Welcome to How We Won, a new newsletter about organizing victories and the people that made them happen.

I’m Lindsay, a Chicago-based writer and editor, and the creator of the Beyond November resource guide. In the overwhelm of living through what some days feels like a neverending tidal wave of crises and cries of “we’re cooked,” once a month, this newsletter will highlight a big community win — be it related to housing justice, climate, education or any number of other issues — and interview the organizers behind it about what worked, what didn’t and what lessons you can apply to the fight in your own communities.

I hope this is a source for grounding, guidance and hope in a difficult time. Thank you for being here, and hope to see you again next month. Onward! 

This edition of How We Won includes information from Drew Costley’s reporting for Verite News and Modern Farmer. Read their fantastic coverage of the fight to preserve Grow Dat here.

In the middle of New Orleans’s City Park, you’ll find a special place. Young people learn, connect and grow over rows of vegetables, picking fresh sun-kissed satsumas from a grove of trees. This is Grow Dat Youth Farm, which for 14 years has served as an empowering space for young New Orleanians to develop leadership skills while growing food for the community. Grow Dat is a different kind of educational space from what most young people in this city experience, focused around building a more just and sustainable future.

“Most young people are in spaces where the primary objective is individual success, and at Grow Dat we’re oriented towards a collective vision of a better world, in right relationship with the land and with each other,” says Kevin Connell, the Program Manager at Grow Dat. “We’re not just imagining it and drawing pictures of it, but also growing more than 100,000 of sustainable food every year, so it’s not this kind of education where we’re getting ready to have a career, we’re enacting the solutions to live on our planet together.”

In addition to feeding New Orleanians and empowering young people, Grow Dat has educated thousands of local students on field trips, employed hundreds of youth and its members help steward the land of City Park, itself an essential local green space.

“The land is really special,” says Kevin Connell, the Program Manager at Grow Dat. “It really represents the time and love and energy put into this place that so many people have cared for over the years. And it’s a particular kind of community—Grow Dat is, for many people who come there, the most diverse space that we’re in because of the segregated nature of American life.”

But in 2023 through last year, the future of this treasured space was in jeopardy. The City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that ran the park, announced redevelopment plans for the park, including building a road right through Grow Dat which would force the farm to relocate.

Up against money and power, the youth of Grow Dat got to work educating the public to raise awareness about saving Grow Dat, from flyering to attending public meetings. 

Part of the issue, Connell says, was a lack of understanding of how special Grow Dat was to the community. In particular, he says, the farm was in alignment with their goals for the park around sustainability and diverse sectors of the community using this public space. “Why would you put a road through a project that is thriving?”

To bridge that understanding with the community and with decision-makers at City Park, Connell says Grow Dat put its values and practices first, and let the youth lead. The leadership model of Grow Dat is modeled after migratory birds flying in the “V” formation, where the bird at the front of the “V” is not always the same bird.

“We take turns being in charge so lots of young people get a chance to lead when we’re faced with a moment like this,” Connell says. “It’s a meaningful learning experience for this to be the young person who talks to the press or leads a public workshop.”

Youth leaders, Connell says, were able to speak honestly and eloquently at meetings and to the media about what Grow Dat meant to them. From there, other community members began to mobilize and get the word out, showing park leadership that the farm held meaning for the whole city, not just the 70 young people stewarding the land.

Grow Dat leaders gathered New Orleanians for what they called “People’s Planning Forums,” both to generate publicity around the future of the farm but also to create a broader conversation about both the land’s history and its future. Youth leaders facilitated three workshops, including one on the Indigenous history of the land the park sat on and the history of enslaved people in City Park.

“The fullness of our city was not being included,” Connell says. “We wanted to see what a more inclusive process looked like and bring that to the public. The farm had been Indigenous land, a plantation, and segregated for the first half of existence, and knowing all this, what should the park be like?”

That public pressure and education was part of a strategy in tandem with building relationships with decision-makers, to move from an adversarial relationship to a collaborative one with the people whose minds they sought to change. “Grow Dat is leading in all these ways you say you want to grow, so let us help you,” he says. “Let’s work together. It did take making some noise to get folks to listen, but that strategy of building trust and moving people’s understanding is a helpful way of thinking about it.”

Grow Dat youth leaders pointed out how young people were not meaningfully included in visioning processes for the park, Connell says. They offered suggestions on how to structure meetings more inclusively, and park leadership implemented a youth committee and other suggestions.

City Park’s new leadership attended one of the youth-led History of the Land workshops, a move that Connell says led him to feel more hopeful about Grow Dat’s relationship with the park.

It was also important to the Grow Dat team and youth members for park leadership to understand the history of the land City Park and the farm sit on, and there has been an effort to introduce public meetings with land acknowledgments. Connell is not Indigenous and acknowledges that it’s one thing to do a land acknowledgment and another to pay Black and Brown people. “There’s a lot more work to do there, but that’s something we made a lot of noise about and tried to really communicate the importance of, and I think that was heard,” he says. “Time will tell how much.” 

But even more significant for Connell was seeing the way that the larger community showed up for Grow Dat. And the wellspring of support youth organizers generated led to the park’s decision makers allowing Grow Dat to retain its current home.

“It’s so great to win,” Connell says. “It felt really joyful and really exciting. There’s so many gardens and farm projects that get kicked off their land when there’s a more profitable use. It was really special that we were able to maintain our space, and this work had been so collaborative. We had to celebrate with so many people because so many people helped us.”

Moving forward, Grow Dat is collaborating with the park on ecological restoration work events and growing and distributing food at more sites. Connell says the approach emerged from how many partners showed up for Grow Dat. “We’re leaning into collaboration and interconnectedness to really build alternatives for the just and sustainable future we want,” he says. “That feels really exciting to be so oriented towards. We’re in a moment of emergency and we know the solutions, so let’s make them happen and meaningfully involve youth at every step of that.”

Connell says the victory has him thinking of his work differently — that the teenagers he works with are modeling a way of being centered on abundance and collaboration rather than scarcity, and how to win the world we want, we need to tend to all kinds of relationships.

“In the nonprofit world, we are often perceived as competition for scarce resources, but the future has to be collaborative work and shared work,” he says. “It needs to be in the front of our minds, connection and interconnectedness and our wellbeing, and tending to those connections in a way that we tend to the soil. When we want a plant to grow or a difficult moment happens, we are strong because we are rooted in relationship and community.”

Join us every second Friday for more stories of How We Won. Thank you for reading and sharing. Keep going!