With Oxfam's Help, a Taos Project Helps Nurture Healthy Food Systems

Posted: 13 September 2007

by Coco McCabe

Through mentoring, a New Mexico program is spreading its brand of community development across the country. Shared interests in food and social justice are at the heart of its mission.

They describe themselves as family. And for 20 years they have been sharing the same vision. That’s how long Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand—a pair of Native American women from opposite sides of the country—have been working to support the food, land, and cultures of the people of northern New Mexico.

They are the founders of the Taos County Economic Development Corporation, or TCEDC, which is now celebrating its 20th birthday. In the course of those two decades, the organization built and continues to operate a 24,000 square foot business park complete with a fully equipped commercial food processing center. TCEDC runs a community garden and greenhouse. It offers educational programs on opportunities in the food sector. It hosts forums on food and agriculture. And though it’s now closed, the small-business incubator TCEDC launched helped 80 local businesses get a start.

“We are like a family,” said Bad Hand. “Family is the foundation for positive change with all its members working together toward a shared vision. It includes our staff, our board, our community, our funders—anyone we work with. We include them in the kinship model.”

TCEDC’s objective has been to help rural communities around Taos hold onto the land and the lifestyle that supported people for generations—until tourism, urbanization, and the scramble to make ends meet in a rapidly changing world began to undermine the foundation of that simpler way of life. In many ways, TCEDC serves as a bridge between Native Americans, Hispanics and Anglos in the region, uniting people based on their shared interests in food and social justice, which are at the heart of TCEDC’s mission.

And now, with the help of Oxfam America, Martinson and Bad Hand are sharing their model of community development among like-minded folks across the US through a mentorship program. Started three years ago, the program today includes eight different groups—all of which have come to TCEDC for inspiration, technical support, and occasionally direct financial help to give shape to their own dreams for community-building.

“Whatever you decide to do, we’ll try to help,” said Bad Hand. “We don’t know all the answers, but we’ve been around the block.”

Finding Answers

For some people in Taos County, the answers were right at their feet, in the ground from which harvests sprout. One of TCEDC’s early projects was a demonstration garden designed to show local people that they could feed their families healthy food and process the surplus produce into products they could sell to increase their household income.

From that initiative, TCEDC’s highly popular Food Sector Opportunity Program was born. A week-long course, it exposes participants to all phases of food production from the development of recipes and an understanding of food safety issues to nutrition analysis and good accounting practices.

“It brought microbiology to marketing,” said Bad Hand.

TCEDC’s food processing center is now helping to support more than 51 businesses that use the facilities for everything from production to packaging and labeling. Their products range from organic flour and scone mixes to salsas and chutneys as well as granola bars and candies. Additionally, the community-owned facility provides a venue for health and nutrition activities involving children and elders.

“It’s all about bringing the best of the past into the future,” said Martinson.

More recently, TCEDC has launched a new initiative to build a mobile livestock slaughtering unit to help underserved Hispanic, Native American, and women ranchers and give them opportunities to increase their incomes, while maintaining their quality of life and culture.

“We operate with a circle model and with shared leadership and a whole-family way of running a half-million-dollar organization,” said Martinson. “That’s quite a contradiction to the paradigm of a hierarchy and bosses.” Among the communities TCEDC works in, the habits of respect, trust, and sharing are still strong, she added, and so the organization’s business approach is familiar and comfortable.

That approach, coupled with the determined, methodical steps TCEDC has taken over the past 20 years—and the results it has produced—has attracted the interest of other groups that would like to make the same kind of progress in their own communities. As often as they could, Martinson and Bad Hand traveled to share their knowledge, but it wasn’t until Oxfam America’s offer to help formalize the sharing that the mentorship program was born.

Source of Inspiration

“They have really been an excellent source of inspiration for us and also of very practical advice,” said Vicky Karhu, the executive director of the Muscogee Creek Food Sovereignty Initiative in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. The initiative, one of the eight in the mentorship program, was founded in 2006 to help reconnect the Muscogee Creek people with their traditional foods and to encourage the consumption of fresh, local produce.

Kahru has tapped TCEDC for advice on how to work with a board of directors and where to go for project funding.

“I’ve called out there and asked questions every time I hit a hard spot,” said Kahru. “I honor their experience.”

For Shirley Sherrod, it’s TCEDC’s hands-on help that has allowed her organization to realize its dream. Sherrod is helping the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative open a commercial kitchen in a converted school in Newton, Georgia. Bread-makers, candy-makers, and caterers are already lining up to use the new kitchen, which was set to open in late summer.

“Being able to go out (to TCEDC) and spend some time in training, and being able to call them throughout this process has been invaluable,” said Sherrod.

“Just seeing their kitchen in New Mexico—it’s not just a concept anymore. It’s very motivating,” added Sarah Bobrow-Williams, who is the asset director for the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative.

For Luis Salas, one of the founders of the Bad River Gitiganing Restoration Project in Odanah, Wisconsin, it is the warmth and determination Martinson and Bad Hand bring to their work that serve as a model for his work. He is the cofounder of a grassroots community gardening project that includes about 100 families.

What started as an after-school project to keep kids engaged in healthy activities has blossomed into a program that produces about 5,000 vegetable plants each year to give away to community members. An estimated 70 grow boxes—raised beds for growing plants—now dot Odanah. And a three-acre community garden stretches across a flood plain very near the remains of a series of ancient garden beds.

“There’s blood memory here in gardening,” said Salas. The problem was many of the Ojibway people he works with had forgotten what they once knew, and a reliance on unhealthy foods had taken their toll: many people in Odanah have diabetes.

To help people rediscover the natural foods they once depended on, Salas and his sister-in-law, Becky Lemieux, started the gardening project.

“Food is medicine,” said Salas. “That became the mantra.”

And a visit to TCEDC’s facilities in Taos inspired them even further.

“When we saw what they had developed, we said this is what we want,” said Salas. “”We need to be able not only to grow food, we need to be able to help people process it , to preserve it, whether it’s for sale or for home consumption. We need a kitchen.”

Of course, a commercial kitchen may be a long way off for Salas’ program, but in the meantime, the connections he has made with TCEDC and other groups involved with similar work serve as an incubator for ideas.

“There is great potential in expanding community-based food systems in ways that respect culture and that create real economic benefit,” said Laura Inouye, senior program officer with Oxfam’s domestic program. “The Mentorship Program provides struggling grassroots groups with assistance tailored to meet their needs over an extended period; this kind of support from experienced and enthusiastic trainers can help them move to the next level in ways that workshops and conferences can’t.”