11/09/2024
We unfortunately very recently, and without any notice period, have had our connection broken to the site that we had been building Ital Abundance Community Garden on. This is due to the owner going into administration and them not being open to any way of us recovering the land once they are gone/ don't want any community outside of 'their own' involved if they do manage to change business forms and keep the land for themselves.
After a year of being made to feel unwelcome, having to fight to get responses to emails and never receiving any solid information or agreement, we were still trying our hardest to keep creating a space for our community within a cut off, privileged and gatekept beautiful woodland space. Our contribution was barely acknowledged, despite requests and demands to work ourselves to enhance the land and to put the work in to make the land usable by the owner and their small 90% white community. It brought up feelings of trauma and ancestral pain, to be worked enslaved to land that we would never be given autonomy on.
Those of you who know the space we had been using and had joined us at our events know just how stunning a space it was. But also just how isolated and purposefully hidden from even the local community it was. It was a white sanctuary, a space for only members of a specific type of philosophical belief (that was rooted in fascism and racism). We knew this and so it was our challenge to try to reclaim this space for the local community and to bring a different set of politics and people into the space, because we do not believe that land access should be restrictive and the Earth, plants and other animals do not share the philosophical beliefs of humans and should not be punished as such.
We are open to any suggestions of new spaces or collaborations across the city for next year. Please get in touch if you have or know of a garden, allotment or other land space that is open to growing a safe space for the Black community. Whilst we are looking for a new space, unfortunately we will not be running any Ital Abundance Community Garden sessions.
Restrictions on Black people being outside is not something new, the West has always been threatened by Black people outside and in nature. Our freedom, our autonomy, our community must always come with strings attached. Black (and Brown) majority communities only get 'gifted' community gardens and access to green spaces when those spaces are run by white overseers. If we do not agree to being indebted to and run by 'the good white people' then we are seen as not deserving of outdoor spaces, greenery, health and survival. Can you name us a working class Black run community garden in Nottingham within our own local areas that is specifically for us by us?
The reasons we set up Nottingham Nourishment Network CIC was to have honest and loud conversations about issues such as the disparity in access to green spaces, scarcity of healthy locally grown culturally appropriate food and the lack of radical community projects run by us. These conversations are going to be uncomfortable to many people and are going to challenge the norms and traditions within society - norms that we definitely see replicated heavily within growing and land spaces.
White people and communities have always closed off their spaces from us, put restrictions on where we can and can't go, and weaponised ownership of land against us. We are not going to share the bleak break down of deprivation statistics here, but they are numbers we know well as working class Black people ourselves fighting over and over again to get a crumb whilst basic boring white projects and people get handed every piece of land, money and support.
We do not need people to speak for us or 'include' us in spaces that are policed by overseers/ people outside of our communities. We instead need people to challenge their own privilege, participate in land redistribution and land justice, challenge the gatekeeping of land access and the poor treatment of Black people in this city and beyond.
We will find a new space, and we will have to fight hard for it, as we have for every other space we have been in or attempted to access. But that's our dedication to our community.
