Michael Chaney: Using Project Sweetie Pie to Address Food Deserts

The process of setting up a meeting with Michael Chaney is emblematic of the polychronic ecosystem he operates in. After a week of struggling to communicate over email and phone calls due to myself getting sick and our schedules not aligning, I called him on a Wednesday afternoon during my lunch break hoping for a free 20-30 minutes to have a phone conversation. He insisted on talking in person, and he was free… at that moment! So I dropped the lunch, hopped in my car, and found my way to South Minneapolis to meet Michael in a co-working space on East Franklin Ave. Through my years of working with food justice activists, I have found that the ability to operate in polychronic rhythms–free-flowing and adaptable with time, emphasizing connections to people and building relationships–is extremely important, so when Michael called me over I knew that the best way I could respect his time and energy was to shift my day and take a trip across the Mississippi.

As a brief overview, Michael has been involved in environmental justice, specifically social and food justice, in the Twin Cities for quite a while. In 1984 he was one of the co-founders of the Minneapolis Juneteenth Celebration. In the 90’s he was one of the co-founders of the Wendell Phillips Credit Union. In 2010, he started an organization, Project Sweetie Pie, that uses urban agriculture to revitalize the North Minneapolis foodscape, and has spent the last decade working on accessibility in higher education and food sovereignty. As a current member of the Northside Green Zone Task Force he has continued to plant the “seeds of change” and implement evolving  strategies and priorities. He also has become an avid critic and advocate for equitable food and public land development and community ownership in the current conflict over the development of the Upper Harbor Terminal in North Minneapolis. Recently Michael helped co-create The Family Of Trees.org and was awarded the 2020 courageous collaborator award from the Environmental Initiative. Other community projects he has birthed and is implementing  to advance environmental justice, equity and inclusion for all are The Northside Safety N.E.T (Neighborhoods Empowering Teens), and J.U.I.C.E. (Juneteenth Urban Initiative Creating Economic Empowerment).

For the first twenty minutes, we flipped the interview and talked about myself and my background in food justice. We traced my youth from growing up in a South Los Angeles food desert, to attending a social and environmental justice-based high school, to Macalester & the plethora of avenues in which I’ve deepened my experience in the food justice movement. We noted how much of my experience has been based in theory and higher education. Through my studies in my classes at Macalester I participate in discourse on systems, frameworks, and theories surrounding food, agriculture, politics, and economics. Last summer I was a research assistant on a University of Minnesota urban agriculture project. The following fall, I studied food systems in three different countries over four months through an immersive abroad program. I’ve met amazing people along the whole journey who continue to inspire me to get through college, and later immerse myself in on-the-ground justice work. I’ve been building and building for many years, and I think my conversation with Michael gave me such an insight as to what my future will look like putting this knowledge into practice.

A consistent thread in our conversation was the desire to encourage self determination in marginalized communities, specifically low income communities of color. One such community, North Minneapolis, has been at the hands of institutional inequalities since the development of the Twin Cities. It seems like both of us share a vision of investing time, energy, and resources into marginalized communities to use food as an avenue to break cycles of self-defeat and low self-esteem.

Before he dove into environmental justice work Michael spent 25 years in TV production and broadcasting, but didn’t have much more to say about that period. Late in that career he had a relationship working with North High School students in North Minneapolis on web design and production, but when the school came under threat of closure in 2010 he acted to save the school through food. By collaborating with Rose McGee, founder of Sweet Potato Comfort Pies, Michael began to grow sweet potatoes with students in a green room at the school. Sweet Potato Comfort Pies used the historical and cultural role of sweet potatoes in the African American community as the inspiration for their urban farm/local food production pilot project. This effort was eventually named Project Sweetie Pie, and since then it has blossomed into a movement. In its first year of operation, 2010, Project Sweetie Pie had five gardens on empty lots donated by local residents with fifty partners, and by now there are twenty-five gardens across North Minneapolis with 135 partners. Not only is Project Sweetie Pie working to combat food deserts and poverty, but it has grown into an organization that teaches youth how to grow and sell their own food to encourage food freedom and self determination. Michael emphasizes that it is important to build infrastructure for inner city youth to develop skills to subvert historical marginalization and become both producers and consumers within their system. Michael noted that this is the feat of a “community that came together, worked together for the common good of the youth and families of this community, for it takes a village to raise a child.”

Michael briefly talked to me about a different urban agriculture project he pioneered, Growing North. This project, a collaboration with the University of Minnesota, is focused on building pathways to higher education for inner city youth. It involves mentorship programs that help develop life and career skills for youth and facilitates access to higher education. Michael informed me that the program just received a $250,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). When I seemed impressed by the amount, he said it was just spit in the bucket. It truly is little compared to the vast amount of wealth being pushed in other industries. He said that he wanted to focus on a partnership with the University of Minnesota because it is a land grant university.  Land grant universities are designated by state legislatures or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts in 1862, 1890 and 1994. The Morrill Act allowed grants in the form of federal land to states, using the benefits to establish public institutions to provide agricultural and technical education to the people. These grants are the first line of defense in educating the layperson about innovation and advancement of agriculture through the extension services. However, they are not living up to their original mandate of educating the people— it has become very ivory-tower focused and inaccessible to most people who cannot afford a college education. These are top-down controls that create more barriers for minority students to access knowledge, and it is a system we should actively try to dismantle.

Michael works in horticulture and agriculture, yes, but that’s not what he does. It’s a means to an end, a strategy. Getting people skills in education to charter their own course is the real vision. He likes to use the garden as an avenue for this because it is synonymous to a petri dish–you have to build the culture. One of his proudest achievements is the establishment of the first urban farm legislation in the nation. Working with Representative Karen Clark and Ed McDonald, the head of the Council on Black Minnesotans, they established cutting edge legislation that allocated money to directly support the training of youth in agriculture in metropolitan communities.

There’s not much of an entryway to environmental justice for the average person in his community. It has become a discourse that mostly people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees participate in. Michael says gardening is literally low-hanging fruit, it is an opportunity for all of us to perceive ourselves as environmentalists. Especially with his practices of engaging youth with agriculture, Michael is helping foster environmental stewards in his community. He says this is important because we as a whole will not be successful in addressing climate change if it becomes the sole domain of white, educated, elite intellectuals; especially while we have not made a dent in improving the quality of life for communities of color.

Michael spent a bulk of our conversation talking about the Upper Harbor Terminal development project dispute. The Upper Harbor Terminal is situated on a 48-acre plot of land along the St. Anthony River in his neighborhood of North Minneapolis. The proposed plan includes converting the space into an 18-acre park, an outdoor concert venue, commercial development, office spaces, and housing. None of this plan involved input from the local community. Residents are concerned about river access, efficacy of job creation, overall patterns of gentrification and the renovation of a district to conform to white middle or upper class comforts, encroaching on their space.

For the past two years, Michael has shifted his activist energy towards this affair. He is on a coalition team with other local organizations to resist the current plan of development and try to cocreate a better vision for the community. The team wants to challenge the ill-founded concept plan decided over the wrong course of action by raising awareness and expectations of this project. They operate based on four pillars: all things ecological, arts and culture, historical preservation, and food and urban farming. They operate based on four pillars: all things ecological, arts and culture, historical preservation, and food and urban farming. According to their vision, the development project would emphasize green technologies and infrastructure, setting a precedent for North Minneapolis on the frontline of putting the Green New Deal into action. They want to establish personhood of the Mississippi River in order to dismantle western domination of nature. Michael said that the vision for the Upper Harbor Terminal project is both rooted in research and development. Experiential learning, workforce development, and applied education are at the forefront of their minds and create an ecosystem within public and private relationships.

Soliciting money from the state all the time is unsustainable, so how do we make a cooperative structure? How do we implement intergenerational wealth building? If $25-50 million public dollars are going into the development of the site, the people should be able to say what they want in the space. What would it look like to have ownership of that site? Michael says that instead of  40 acres and a mule, they’re going to build 48 acres and a school.

Michael finds it important to be vocal about this matter because it is tied to many of the greater issues marginalized communities face. He says it’s not good enough to talk about food justice and food access unless you tie it to economics. Why are marginalized communities suffering? Because of disenfranchisement, disinvestment, lack of access to capital. He says that most solutions within social justice are unsustainable. Are they a fancy cause giving someone fish rather than teaching someone to fish? We must give people jobs, and teach skills to set them up to direct their own destiny. Simply giving people food creates codependency, but if we gave people tools to become independent, we can make more progress. Michael says that the trajectory of the future is about me being invested in my future as much as it is about society being invested in my future, because I have gifts and talents that need to be supported. We have to support the young bright minds of today.

At the end of our conversation, we shared some ideas that were really meaningful to me thinking about the future of my work. He was summarizing his work through the decades, first in the 1980s created the first Juneteenth celebration in Minnesota, then in the 1990s co-founded Wendell Phillips Credit Union to aid wealth creation. In the 2010s he focused on urban agriculture, and now he’s onto the Upper Harbor Terminal development theme. He says he is always working to create real solutions for real people who have real problems. I noted that the power in his work is that it shows how all these systems that disenfranchise communities of color are embedded into our society. He equates it to probiotic health–if you want to become actualized, it’s about living in the moment, living organically. He has always been working to elevate his community through the avenue most relevant. Western academic society values the accumulation of wealth as the motivation for living, but his motivation is to find out who he is and discover how his talents & skills can be made available to help society at large, to advance the greater good. We as a society need to ask ourselves, “What is our succession plan?” like farmers consider the best succession crop. It resonated with my belief that if I do not have people who are set up to continue my work after me, then my work has been for naught. To this, Michael said that as people, we’ve been conditioned to live in a self-serving world, but it’s an illusion. We as a society need to ask ourselves, “What is our succession plan?” like farmers consider the best succession crop. He says we need to effectively utilize our resources to become good stewards–we’re all environmentalists but you’re either a good steward or a bad steward. People of color are barred from a seat at the table most of the time, and those who are out doing inspiring work never get representation in the media. From this, I took away that it is important for me to be interested in food justice work as a young woman of color. With as little representation as we get, we are the ones redefining who get to be the movers and shakers of our system, redistributing resources and capital, and are healing fragments in our relationship with the earth. Michael has shown me that there are pathways for me in my future working in alternative food justice movements. I struggled for a period of time trying to figure out how to practically de-commodify food and subvert the capitalist economic system, because that seemed to be the root of injustice. Now, through hearing Michael’s experience in this movement, I can see that change doesn’t happen so quickly, but it should not discourage work from being done. We must help our future generations by building pathways and setting them up with tools to create our vision. I’m being called upon now, in 2019, to navigate through this system that was designed against my favor, and, by recognizing this, it is in our collective best interest to foster a framework to uplift everyone.