Over the last year, as I began my trial run at being temporarily semi-retired, my focus on community gardening and food security intensified. I joined a food cooperative board (https://www.riverwestcoop.org/), started a podcast (https://www.riverwestradio.com/show/healthy-food-in-the-53212/), became something like a volunteer assistant farm manager at a neighborhood food gardening nonprofit (https://victorygardeninitiative.org/), and studied voraciously. And then I started Food Freedom Milwaukee. It’s a small nonprofit with big goals: To transform our urban space from ecogically dead zones into thriving regenerative, food and health producing naturescapes. Because I came to understand that while access to healthy food is a right, it can’t be solved without challenging the system that produced and maintains nutritional inequality. In fact, we can’t have healthy food if we don’t have sufficient space for native plants and insects and healthy soil.

So Food Freedom Milwaukee works with communities facing food insecurity and their schools to learn how to find health by living in balance with nature by caring for and cultivating the natural spaces where we live so that it can take care of us!