Washington, Karen

Impact on the world

Often called the “godmother” or “queen” of urban farming, Washington turned a single backyard tomato plant into a decades-long campaign that transformed dozens of vacant Bronx lots into community gardens, beginning with the Garden of Happiness in 1988 and the borough's first farmers market through La Familia Verde in the early 2000s; in 2009 she co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), whose annual Black Farmers and Urban Growers Conference drew over 500 attendees in its first year and became the largest recurring gathering of Black farmers and food-justice advocates in the country. She coined the term “food apartheid” to reframe what is often called a “food desert” as the product of deliberate policy rather than a natural condition, received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2014, and was named to Ebony's “Power 100” list in 2012.

Life & background

Born around 1954 in New York City and raised in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side before her family moved to Harlem, Washington attended Hunter College and earned a master's degree in occupational biomechanics and ergonomics from New York University in 1981, working as a physical therapist while raising two children after moving to the Bronx in 1985. Tending a backyard garden led her and a neighbor to convert a trash-strewn vacant lot into the Garden of Happiness in 1988, which grew into a 36-plot community garden with a chicken coop and beehives; she went on to co-found the New York City Community Garden Coalition, La Familia Verde Community Garden Coalition (2001), and Black Urban Growers (2009), and served on the boards of the New York Botanical Garden and Just Food. After retiring from physical therapy at Montefiore Medical Center in 2014, she co-founded the cooperatively run, women-led Rise & Root Farm in Orange County, New York, where she continues to farm and mentor a new generation of Black and Brown growers.

Sources

1. New York Botanical Garden (oral history); BlackPast.org; United Hospital Fund