Community Gardening Is Gangsta – Ron Finley

“One person has the power to initiate a change and if we all do it collectively, things will be changed.”

Known for his “urban gardening” endeavours, Ron Finley took the stage on TEDxtalk in early 2013 and blew the audience away with his advocacy and passion for urban gardening. Ron initially started gardening to decrease the effects of the food apartheid in which his own neighborhood existed, encouraging healthy eating habits, and beautifying the land.

Ron is not one who backs down when it comes to causes he believes in. It all started in 2010 when Ron first dug up the strip of land between his house and the street, known as the parkway, and started planting fruits and vegetables. The laws in Los Angeles made it illegal to plant anything on those parkways but he eventually got the city of Los Angeles to change the law. It propelled Ron into a pioneering new career: ‘Gangsta Gardener’.

Ron created the non-profit organization, The Ron Finley Project, which aims to teach communities how to transform food deserts into food sanctuaries, in South Central Los Angeles. In addition, Ron has appeared in several documentary films about urban farming, including ‘Can You Dig This’ and ‘Urban Fruit’. His homegrown gardening course on an American online education subscription platform called ‘Masterclass’, is one of the top classes on the platform and a popular hit among its subscribers as well.

Ron shared with us about his childhood, how he started his journey, giving us insights into the role of community gardening and its impact on the people who are involved. More than that, his unique perspectives of the world and passions breathes life into his responses in our interview with him.

EARLY LIFE

Tell us more about your family background and share with us on what it was like growing up.

I grew up on a main street in South Central Los Angeles with eight siblings. The man of the house was not the best role model or person to be around. I was a homebody, but also had a lot of fun when I would go out and play, so I stayed out. My Mom worked in aerospace, so when she was home, I got to cook with her. I loved French fries, and they would tell me that when I grew up, I would turn into one because I cooked French fries all the time.

For the most part, the parts that I want to remember were fun, but also there was a lot of violence, a lot of alcohol, which I chose not to indulge in, ever. I didn’t really enjoy school, I enjoyed friends at school, but I didn’t necessarily excel in school. I had the most fun doing something that was tactile. I remembered when I was in junior high school, I wanted to take the cooking class and they wouldn’t let me because they said it was for girls, originally.

Then I told the counsellor, “Aren’t most chefs men?” So they literally started a boys cooking class because of that. At the time I didn’t see that as paradigm shifting, but as I got older, I realised it was. That’s a track I’ve been on, is to change our archaic laws and rules that don’t serve us.

How did your upbringing shape the person you are today?

My upbringing shaped me because I realised what I didn’t want to do and what I didn’t want to become. The things I saw didn’t serve me, so I was counter to a lot of the things that happened around me. I didn’t want the violence, I didn’t want the drugs, I didn’t want to be intoxicated and I didn’t want to be in a gang, so I didn’t. That’s a lot of what I saw around me and that wasn’t for me.

How would you sum up your childhood?

Beautiful, because I’m still here. My circumstances shaped me to who I am today, and without that you wouldn’t think I’m interesting enough to do a story on. I try to go through and not have any of the regrets, which, we’re all gonna have some, but release the pain and enjoy the beauty. Remember the things that made you happy. That’s why I say this now, and tell people to “operate from happy”.

JOURNEY

What got you into fashion designing and why the focus on professional athletes?

What got me into fashion designing is at a very young age I realised clothes didn’t accommodate my body or ‘black bodies’ in general. I wanted it so that I didn’t have to accommodate the clothes but that the clothes accommodated me. I wanted everything to be customised. At age 15, I had some pants tailor-made for me and I thought, if the tailor can do it, I can do it. I don’t know where I got the money from but that set me on the fashion designing journey at 15.

I wanted to express myself and I think clothes are a way to do that. My focus wasn’t necessarily on professional athletes, but my community. The athletes generally need bigger sizes and usually have the money for custom made clothing. They typically can’t walk into stores and buy things like the average sized person.

How and why did you become interested in urban gardening?

I became interested in gardening as a child in elementary school. But I didn’t realise that they didn’t give us the whole lesson at the time. They had us watch a seed grow in a wet paper towel in a petri dish. You watch this seed destroy itself to give new life and the stem and leaves come out and you think “wow that’s inside that one seed”. But that was it.

We didn’t do anything with that seed or that new life. Now I say, the school should be in the garden, not the garden in the school. We should have had somewhere to put that bean in the ground to give us hundreds of more beans and those beans would give us thousands of new beans. The lesson is that this one seed had a thousand more seeds in it.

That would have made it so much more magical to us. Growing up in an urban environment, we didn’t have anywhere to grow food. The perimeter of the property was flowers and things like that but I was always interested in growing things. What really took me deeper into urban gardening was the fast food and lack of healthy food. Everywhere you went there was convenient fast food. We didn’t realise it was conveniently taking years off our life.

When I started, it was first and foremost beautification. I just wanted to beautify my surroundings with flowers and trees and smells and colour. And then food. I remember going to the store and seeing a six pack of beautiful same sized, same shaped, tomatoes and on the package it said “May be coated with shellac to preserve freshness”.

It took me back to junior high school where we put shellac on our wood and I’m sure it’s not the exact same but that was a big spark. I realised they didn’t really care about the foods they were giving us, ‘number 6’ food dye, ‘number 2’…this and that, all these ingredients, why are they necessary to be in our food? Our food should heal you not kill you. Homicide, suicide, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, what do they all have in common?

What were some hard decisions you had to make and challenges you faced along the way?

Hard decisions, shit waking up in the morning and thinking should I get out of bed? One of the biggest challenges I face is being judged by my skin colour. That’s every day, 365 days a year, I’m black. In this society you realise it. Not that I want to be anything else other than what I am. There aren’t really hard decisions, it’s either good or bad. A bear sleeps in the woods.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Which achievements/milestones are you most proud of and why?

Raising my three sons. And the fact that I’m able to change people’s lives and people’s thinking in regards to food and culture and looking at the growing and cultivating of food as art. With Masterclass and TED I’ve been able to spread my gospel around the world.

How many people out there can say that what they’ve done is being studied and analysed in schools and universities around the world. I’m also proud of getting the law changed in Los Angeles where you can now grow food on the parkway. And everyday, the achievement that I woke up that morning.

What do you think are the key ingredients to your success?

Tenacity, giving a fuck, not being put in a box, being dyslexic, seeing and thinking about things differently rather than the way we were trained to think about them. When you think of something like cities, I’ll ask “What are cities designed for?”, and people answer completely wrong and say “People”.

But cities are actually designed for commerce. They house people, but not to their betterment. So how do we collectively design cities so that we’re safe, where they make us healthy and have regenerative food sources and clean air and water around us?

What lies ahead in terms of your goals and ambitions?

Hopefully I’ll wake up in the morning. The present lies ahead. I try not to live in the future. I want to fix the ‘now’, because if not, we don’t have a future. Hopefully I wake up in the morning and I can start anew.

Just like the cycles of the moon or from dusk to dawn. The earth continuously changes and reawakens every day. I want to do the same and have that mindset. If we’re stuck thinking about the future we neglect the present for what it is, a present.

PERSONAL (LIFE)

What is your life motto (Or core values) if any?

Wake up, sit up, stand up, look up and don’t get caught the fuck up. Basically, my core values are bring some, get some; which turns to the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated.

To you, what are the most important things in life?

The most important THING in life and to your life is air. Why so? Do I really need to answer that? We’ve been trained to value things – but things give you absolutely no value. So we don’t hold value for self or our neighbours or for this planet, the soil, the water because we think it’s endless, but it’s not.

So to me, air is the single most important thing in life for everything. Try doing without it, see how that works for you. One person has the power to initiate a change and if we all do it collectively, things will be changed. That and healing this planet, when you heal your mother, you heal yourself.

What’s worth mentioning on your life’s bucket list that you have not done?

I don’t know. I don’t have a bucket list. Again, that’s the future. I guess you can say changing the rotation of the planet.

Why do you do what you do? (What drives you everyday)

I do what I do because it needs to be done. It’s in my face. If we can change something for the better we should do it. If we can show people a different way, we should do that. If we can teach, we should all do that. We’re all creatives. This is something that I feel just has to be. It might be linked back to my childhood where I wish these things were explained to me.

Like the fact that we’re on a spinning ball in outer space looking for aliens. The magic, the alchemy of this spinning ball, sustains our existence and that we are a part of nature isn’t taught and it should be . If we were taught these things we would look at this planet and ourselves differently and we would work better to heal it. How do we change man’s need for greed to a man’s need for seed?

Who are the role models and influences in your life?

Mother Nature is a role model. Smart, efficient, architecture is a role model. Art is a role model. Just beautiful design. I’m my own role model, something I didn’t have when I grew up. My goal as a teen was I wanted to become a master tailor but I had nobody around to show me how to get there.

So like a lot of things, I figured it out on my own, like how to work with leather. What we should be taught is that there isn’t one road to get to a place, there are many roads. And if there isn’t one, you make your own road. That’s what we should teach kids, be your own role model. Oh yeah, and I still want to be a master tailor.

What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind?

I have no hopes to leave a legacy behind because it’s already done. I have three amazing sons and the work I have done has reached across the planet and changed people’s lives.

I’ve got kids from India to Africa to Compton to wherever growing food, calling themselves “gangsta gardeners”, changing their lives and changing their communities, so I think I’ve already done that. The question is what other legacy am I going to leave behind?

What are some life lessons you will take to your grave?

When you hear that question, you talk about life and death in the same sentence. If I’m dying, why am I going to take a life lesson to my grave. Ima try to keep living. A life lesson to take to the grave is that you’re gonna die. Don’t sweat the small stuff because in the end it’s all small stuff.

VIEWPOINTS

You are passionate about making healthy food available to everyone, including the underprivileged. In your opinion, how does nutritious food make a difference across various aspects of people’s lives?

If you don’t have the proper nutrition in your body, it’s not going to function the way it’s supposed to. A lot of people in a lot of countries don’t have a lot of healthy food around them. Even in privileged places like the U.S., not everyone has the privilege to get nutritious food. So you need to grow your own food. You’ll have all sorts of abnormalities, chronic diseases, brain dysfunction, and body dysfunction without these nutrients.

There’s certain nutrients that we need in our systems to function the way we should, and a lot comes from food, but also the environment. Where and how you live and what you’re exposed to. Why doesn’t our education include nutrition? From elementary school throughout the whole process of being so called “educated”.

One of the single most important things to your life is your health and we receive no knowledge of self. The beauty of hindsight. Who’s supposed to show us? Who’s supposed to teach us? That’s why I say, “beauty in, beauty out”.

On another note, you are a strong advocate of guerilla gardening – cultivating food plants or flowers on land not legally permitted for such uses. What good reasons justify such a cause? Especially when seen from the viewpoints of law-abiding citizens in America and other countries.

That’s a misnomer. I don’t believe in taking over spaces you don’t have a right to take over or property that’s not yours. I do “gangsta gardening” not guerrilla gardening, because gardening is gangsta.

We should have healthy food in our communities and spaces and everyone should have the benefit of healthy, nutritious food. I’m an advocate for humanity, that’s what I advocate for. I don’t advocate for people taking other people’s property. That would be colonialism. Did I just say that?

How does both healthy eating and guerilla gardening help reduce the impact of climate change? And what is your advice to people (especially the younger generations) who are inspired to contribute to this movement?

You’ve got plants and soil that sequester carbon, making the air fresher. You’re helping build the soil, which gives us cleaner, fresher air. When you plant things the air is filtered. Planting trees makes the air cleaner.

One of the biggest things we can do to give back to the planet is compost, compost compost. And then some more and then some more after that. If it came from the Earth you can put it back to the Earth. That’s what you should do, practice regenerative systems. Be the forest. Do not waste, heal the land, heal yourself. Learn how to grow food, harvest it and cook it.