.pdf

Dmrecord 286316

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Broad, Garrett M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA