Before social safety nets were enshrined through government programs like Medicare, free-and-reduced school lunches, or food stamps, charity — the idea of the wealthier aiding the needy — was the social norm.
Especially in times of great socio-economic division, the upper classes were historically expected to perform acts of charity. Titans of industry like JD Rockefeller and JP Morgan famously supported several learning institutions like Spelman College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rich heiresses such as Consuelo Vanderbilt and many of her contemporaries contributed their funds to building hospitals and providing economic relief to women. Even today, the British royal family’s influence is most tangibly seen in their support of more than 1,000 charities and patronages.
While these acts of charity and philanthropy no doubt shaped policies at a high level, immigrants, Black people, and other marginalized people have found ways of taking care of their own on a community level. Often ostracized by race, income, or class, communities of color everywhere in the U.S. didn’t have large sums of individual wealth or public influence.
What they did have (time, money, knowledge, and numbers), they could contribute to a collective cause, and meet their neighbors’ needs in solidarity with each other, not their much richer benefactors. It’s called mutual aid.
Marielle Argueza photos
In the late 1700s, a group of freed Black men in Philadelphia formed the Free African Society. While they began as a group that mostly shared financial and religious knowledge, they volunteered to transport and bury the dead during an outbreak of yellow fever, helped financially support recent widows, placed orphans in apprenticeships, and paid the tuition of students who didn’t have access to free schools.
In 1833, poor Chinese workers in San Francisco, Calif., banded together to help each other find work, housing, and legal aid in what eventually became the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. The group still exists today and functions in much the same way, and now provides naturalization and English language classes as well.
In East Harlem in the 1960s, the Young Lords, a coalition of Latino and Black youth, banded together to launch the “Garbage Offensive.” They demanded that the city provide proper sanitation services by blocking the streets with a giant pile of trash. They also commandeered churches, setting up feeding programs, clinics, and daycares for working families who couldn’t afford childcare services on low-income wages.
The Black Panthers started a free breakfast program in 1969. While a national feeding program for students existed nationwide, it had its limits. The widely accessible lunch program was reduced-price, but not free. The national breakfast program was limited to only a few schools.
The Panthers recruited mothers and solicited donations of money, food, and space to run the morning program. The model, which began in one church in Oakland, Calif., was replicated in 36 other cities by 1971. In a 1969 U.S. Senate hearing, even the National School Lunch Program administrator claimed that the Black Panthers fed more poor students than the entire state of California.
The FBI saw the party as a threat. A combination of party in-fighting and state-sponsored raids and assassinations nearly dissolved all chapters — and their breakfast programs.
The mutual aid efforts weren’t all for nothing, though. In 1973, the U.S. government increased funding for its free and reduced lunch program and expanded the breakfast program to all schools.
The practice of mutual aid lives on and has had a resurgence in popularity since the pandemic. Be it pantry fridges, financial aid for missed rent, or free childcare, the practice lives on in neighborhood nonprofits and ad-hoc neighborhood groups alike.
The legacy of mutual aid
On a Wednesday morning at 127th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, Latonya Assanah speed-walked back and forth from the Harlem Grown Farm and a makeshift farmstand on the sidewalk.
“Free seeds! Free seeds!” she yelled to the growing crowd of people lining down the street. “You can grow your own food, too!”
An older man with a full bag of fresh produce from the farmstand approached her as she refreshed the box of free seeds. “Do you take volunteers? How do I sign up?” he asked Assanah, Harlem Grown’s agricultural director.
“I’ll get you a card,” Assanah replied with a smile.
This is a typical scene at the Harlem Grown farmstand at their 127th Street location every Wednesday morning. People from all walks of life line up along the street, waiting for a bag of fresh produce, either grown from Harlem Grown’s urban farming operations (which include mushroom incubators, chicken coops, and hydroponically grown produce) or donated by one of their community partners. According to their estimates, they help feed 150–200 people a week on average — and sometimes well more than 200 people during the summer.
Harlem Grown began in 2011, when the nonprofit’s founder, Tony Hillery, spent a few years volunteering at a local elementary school on 135th and Lenox Avenue. The school was directly across the street from a common occurrence in New York City: an abandoned lot.
“All of the children referred to it as the haunted garden — they didn’t want to walk past it. It was essentially being used as the block’s junkyard: People were dumping garbage in there,” said Safiya Raheem, Harlem Grown’s director of external affairs.
Where kids and their families saw a dumping site, Hillery saw an opportunity. He made a few calls to the NYC Parks and Recreation Department, and cleaned up the site.
It was Assanah’s daughter, an elementary school student at the time, who suggested they grow something on the empty lot. Hillery promptly went to a store and began building the bones of a garden.
Assanah, who was a parent volunteer when she started, said the idea for the farmstand was a natural offshoot of Harlem Grown’s expanding program offerings and diversifying production into hydroponics. Not only was the original 135th Street site an outdoor classroom to teach children about food systems and nutrition, but in a few years, it was also a fully productive urban farm.
Since they already had Saturday programming, they began to give away the food they were growing, first to their student families, then to the neighboring community. “We already had a Saturday program, so we said, ‘Let’s set out a table, and let’s [put] the produce that we’re growing on this table for anyone to come and take it and have,’” recalled Assanah.
The popularity of the farm stand skyrocketed during the pandemic. “COVID happened. Then it was, ‘How can we all connect?’ And this food is still growing,” said Assanah. That’s when the nonprofit began seeing those averages of 150–200 people attending their farmstand every week — and those numbers have remained steady ever since.
And as the need grew, so did the number of people who began to contribute their time and knowledge. Raheem and Assanah saw an outpouring of community support from Columbia University students, parents and grandparents with time on their hands, and eventually donations from nearby grocery stores and local growers.
Harlem Grown doesn’t just grow and give food. They also see Harlem — a neighborhood with an embedded Black community and immigrants — as a resource for their work as well. People with no gardening experience become self-taught urban farmers. Older folks are willing to learn new skills. Immigrants who may have grown up gardening or farming in their native countries share their experiences in growing and preserving/cooking cultural foods.
“We as a community have a lot more resources and expertise than we give ourselves credit for,” said Raheem. “How do we collect that willpower and that talent and that desire to be helpful to come together as a community to create healthier outcomes for ourselves?”
Although the group does face some challenges in recruiting for specific and specialized skills, Harlem’s ability to come together never ceases to amaze Assanah — volunteer turned urban farmer.
“We are a unit, you know? And that’s not just the old Harlem,” she said. “That’s what Harlem was. That’s what Harlem is. And some people may not see it, but if you’re not in it, you won’t know about it. That’s the Harlem I come from.”