Charles Frempong-Longdon: Using Food & Art to Bridge the Gap Between Nonprofits & Community

It has been a tough year for everyone in this global community due to the overreaching pandemic, and the interview assignment that should be happening in person became an online project. Luckily, we still had the opportunity to sit down with Charles together via Zoom and have an open conversation on the topic of environmental justice and how he has contributed to other related fields to build a healthier community. Centered around the idea of connecting people together and calling their attention to environmental and social problems, Charles very willingly shared his personal engagements on how he got to work with others towards that end.

Before we got on the Zoom call with Charles, I was imagining that we were going to be speaking with a very old man. Knowing that he was a part of the Sierra Club I was picturing a John Muir type of person. But when we got on the call, I was very mistaken! Charles is a young person whose family is from Ghana, but he lived mostly in Minneapolis and experienced growing up under American culture. Though the cultural root he inherited is not comparable to the works he was doing for environmental justice, Charles was actually inspired by his Grandpa and the life he lived in Ghana. At the age of eighteen, Charles went back to Ghana to visit his Grandpa, and he remembered the talks he had with him on the changes happening in Ghana. He was surprised by the natural, slow-paced life that his Grandpa was living in being just next to urban expansions such as high-speed railways. This is the first anecdote Charles shared with us, and it undeniably set the base for his continuing works. To our understanding, that was a critical conflict between modern constructions and the existence of nature. Charles rethinks about whether this has been ecological or not, and it is where he begins to explore environmental justice issues. Initially inspired by the conversations Charles had with his Grandpa on topics like nature and urban expansion, these experiences are what first piqued his interest and started his journey in environmental justice.

One of the stories that struck me the most during the interview was Charles’ path to his Sierra Club job. Charles explained to us that his career started with him working on a food truck for many years. During this time was very passionate about going to protests and was very into activism. One day he just randomly walked into the Sierra Club because people looked like they we’re having fun. Someone came up to him and asked if they could help and they had a conversation about the work done at the Sierra Club. They talked about environmental justice and Charles realized that it was something he was very interested in and passionate about but had never had the exact words for. Soon after that he got an internship at the Sierra Club. When he started working there, he thought he was doing a bad job. But, throughout his internship he had many conversations with people who work in environmental justice, and through those conversations realized that he had so much confidence in what he was passionate about. His job today allows him to have conversations and lets him be able to work with and advocate for disadvantaged communities.

Later in our conversation we asked Charles about what kept him going in his work, his main drive for his fight in Environmental Justice revolves around building a better, stronger, and bigger community. Charles told us how, due to his job at the Sierra club, he gets to be around really inspiring and amazing people. He gets to work alongside and learn from these people and it’s his job, an ideal working environment, that makes him feel very grateful for his job position, the people he works with, and all of the work he gets to do. While his work community is incredibly important and inspiring to him, Charles discussed how creating spaces for people in the larger twin cities community as a whole is something that he’s very passionate about. Getting to use vulnerability to connect with people and familiarizing himself with others helps build a better and stronger community.

After hearing just how important community relationships are to Charles, I reflected on the murder of George Floyd this past May. As someone who also worked in the Twin Cities this summer doing community engagement and centered work, I remember just how much impact the murder had on my job, on Minneapolis communities, and conversations on racial and environmental justice. When I asked Charles about how his work was affected, he told us how all of his work really started changing in March to be more focused on the pandemic’s impact on Brown and Black people. He told us how the murder of George Floyd was the breaking point. People were exhausted with all of the unjust killings of Black and Brown people for years, but this was the event that put people over the edge. Charles’ work became less about environmental justice and more about Black liberation. Topics he worked on were seeing ACAB as an EJ issue, thinking about access to green spaces, interactions with Black and Brown bodies, and the impacts and implications of borders. During the time of the large beginning protests, Charles was working on the front lines with people that he had worked with forever, which showed the power of how the intersectionality between environmental justice and police brutality. Through this work Charles started to see environmental justice as a way to help protect the BIPOC community. He strongly believes that healing justice and community care needs to be an active part of our movements.

Being so interested by just how much the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd changed his work and what he focused on, we asked Charles more about the exact work that he does at Sierra Club. Charles is a chapter organizer which entails listening to community members and having conversations with people, making small wins into larger ideas. Food and art are holistic ways of getting in touch with people, that’s why Charles has been focusing a lot of his work and community outreach on urban gardening and trying to eliminate food deserts.Charles does work on a large geographical scale and focuses a lot on environmental justice issues with trash incinerators. He helped set up an interface on how people worked on these problems. Another large aspect of his job is figuring out how to translate non-profit language to community language. Nonprofits can use confusing terminology and overall inaccessible language when trying to work with communities and end up very much sounding like a condescending outsider. Charles mentioned how a great way to help bridge this gap is through the arts. Charles was a chef on a food truck for many years and always found that food is a great way to bring people together. Food and art are holistic ways of getting in touch with people, that’s why Charles has been focusing a lot of his work and community outreach on urban gardening and trying to eliminate food deserts. Overall, his work is about building up relationships with the community in which he combines things that he is passionate about like the overlaps between food, art, and environmental justice awareness.

I was so interested to hear just how much art and food were a part of his work in environmental justice, whenever I think about community engagement and events I always think of events with tons of food and music, and I was wondering if this was the case for the work that Charles did. Where in eco-poetry humans are seen as an extension of nature and human expansion into nature is not the end goal.So, we asked him to speak more about the intersectionality of art and environmental justice. Charles told us that before he started working at the Sierra Club while he was a cook, he was also making music and writing poetry as a way to process interactions and knowledge. He was very into eco-poetry which is based in an Indigenous and BIPOC way of interacting with nature, that has an aspect of gendering inanimate objects. He explained to us how traditional White Western poetry about nature is called nature poetry which depicts aspects of nature or nature itself as being a damsel in distress. Where in eco-poetry humans are seen as an extension of nature and human expansion into nature is not the end goal. For Charles, this was a way to learn how to interact with the world and created an opportunity to build connections with people through art and poetry. Which has similar roots and energy to the work he does with community organizations at the Sierra Club.

While Charles enjoys his job and loves the connections with other environmental justice advocates and community members, he told us that he also has suffered from imposter syndrome. With having environmental justice as a career, in the beginning he felt like everything that he was doing was wrong. When working he had an underlying capitalist view on the work he was doing and was constantly wondering if he was doing enough. But he soon learned just how much ingrained capitalism was affecting him and also focused on how environmental justice is not a capitalist concept. So therefore, no type of capitalist work scale can measure the type and importance of his work. Another part of his imposter syndrome was trying to live up to an imagined standard as a young Black man in a corporate capitalist society. He learned he had to advocate for a seat at a table.

In class while discussing the recent news around Line 3, we were informed that there was a large number of people that resigned from the EJAG to protest the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s decision to grant water crossing permits for Line 3. Charles was one of those people! When we asked him about the situation, he told us that having a seat at the table does not give you legitimate access to the meal being served. The EJAG was advertised as the community being able to have a say in environmental justice issues happening within the state of Minnesota, but this was not the case, they were simply mitigating casualties. For many of the board, Line 3 was the last straw. The board was telling them not to grant the permits, but they did it anyway. To Charles and many others on the board this action was soul crushing, the Pollution Control Agency could have stopped it but instead they looked the other way. After this disaster Charles is just even more fired up to fight for creating real solutions that benefit people, and now truly understands public justice vs. cooperative justice from organizations and agencies, which is really just performative and often not real justice.

After hearing all of the amazing and inspiring things that Charles said about his journey and path to working with environmental justice, I am even more excited to participate more in activism surrounding environmental justice! So, we asked Charles what he recommended to young activists who want to get involved in the environmental justice movement. Charles first mentioned how after the youth climate strike he saw just how much people patronize youth. He continued with how he thought that youth are talented and intelligent and great at holding space for people. They are true to themselves and stick to their guts and those are all admirable and important qualities for those participating in environmental justice activism. He recommends that we have conversations with those we admire and that we should be open to learning, engagements, and reaching out to people. I will definitely take his advice and our conversation with him was a great start for the furthering of my environmental justice activism!