Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony Damico.
Tony, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I moved to Long Beach for graduate school thirteen years ago. While studying public communication and social change, looking at the advocacy of revolutionary hip-hop artists in Los Angeles, the plight of South Central Farms got my attention. I hadn’t had an active interest in urban agriculture until I saw how much it can mean for a community that has rich cultural heritage, folks who have been forced by the modern economy to disconnect from real food, those who were working to re-forge that connection and take control of their health.
From there, my interest in food sovereignty grew. I hosted monthly salon-style events that incorporated performance arts, visual arts, hip-hop, and discourse to prop up themes that were under-represented in the mainstream. One event explored the concept of gift culture and the potential for creating sharing networks that were less reliant on the cash economy, which was going through a recession at the time. I worked with a group of residents to create the Long Beach Time Exchange – our first local time bank and amassed nearly 500 members in three years.
During this time, I was renting a room in a house that granted me the opportunity to build a permaculture-oriented shared garden space, learning about native plants and vegetable gardening. We hosted an event exploring ways to enhance the local food system, with dozens of local food leaders speaking and coming together in a food forest near Downtown Long Beach. I’d also been working on the Building Healthy Communities initiative via my work with the Time Exchange. We realized quickly that a hub for local food action and entrepreneurship would help the initiative gain focus in areas of food justice, as well as craft a unified voice for local food efforts.
So, back in 2014, Ryan Smolar and I formed Long Beach Fresh to do just that. Now, we’re a five years old non-profit with a strong advisory committee of 25 residents representing every council district in the city, and we’re poised to take the food equity movement to the next level in Long Beach.
From this event came the concept of Long Beach Fresh.
Has it been a smooth road?
Food is a very personal subject. While it’s not too controversial to say that everyone deserves good food, it can be difficult to bring different businesses, organizations, and community members together around a shared agenda, especially when folks have differing beliefs about what kind of food system we should be supporting. Looking at influencing the policies of large institutions like the school district, these considerations often come to ahead. Should school food be organic whenever possible, or is simply eating more fruits and vegetables the most important goal for food insecure communities? Should we value cultural foods as much as we value plant-based diets? Moreover, opening up about one’s experience with hunger and nutrition can be difficult and trigger many emotions. What we’ve attempted to do with Long Beach Fresh is to collectively build a matrix of values that show the kind of food system we want to see – one that values culture, nutrition, the environment, animal welfare, and the workforce. We’ve taken these values into consideration when crafting our policy agenda, creating a local food map, and convening local food leaders in working groups and our annual Foodways Summit.
We’d love to hear more about your organization.
We’re a community-based organization that’s fiscally sponsored by the non-profit agency, Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs. We’re supported by The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative, one that’s wrapping up in the next year or two, as well as the Kaiser Healzone which wrapped up earlier this year. These initiatives have enabled us to create more food freedom in Long Beach, alongside a powerful, diverse, and multifaceted movement of local food leaders.
We help eaters, feeders, and seeders connect and share resources throughout annual Foodways Summit – a week of events across the city exploring the ways communities are innovating the food system, from school food and community learning to cultural food, urban farms and community gardens.
Long Beach Fresh also hosts an annual Blue Ribbon Urban Agriculture contest that sees over 100 entries of local produce grown in community gardens, front and back yards, and urban farms – it’s always a staggering display of bounty, as so many unique things grow in our climate. We host monthly crop swaps that see literally tons of homegrown produce shared across diverse neighborhoods, and just released a printed guide the folks can use to create their own.
We are a trustee for the City’s Kiva Loan program – one of about a dozen cities in the United States that offers crowd-sourced micro-financing to underrepresented entrepreneurs and have seen businesses like Gusto Bread, Colossus Bread, and Long Beach Farms Inc grow immensely due to these successful campaigns.
Lastly, but most importantly we pair programs like these with policy education and advocacy to ensure that barriers to food freedom are lifted – we helped institute the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones, helped make the Cottage Foods Act the most successful in the state, and are working to educate decision makers about the benefits of a city-wide Good Food Purchasing Policy, as well as the Micro-Enterprise Home Kitchens Act.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I’d recommend building a diverse team first, especially if creating a non-profit or community-based organization. If starting a business, I’d recommend starting small (i.e. – pop-ups, shared space) and building a strong following to build off of.
Contact Info:
- Website: lbfresh.org
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: instagram.com/longbeachfresh
- Facebook: facebook.com/longbeachfresh
- Twitter: twitter.com/longbeachfresh
Image Credit:
Brian Feinzimer for Long Beach Fresh, Beverly Laxa for Long Beach Fresh
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