Michigan State University faculty and students are producing a documentary on a vision of Flint as a healthier, greener city. It will show the challenges of bringing fresh produce to a food desert, feeding schools, providing educational options and battling bureaucracy.
On Wednesdays through July, Great Lakes Echo will run a segment expected to become a building block of the finished story. You can help.
The Greening of Flint main page is where to post questions, suggest interviews, make comments or offer suggestions to help producers tell the story of a city trying to re-grow its roots literally and figuratively as a model for post-industrial revitalization. It also contains links to each of the published segments and tells which ones are coming up.
This week:
Jacky and Dora King, karate masters, teach students how to farm on Youth Karate-Ka: Harvesting Earth Farm in Beecher, a community near Flint. The Kings perceive karate and farming as self-defense. The former is a physical self defense; the latter is an economic self defense. The Kings and their students provide the community with organic food, as well as keeps the money in Flint.
Related stories:
Urban pioneers turn vacant lots verdant in Detroit
Inmates harvest food, savings, education and jobs from jail gardens
Growing Power sprouts in Wisconsin
Farm to Spork: Kids see fruits of partnering schools with farms
Shifting carbon from roads to roofs
@Shaun:
The City of Flint, City Council and Planning Commission fortunately don’t have a say in the matter. Most of the Kings’ properties are in Mt. Morris Township or Genesee Township, just outside of the Flint city limits.
“I envision this will be the number one hub for urban farming in the United States in the next ten years.”
Not if the City of Flint, City Council or Planning Commission have anything to say about it, unfortunately. It’s a crying shame there IS such a fantastic grass-roots effort being fostered and developed here that is being stomped on and cut at by a leadership that doesn’t understand it and is held sway by some pretty ridiculous personal biases.
I routinely hear how this is just the latest iteration of share-cropping and keeping the poor black folk down. I sincerely hope that this doc helps make the real leaders of our community–folks like Dora and Jacky King–understood for tremendous benefits they collectively bring to our community and much more important they are then the standard fair we’ve come to rely so heavily on.