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12 years of Planting Justice programs

Landscaping

Staff built over 550 gardens for full-paying clients and free for community groups to generate ~$250k/yr

4-acre Farm

Staff, volunteers and students planted over 2,000 certified organic perennial plants, with sales and distribution expected in 2021

2-acre Nursery

Certified organic selection of over 1,100 varieties of perennial plants in East Oakland with $400k/yr in sales, and a partnership with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust to rematriate the land

Decolonial Education

Over $400k/year in contracts at Oakland high schools, sites of incarceration and with community groups (shifting due to covid-19)

Grassroots

Fundraising

Street canvassing that generates ~$400k/yr in small and monthly donations

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2009

$500 personal investment
2 staff members (basically volunteering)
1 used truck through a private loan of $200/month over 3 years at 0% interest
Tools from the tool-lending library
Free Craigslist advertisements
$3,000 raised from door-to-door canvassing

2021

$3.5 million annual budget
42 full-time staff with benefits
4 used work trucks, 1 large bus, 1 small tractor, 1 box truck, 1 refrigerated farmers market truck, and 2 leased electric vehicles
A 10-year lease at $1/year for 4-acres of farmland in El Sobrante
Title to 2-acres of a $750,,000 property in Oakland plus infrastructure investments for nursery production, shipping and on-site sales
Shared title to 1.3-acres of a $1.1 million property with a 7,000 sq.ft. building that requires renovation (Adachi Nursery)
Title to 3-acres of a $2 million property that requires clean-up and renovations (Neishi Brothers Nursery)

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Governance Overview:

Integrating Projects

in 2021

PJ’s administrative and communications team includes 2 Co-Directors, an Executive Assistant, an Operations Director, a Grant Writer, an Accountant, and 2 media team members.

- Board of Directors

- Leadership Council

- Peace Council

- Equitable Pay Chart

- Transparent Decision-making Chart

- Reparations Framework

- A 3-acre aquaponics center located next door to our 2-acre Nursery (~15 new staff + 2 homes)

- A commercial kitchen and urban farm store located one mile from our 4-acre Farm (~6 new staff)

Vestibulum congue

2-acre Nursery:

18 staff

$450k in revenue

Full-cost and

Free Landscaping:

5 staff

$300k in revenue

Canvassing

3 staff

$450k in revenue

Decolonial Education:

5 staff

$400k in contracts

4-acre Farm:

5 staff

(sales expected in 2021)

Programs currently operating

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Board of Directors

- Purpose and function is to support staff with adequate resources and hold staff leadership accountable to meeting the organizational mission and remaining financially sustainable.

- Currently 20 Board Members with 45% of board seats filled by PJ staff members

- Meets 4x/year with committees that meet in between those times

Leadership Council

- Purpose and function is to decentralize and democratize organizational-wide decision-making, development priorities, and staff accountability.

- Currently 13 Leadership Council members with 4 seats that are unelected (Co-Directors, Assistant, and Operations Director), 8 seats that are elected from each program (2 from the Nursery team and 1 from Farm, Landscape, Education, Canvass, Media, and Maintenance) and 1 representative from Sogorea Te Land Trust.

- Meets every 3 weeks

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Peace Council

- A resource for staff members to turn to when experiencing conflict in the workplace with the support of third party facilitators and abolitionist strategies including transformative justice.

- Currently 7 members which includes 6 staff members who are nominated annually by co-workers, and 1 representative from Sogorea Te Land Trust.

- Meets every 3 weeks plus additional circles when needed

Equitable Pay Chart

- Outlines how pay is determined across the organization in which everyone enters year 1 at the same rate ($19/hour or $39,500 annually) with 3% annual increases

- Staff determined additional bump-ups in pay for single parents, caretakers with children under age of 5, people who are formerly-incarcerated, Leadership and Peace Council members, Directors, Board Officers, Co-Founders, and once people reach their 4th year of employment at PJ

- No person can make more than 2x the lowest paid full-time salaried employee

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PJ’s 2-acre Nursery in East Oakland

In 2016, Planting Justice raised $105,000 through a crowdsource campaign and received a $600,000 loan from a CDFI, Community Vision, with 4.75% interest over a 7-year period and a balloon payment at the end. This loan was to purchase the 2-acre property and to acquire a business called Rolling River Nursery, which has a globally-significant collection of 1,200 different varieties of fruit and nut trees. We also spent $200K in infrastructure on site: greenhouses, irrigation, benches for 30,000 certified organic plants, a yurt, and shipping containers for office and storage.

In 2017, Planting Justice decided to rematriate the land back to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization. However we need to pay off the entirety of the loan before officially putting the land into their trust, and we still owe ~$500,000 after 4 years of monthly payments, so we will likely refinance at the end of the 7 year period, unless a donor steps in, and will rematriate the entire property to STLT upon completion of the loan payback.

https://arcg.is/1DjXu10

Planting Justice’s 2 -acre nursery and headquarters in Sobrante Park, deep East Oakland (319 105th Ave), is home to over 1200 varieties of rare and heirloom tree crops, which are all propagated onsite. This is PJ’s most impactful project to date, with an enormous amount of daily activity. We are open to the public Monday-Saturday, visitors are highly encouraged. The site represents the largest investment in the Sobrante Park community in over 50 years. It is home to 18 full-time staff, with 15 of these staff members living within ½ mile from the site. All of the knowledge of how to run the nursery is held by and led by long-term residents, all of whom are black/indigenous/latinx. The site is also host to over 7,500 visitors/year, including 2,000 participants in Planting Justice’s Education Program, who participate in an intensive, hands-on curriculum with topics ranging from urban permaculture, food justice, plant propagation, plant medicine, nutrition, and culinary arts, all rooted in social justice and an abolitionist framework. The land is also the first rematriated land to Ohlone people, as a home to Sogorea Te Land Trust, the only women-led indigenous land trust in the U.S.

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PJ’s existing 2-acre nursery is the bottom highlighted property, the Neishi Brothers nursery is the top highlighted property. The Neishi property is 3-acres in size, with two existing homes. Planting Justice has begun a major cleanup of the property, which has been vacant for 10 years, which involves a major demolition and remediation project that includes abatement of lead, asbestos, and black mold. Once the site has been remediated, Planting Justice will buid the largest and most productive urban aquaponics farm in the country, with an expected annual output of 140,000 pounds of certified organic produce PLUS 100,000 nursery starts of annual veggies/herbs/flowers. The nursery starts will be available for sale onsite (SNAP enabled) and at PJ’s new retail nursery at the historic Adachi nursery location in El Sobrante. Produce will be sold onsite (SNAP enabled), via PJ’s brand new refrigerated mobile farmers market truck, and at the Good Table, where it will be sold through the cafe, and also turned into value-added products in the commercial kitchen at the Good Table. This project site is anticipated to create an additional 15 living wage jobs for formerly incarcerated people and historic residents who have systemic barriers to employment in Sobrante Park

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A 3-acre Aquaponics Cooperative Training Center

in the Sobrante Park neighborhood of East Oakland

In June 2020, the East Oakland Neighborhood Initiative successfully partnered with the City of Oakland to receive a $28 million grant from the CA Strategic Growth Council Transformative Climate Communities (TCC), which is a cap and trade program.

Planting Justice will receive $2.4 million of this grant to purchase the 3-acre property owned by the Neishi Family. This grant enabled us to purchase the property without adding any debt to Planting Justice.

Demolition and remediation is estimated to be at least $200k. Our aquaponics farm construction will cost $600k. Renovation of two homes for re-entry and emergency housing will be at least $400K. We successfully received $800k in funding from the Office of Community Services’ Community Economic Development program for renovation. We still need are still fundraising for this project

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Community Relationships and a Reparations Framework

Partnerships and direct support alongside other community-based groups and public institutions for outreach, education, and direct services, ie:

Sobrante Park Resident Action Council
Roots Community Health Center
East Oakland Collective
Black Cultural Zone
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
Oakland Climate Action Coalition
Sogorea Te Land Trust
Local schools
Sites of worship
Apartment complexes
Rehabilitation centers
Grocery cooperatives
County Public Health Department
County Health Care Services Agency
Kaiser Permanente

Land-based community reparations rooted in listening, learning, healing, and action

No amount of material resources or monetary compensation can ever be sufficient restitution for the ongoing pain and suffering inflicted on people by centuries of systemic racism and white supremacy.

Given that these injustices have not been repaired on a larger social or national scale, what is within our collective power? What can we commit to doing to support the repair of these harms that exist on behalf of white patriarchal supremacy, colonialism, and institutionalized racism in the United States?

Planting Justice is committed to investing resources towards the health and healing of Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, immigrant, refugee, disabled, gender non-conforming, and other communities impacted by systemic oppression.

This may take the form of ceremony and ritual;

support with housing; scholarships; grants; and

land rematriation.

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4-acre Mother Farm

10-year, $1/year Lease

In 2011, 10-acres in El Sobrante, CA was listed at $300,000 but at that time, the annual budget of Planting Justice was only $250,000.

Some Planting Justice members formed an LLC called Wild and Radish to take on $300,000 in debt from 12 private lenders at 0-4% interest.

Our 4 acre farm is located only 15 miles from downtown Oakland, on a total of 13 acres that are mixed-use agriculture and residential. The property is owned by a cooperative called Wild and Radish LLC which is dedicated to building long-term access to deeply affordable land that enables low-income people to live close to the land as part of a diverse and multi-generational ecovillage community. Back in 2011, the 10 acres that was listed for $300k had been sitting on the market for awhile because at that time no developer wanted to make an offer after the neighbors had formed an association called the Friends of Garrity Creek and filed an environmental lawsuit against the former developer, who had planned to build 42 homes, including plans to pave over the freshwater spring and creek on site. At that time, our non-profit annual budget was too small to take on debt so a group of us formed a separate entity called Wild and Radish LLC in order to take on the debt of purchasing the property without a bank loan (none of us qualified for a bank loan of this size). So then in 2013, Wild and Radish LLC offered a 10 year, $1/year renewable lease in order for Planting Justice to farm the land. It wasn’t until Planting Justice secured this lease that we were able to receive grants, some from private foundations, some from the USDA, and from our growing community of small and monthly donors, in order to cover the cost of 2-3 staff members salaries and around $125,000 in infrastructure such as deer fencing, installing irrigation, digging over a mile of swales, and planting thousands of perennial plants. Today the farm has over 1200 fruit trees and 1000 perennial fruiting shrubs (encompassing a total of nearly 1000 distinct, rare, heirloom varieties) in the ground, as a “Mother” collection for PJ’s globally significant plant collection. In addition to producing over 100,000 pounds of certified organic produce per year for the next 80+ years, the farm is also producing propagation material for these rare varieties, which is pruned from the farm and then sent over to the 2-acre nursery in East Oakland in order to propagate over 15,000 new baby trees each year.

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The Good Table @ Adachi

Shared Title to 1.3-acres, with a

7,000 ft² building in El Sobrante

We partnered with Mira Vista United Church of Christ (MVUCC) to purchase the Adachi Nursery property.

We’ve raised part of the $1 million needed for renovations, mostly through one anonymous donor, $30K through a crowdsource campaign, and a $19k donation from the Adachi family business. We’re beginning the process of permitting at this site.

The third critical juncture in our organizational history related to land acquisitions is the Adachi property, located less than a mile from our 4-acre farm in El Sobrante, CA. For this project, we create a joint venture LLC in partnership with a church. The church was able to provide $1.1 million to purchase the property, since they had sold their church building several years prior with the goal of creating pay-what-you-can cafe as their model of ministry. PJ has subsequently raised over $1 million to renovate the beautifully built 7,000 sq.ft. building, which will house the pay-what-you-can cafe (run by the Good Table United Church of Christ); a community center/arts space for educational programs, cultural events/live music, spiritual gatherings, and other community offerings such as self defense/yoga/meditation; a large retail nursery/farm store; a second commercial kitchen in addition to the cafe kitchen for producing value-added products from PJ’s 4-acre farm 1 mile away (and other local farmers); and additional retail space to support local farmers and craftsmakers to have a place to sell their goods.

It’s important to me to highlight the contributions and legacy of the Adachi family who ran their business for over 105 years. We continue to have the Adachi family visit and have guaranteed their use of the space for family reunions. Last year the Adachi family business made a fairly large contribution to our fundraising campaign, and we plan to install a museum-style exhibit on-site that keeps the important history of Japanese nurseries in the CA East Bay alive in the public’s consciousness.

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