PlantingJustice

Notable Achievements

-- Founded in 2009 in Oakland CA, PJ’s mission is to empower people impacted by mass incarceration and other social inequities with the skills and resources to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing. PJ’s seven (7) innovative and highly integrated programs generate a significant portion of its $5 million/yr+ operating income and support 55 full-time staff members, including 30 formerly incarcerated people, with full-time living-wage jobs in urban farming, nursery production/management, ecological landscaping, community education, and peer mentorship that position them as change makers in their communities.

-- PJ is unique because of its internal social and nonprofit management innovations, including a democratically elected Executive Leadership Council, a democratically elected Peace Council, transparent pay-schedules, and self-managing programs that make all of their own operating decisions. A majority of PJ’s staff, staff Leadership Council, and 20-person Board of Directors are people of color and low-income. Some of our most notable achievements include:

-- Accessing long-term land tenure on more than 16 acres in the nation’s most difficult real estate market to design and build transformative Equitable Food-Oriented Development projects with social and economic infrastructure that will benefit the community for multiple generations

-- Running the largest urban farm in the region (4-acre El Sobrante farm), with more than 800 varieties of fruit trees and other edible+medicinal perennials

-- Running the continent’s most biodiverse organic mail-order fruit tree nursery 150’ from our future aquaponics farm site, with a globally significant plant collection totalling more than 1500 varieties of trees. Nursery sells nearly $500,000 in product/year, shipping approximately 25,000 fruit trees/shrubs across the continental U.S. each year

-- Designing/installing 650+ edible gardens through its Transform Your Yard program, including 150 free/sliding scale Community Justice Garden Hubs at schools, places of worship, apartment complexes, transitional housing centers, senior living facilities, and other low-access, high-impact community areas, since the organization’s founding.

-- Impacting 7,000 at-risk youth and adults/year through educational programs at 8 public schools, 3 prisons, 3 juvenile detention facilities, and on PJ’s various farms/sites.

-- Providing up to 80 paid youth internships per year, beginning at $17.50/hr, with wrap-around supportive services, given that the youth who are referred to Planting Justice already have significant trauma and personal challenges and are at high risk for experiencing violence and incarceration

--Assets include title to 3 properties (2 acre nursery in East Oakland, 3-acre (future) aquaponics farm in East Oakland, and 1.3 acre “pay-what-you-can” cafe, retail nursery and gathering space (called the Good Table) in El Sobrante, and long-term leases for PJ’s 4-acre El Sobrante Farm and 5-acre Sacramento nursery (in pre-development, owned by the City of Sacramento

-- All programs are led by people most impacted by systemic violence, structural economic and social oppression, and mass incarceration

-- Growing organizational budget to $5m+/year with 55 full-time staff, including 30 formerly incarcerated people.

-- Only 2 out of the 75 formerly incarcerated people who have served as full-time staff at PJ over the past 13 years have gone back to jail/prison on a new charge = less than 3% recidivism rate

Major Goals for 2022/2023

Building out PJ’s Executive team to add strategic operational capacity in preparation for future scaling (see funding gaps, below)

Maintaining a 0% recidivism rate for all staff and youth interns in 2022 and 2023 (0% annual recidivism rate has been achieved in each of the past 4 years)

Completing the renovation of the 1.3 acre former Adachi Nursery in El Sobrante and its 7,000 sq ft commercial building, and opening our doors to the public by Spring 2023 as the Good Table, the region’s (nation’s?) first combined “pay-what-you-can” cafe, retail nursery, farmers market, incubator commercial kitchen, arts+cultural venue, and gathering/educational/organizing community space Securing a Conditional Use Permit for PJ’s 3-acre aquaponics farm at the historic Neishi Bros. Nursery property, and completing construction of what will soon be the nation’s largest urban aquaponics farm, with capacity to yield upwards of 180,000 pounds of organic produce AND 150,000 organic nursery starts each year.

Securing a Conditional Use Permit for PJ’s brand new 5-acre nursery in South Sacramento, in collaboration with the City of Sacramento and Three Sisters’ Gardens, and utilizing a $2m CNRA state grant to build out a state-of-the-art production nursery that will double PJ’s capacity for fruit tree propagation to meet an aggressively ballooning national demand for PJ’s mail-order heirloom fruit tree nursery

Designing, developing, and launching a brand new wordpress website, in collaboration with Two Hats Consulting, a full service marketing agency. Services include an enhanced user experience and optimized woocommerce online store with over 1500 different product pages, photography, copywriting, and brand identity evolution. We are so excited to have a website that is sophisticated and effective enough to see PJ into its next phases of growth and development.

Full length documentary, specifically focusing on Planting Justice’s work in Sobrante Park (nursery and aquaponics farm construction/vision/buildout) to tell the larger story of PJ’s mission and vision for the future. Very initial conversations have been in place with Kontent Films, who came out to the nursery on a single Saturday and produced this short video clip, which shows what the Neishi nursery looked like before Planting Justice began cleaning it up! Kontent Films is an activist filmmaking company who have been working with social movements around environmental / climate justice, food sovereignty, and the new economy for many years now. Their last feature film, Not Without Us followed grassroots activists from around the world to the climate talks in Paris, and they are currently producing a feature film called Farming While Black, about the rising generation of black farmers. We are excited to explore this further, and believe it is critical to document our work in such an in depth and visual way!