Cultivating Change: An Interview with Erika Allen, CEO of Urban Grower’s Collective

Erika Allen has emerged as a beacon of change for the South Side communities. With a fervent passion for addressing food deserts, she co-founded Urban Growers Collective in 2017, a nonprofit farm dedicated to empowering BIPOC urban growers and combating food insecurity. Erika’s tireless efforts alongside co-founder Laurell Sims have propelled them to the forefront of sustainable community development, championing renewable food cycles and energy.

Yet, their most ambitious endeavor to date, the Green Era Campus, aims to revolutionize Chicago’s community by offsetting tons of carbon dioxide and fostering environmental equity. In an exclusive interview, Erika shares her insights on tackling systemic issues of inequality, racism, and food access, highlighting the fundamental right to nourishment for all.

Can you share a bit about your journey from growing up on a Wisconsin farm to becoming a co-founder of Urban Grower’s Collective in Chicago?

My childhood environment was the farm, where I learned how to work and dream about the things I wanted to do in my life. The farm was my classroom to experience nature. It was not an easy childhood, but it was an important building block in my stamina and my ability to meet the challenges of life. There were many lessons learned on the farm, especially a small family farm where we didn’t really have any farm labor.

It was the beginning of what has inspired me to do the work I currently lead with Urban Growers Collective, Inc. Also, the beauty and arts through the gardens my mother designed and grew full of beautiful flowers and shrubs with long complicated Latin names were cultivated here.

Our family’s land is on a high ridge close to the lake in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It had a lot of clay and sand in the soil–a really interesting soil composition. As a child, I’d sometimes find veins of clay and would make sculptures.

Somehow, all of this led me to come to Chicago to go to art school. I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with a BFA, and then continued working in Chicago as a teaching artist, exploring and trying to understand my own practice. I did some curatorial work early on as a teaching artist for many years, always exploring social justice issues and cultural reclamation themes around ancestral memory as a means of trying to understand racism. This led me back to graduate school to become trained as an art psychotherapist.

That was really the crux of why and how I love to express myself through art because I was able to communicate things that words could not convey. People couldn’t hear or see what I was trying to communicate, so visual expression allowed me to do that and inhabit worlds that I enjoyed exploring.

After graduate school, I worked at a small agency running family resources and support for home daycare and center-based daycare/childcare and was interested in helping to support crisis intervention and poverty interventions surrounding rent assistance, utilities, food, clothing, and FEMA services that were available. I then moved into family therapy and family support, and right away, I saw that the food pantry element was a powerful way to intervene and release household income.

What inspired you to follow in your father’s footsteps and become involved in urban agriculture, specifically focusing on transforming food deserts in Chicago?

My dad’s journey with Growing Power in Milwaukee was really interesting to me, and I saw the applications for Chicago and wanted to open an office. I didn’t want to go back to the farm, but here I was full circle and was beginning to re-embrace urban agriculture because I enjoyed what he was doing. I saw it as a way to integrate with the arts and humanities, to get to that enrichment place that I believe everyone should have access to and experience.

Could you elaborate on the mission of Urban Grower’s Collective and how it addresses issues of economic opportunity, food insecurity, and access to nutritious food in BIPOC communities?

Rooted in growing food, Urban Growers Collective (UGC) cultivates nourishing environments that support health, economic development, healing, and creativity through urban agriculture. We use urban agriculture and community food system development to dismantle inequities and structural racism, which prevent communities of color from living healthy, vibrant lives.

UGC cultivates nourishing environments in Chicago’s historically disinvested communities, seeding pathways to freedom while supporting residents’ health, economic development, healing, and creativity through urban agriculture.

Urban Grower’s Collective has been actively involved in creating sustainable communities through renewable food cycles and renewable energy. Can you tell us more about some of the initiatives or projects you’ve been working on in this regard?

In the Midwest, community agriculture that leans into peri-urban and rural agriculture is important in removing those barriers and silos that are geographically and culturally fixed. Through the work that I have been doing now for 16 years, Urban Growers Collective will bring and activate an anaerobic digester, with my business partner, Jason Feldman, who has led the development of the technology and the design of the digester, and all of the business structures inherent to that aspect of what we call the Green Era Campus.

The Green Era Campus project sounds incredibly ambitious and impactful. How do you envision it addressing both environmental injustices and food insecurity in Chicago?

This Campus, the first of its kind in Chicago (and the Midwest), will house an anaerobic digester on a 9-acre campus site, which will break down food waste from landfills into nutrient-rich compost and renewable natural gas for agriculture businesses citywide. Compost created by the digester will be provided at a low cost to farmers throughout the city and used on our seven-acre urban farm, which is expected to grow 125+ varieties of produce, herbs, and plants year-round for the Auburn Gresham community.

Alongside the anaerobic digester, the Green Era Campus will create green jobs, small business growth, youth education opportunities, and healthier lifestyles through a community education center, event plaza, community market, and other community resources. By incubating small urban agriculture businesses and hiring locally, we expect to create over 300 new jobs and enterprises, revitalizing a neighborhood that has long been neglected.

Through equitable investments, resources, and opportunities, the Green Era Campus will invigorate the Auburn Gresham community and regenerate local economies from poverty to possibility. We are thrilled to enter this new phase in our organization’s life: the Green Era Campus has the potential to propel an entire sector, creating a model in Chicago, and worldwide, for what environmental justice and equity can look like.

Therefore, in thinking about how to harness food waste, food that’s expired, and food residue, there will always be waste and non-human consumption of food. Instead of having that waste mixed in with our other trash going to landfills, we want that material to be re-upcycled and circulated again so that we’re able to capture the methane before it off-gasses and enters the atmosphere.

We also have the material then to rebuild our soils and to grow food. My father innovated a lot of growing systems using food waste and the density of the food waste to increase both the nutritional load of the food, but also to mitigate the contamination. That work really inspired me, and I saw it as a critical plank in Chicago’s transformation around how we live and grow in our communities.

Through the development of the project and working with the City of Chicago, over multiple administrations, but taking root during the Emanuel administration, we were able to identify a site in Auburn Gresham and be included in the quality of life plan with the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation, who is part owner of the Green Arrow Campus Digester, allowing us to gain a great deal of community support.

UGC produces and distributes a great deal of food on just a few acres in the city. Being able to expand that, have it centralized, and produce crops that can supply all of the demand that we currently receive is pivotal. We turn away a lot of business because we don’t have the supply. We prioritize the produce that we grow for our own programs and for specific impacts that are strategically aligned with our mission and that of our partners

In your opinion, what role do you see urban agriculture playing in addressing broader societal issues such as racial equity, economic empowerment, and environmental sustainability?

I try to contribute to my local foodshed in that way and make strategic decisions about how to spend my money. This is important because, with Urban Growers Collective, our vision and aim are to address the inequities and structural racism that are inherent in the food system.

It’s not just the food system, but the food system becomes the tool and method to both meet the need, through growing food and cultivating nourishing environments that ultimately will support personal and public health.

How do you engage with the local community in your work, and what kind of support or partnerships have been crucial to the success of Urban Grower’s Collective?

We are the community, staff, youth, families, customers, program participants, apprentices, neighbors, and the community organizations we collaborate with. We are implementers and innovators, sometimes forerunners innovating or reclaiming generational knowledge that has been lost. This is critical to our work and takes a long time to develop, problem solve, and overcome obstacles along with our community, who are struggling with the same issues.

The impacts of the Green Era Campus and Urban Growers Collective are to create pathways for youth and adults in the community to see themselves within this work, to see themselves within green energy and technology, as growers with the power and agency to make change. We want to expose children and youth early in their development to these food waste-to-energy initiatives, and back to growing food developments in our community.

We want young-minded people to collaborate with the brilliant farmers and growers, scientists, engineers, activists, artists, and philosopher storytellers, to really cultivate thinkers, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are able to be place-based, to live and work within their own community, and also to be wealthy. Our goal is to redefine this concept of wealth as being able to own, live, and thrive generationally within our neighborhoods without fear of displacement, build property values, have living wage employment and business ownership, and have monetary wealth without extracting or creating harm in the world.

This is a tall order these days, but I think it’s imperative. We want to make sure that as we increase our fiscal standing and success with this kind of innovation and the many others that are being developed, that we’re not repeating the same cycles of harm and extraction. There’s a way to generate wealth without creating harm. And that is, I think, critical for the global and local economy, food systems, agriculture, and all industries to consider what their impacts are and how they want to live and grow in society.

What are your hopes and aspirations for the future of urban agriculture and food justice in Chicago and beyond?

I’ve selected food systems and farming because it is such a human thing to do and something that we all participate in and appreciate. We can all hold seeds in our hands. We can all drop them into the soil and watch something grow. And then, with time and effort, have something to nourish ourselves and others. That’s the basis of civilization. If we’re able to do that and make sure everybody’s nourished as part of that process, all kinds of innovation can happen.

I think with the alignment of passion and commitment to the environment, this work requires a lot of sacrifice, time, and energy to get us to the point where we can even see that kind of reality. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it certainly requires a lot of patience and time to achieve all of those broader societal impacts that will turn the tides on defending the need for racial equity and justice.

Economic empowerment, choice, and involvement are important for all people in our society, at whatever level they want to participate. Our environmental sustainability and mutual aid should refocus our thinking about our neighbors and ourselves. How can we stretch and support one another with our time, resources, intellect, and with our passion to resolve some of these longstanding challenges?

I’m very grateful to be able to continue to think and speak on these issues and implement models that can grow, nourish, and create habitats that provide the inspiration and the data for other communities to look at how they can replicate and join us in our work collectively.