100 Seeds of Change

An initiative committed to building a healthy, beautiful, safe, and self-sustaining local food system by creating 100 community, school and home urban gardens throughout Inglewood, including backyards, parks and other available properties.

The Social Justice Learning Institute has developed the "100 Seeds of Change" Food System Initiative - a comprehensive, city-wide plan to create urban gardens at homes, local schools, city parks and other locations with city youth & community members. The goal of this initiative is to transform Inglewood into a healthy living community by empowering residents to collaboratively be active in growing their own food in a local network. In the end, the food grown within this network will create Inglewood’s first complete local food system that is sustainable from the ground to the plate.

"100 Seeds of Change" is an initiative that emerged from the work of our youth and community members, who were concerned about living in a food desert. From the research conducted by our youth on food justice in Inglewood and South LA, we realized that in many communities, especially communities of color, individuals often lack affordable and accessible healthy food sources which results in increased health risk factors such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc. When you consider this fact and the existing food options (i.e., fast food restaurants, liquor stores and low quality chain supermarkets), we must question the systemic challenges facing our community and eliminate barriers preventing this access. 

We believe:

• That access to healthy, affordable and quality food is a basic human right;
• That the cultural diversity of food should be honored within communities;
• That food production must be sustainable as humans work to achieve ecological equilibrium;
• That we must do everything in our power to preserve resources for future generations; and
• That systems that govern food distribution must be just and fair.

The 100 Seeds Of Change Food System Initiative intends to accomplish the following goals:

1. Educate and empower the community residents by providing novice to expert training of gardening techniques, food preparation, nutrition education, and the value of food justice.

2. Produce enough locally grown fresh fruit and vegetables through the network of the “100 Seeds of Change” community, school, and home gardens to meet existing healthy food needs in Inglewood and the south Los Angeles communities.

3. Aggregate the locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables and create the appropriate cleaning, inspection, and storage process

4. Distribute the produce through the “100 Seeds Of Change” distribution channels, making the produce available 1) by food sharing for growers of the “100 Seeds Of Change” network and 2) through affordable purchase by residents not in the network.

Interested in having a 100 Seeds Of Change garden in your backyard? visit http://www.sjli-cp.org/beaseed to apply!

Click here to watch a video on how we got started in this work. 

Contribute to this effort as we work to impact the lives of thousands of people by empowering them to take hold of local food production.