Vikki Ayanna Jones
CEO & Founder of
Sankofa Village Community Garden
Sankofa village for the Arts, Executive director, Shabaka Perkins had the vision to feed our community while educating them to grow healthy food. We found the ideal location in Homewood South, two lots over by the URA, these lots were located on North Braddock Avenue and Susquehanna Street, once a popular drug corridor. Enlisting the help of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (WPC), Grow Pittsburgh, and G-TECH,the site was prepared and developed in August of 2015. The developing of this site included soil testing, which indicated that raised beds would be the way to go, due to the levels of lead found in the soil. To protect crops, our produce and our gardeners, heavy duty landscape fabric and wood chips were applied to make the garden safer for growers and the community. Since the Geraldyne B. Hill Senior Garden Project would be an intricate part of Sankofa Village Community Garden it was designed to be handicap accessible. Sankofa Village Community Garden's first gardeners were the young campers from The Legacy Arts, Bara Makona Summer Campers.
Sankofa Village Community Garden's goal is to eradicate the Food Apartheid that exists within our communities. To rekindle the intergenerational atmosphere that has long been a touchstone of our communities. To engage and provide the community with the opportunity to benefit from food self-sufficiency, to provide place-based urban agriculture education, to enable the community access to food production and to provide opportunities for entreprenuership.
To create communities where every child, adult, and senior does not have to leave their communities to get fresh produce, jobs, or education. We want to show that by turning to the skills and knowledge within our communities, change is possible.
A term that describes the relentless social construct that devalues human beings and assumes that people are unworthy of having access to nutritious food. Food Apartheid affects people of all races, including poor white people, although black, brown, and tan people are affected disproportionately. Under these conditions, which are overtly abusive, whole communities are geographically and economically isolated from healthy food options.
