Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your profitability, your positive impact, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have 1 request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am super excited.

Get ready, in garden geeks. I am here with Erica Allen, and I am like, hopefully not gonna be apologizing too much for how deeply I'm geeking out on gardens and how excited I am. Our topic is Pathways to Freedom, the intersection between community food and justice. In and Erica is the cofounder and CEO strategic development and programs for the Urbans Grower Collective in and the president of GreenERA Educational and the co owner of GreenERA Sustainability Partners. She's been involved in the community food and justice space since 2002. As far as I could find, it might be even before that. So, Erica, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Paul. I'm so grateful to be here.

It is so inspiring to get a little sense, do a deep dive into your background and the work you've been doing for a really long time, and we're gonna get into what it looks like now. But before we get into in what you're doing now. What would somebody wanna know about Erika Allen? What's the short version of your backstory that would give some context for the work that you're doing now, Erika?

In That's such a simple yet complex question. I will say that just, you know, my pronouns are she, her, hers, And we and us, I'm a visual artist by training to, kinda move from the farm,

in Family Farm and to come to Chicago to

go to art school at SAIC and never left. I really have developed as an adult here in Chicago, in interested in, you know, the intersection between the arts and social justice and understanding the historic legacy and in physically manifests structural racism within our environments. And I'm a trans psychotherapist. I have an honorary PhD in public health in from my alma mater where I received my master's. And I'm a mom of a 16 year old, and I live with a parent.

Okay. Got it. And part of the thing that, like, not only do I share so much, at alignment with the the food justice and, you know, unpacking racism and trying to do something about that. But your original training is in art therapy, and my original training is in community mental health. So just anything you could say about well-being and in change, and how does food and community work fit with Erika Allen, the art therapist into artists. Like, what help us understand that intersection.

And I think the intersection is really healing. Right? Like, thinking about healing our communities, in Which I think we all in the helping professions think about or, you know, from how our spirituality, you know, in the multitudes of ways that people in have their connection with their higher power and their ancestry and, you know, all of those things. I'm a universalist. Like, I I I I believe in in Supporting everybody's, you know, development of their their highest character and their and their destiny. Right? So For me, it's really about the the ways that we manifest with whatever our passion is. You know? The most powerful healers are wounded healers who, you know, utilize their own experience to be able to support and in Create change within within our communities of practice. So I I really think about it in that way and think about, in You know, therapeutic interventions that don't take into consideration the daily stressors in and trauma that's unresolved, especially in communities of color and and low income folks, that poverty continues to elicit. In And when we have those disconnects, it's hard to do the therapeutic intervention.