by Johnisha Levi, Development Manager
Since its inception, The Nashville Food Project has operated in a foodscape saturated with inequity. Our mission is to ensure that people are getting the food they need and want, with “want” being as vital to us as “need.” And now, after a series of life altering events, including tornadoes, a pandemic, fatal police shootings and mass protest, we are in a moment that is utterly destabilizing. But this is not necessarily a negative. Although it is admittedly easy for each of us to vocalize what we fear and dislike about 2020, this year also presents a rare opportunity to reset. When we emerge from this crucible, what new shape will we assume? Who and what will we be—as a nation, and as a people?
Now is the time to re-imagine, re-create, take response-ability, and re-assess. There is so much that has been and is broken about our government, our country, and our world. Stressors have better exposed these breaks, giving us a clearer picture of our failings, so the question is what do we do to improve and innovate, to move beyond and above? These are challenges for us as individuals, but also as organizations. Currently, The Nashville Food Project may not be able to carry out the part of our mission that “brings people together” physically—whether in our kitchens or for charitable fundraisers like Nourish—but that doesn’t stop up from querying how we can continue to sustain and nourish our community in new and even better ways.
Nourishment, after all, is about so much more than feeding and eating. To nourish another centers on the emotional tie—the care, regard, and concern—you have for another. It is about maintaining a relationship by prioritizing and cherishing another, not imposing what you think you know, but rather about listening. And it is this relationship that informs what makes another person or a community healthy and strong. What comes to mind is the phrase “community of feeling,” which appears in letters that Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein exchanged on the question of war. What I think it means to nourish a community is to nurture “a community of feeling,” and this is at the heart of TNFP’s vision for a just and sustainable food system. As Tim Mwizerwa, program director at one of our emergency partners Legacy Mission Village explains, “ T[he Nashville Food Project was] willing to provide fresh produce to a lot of our families that were also culturally competent. You can gather a lot of goods but if families don’t recognize how to cook that produce, it goes to waste. We really appreciate your partnership and support and just knowing that we are not sending [our client families] filler foods, we are sending them nourishment on top of that.”
Although many things remain uncertain in the coming months, one essential truth, as stated in a recent New Yorker piece, emerges: “civic connection is the only way to survive” in a time when physical contact can present such danger to so many in our community. And it is this civic connection that is at the heart of our community food model at TNFP. Typically, mutual aid efforts and charitable organizations take different approaches. The former tend to be more grass roots and shaped by volunteers and the needs of recipients and services, while the latter tend to be more hierarchical and governed by boards and donors. What is beautiful about The Nashville Food Project model is that it is more a hybrid—a charitable organization that operates like a mutual aid project in seeking to empower, involve and amplify the needs of those it serves. For example, when a Burmese community leader and former Growing Together farmer approached TNFP about the particular need in her hard-hit community for fresh produce, we were able to use unrestricted funding to pay our Growing Together families to supply these vegetables. Thus, families affected by COVID outbreaks at their workplaces were able to enjoy the labors of what their farming neighbors produced, while the farmers could continue to earn income from their agricultural efforts. This is a community of feeling and of nourishing—of listening, responding, and creatively meeting a need.
When reading the news can be so grim, it is inspiring to see the impact that spontaneous mutual aid networks and charitable organizations are making to help ameliorate suffering during this pandemic. While TNFP will seek to carry forward some of the lessons we learn in crisis to keep nourishing our community, we must never lose sight of the underlying reality that these unmet needs should never have existed within our systems in the first place. And we must continue to strive to make our own work obsolete one day. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”