Urban Creators

Birgitte’s book beautifully weaves together the elements of a visionary and how those elements are more and more interconnected with everything else the deeper you look. I grew up on the Upper East Side and stood in many revolving doors watching the stark diaspora of people from every different income level pass by, completely detached from one another as if traversing different dimensions. Through these experiences I have come to believe that the real task of a visionary is to find ways to bridge these gaps, to break down social barriers and enable everyone to understand how interconnected we all truly are, and how much more powerful we are together. This book shows how deeply connected we are on a biological, chemical, spiritual, and social level, and the stories within the narrative provide a small spotlight on some of us who have found ways to step outside of our comfort zones to create visions larger than than ourselves. 

 

 

We were born out of the social unrest of North Philly’s blighted landscapes and the rip tides that segregate Temple University from its surrounding communities. Despite coming from so many different backgrounds, our core leaders were unified by a vision to bridge this gap, and to bring food and social justice to our neighborhood at the grassroots level. 

 

In 2009, our original founders came together through a series of service-learning trips to New Orleans that included students from both Temple and North Philly schools. This odd assortment of agitated youth spent two weeks living, breathing, cooking, crying, laughing, growing, and working together, alongside residents of the Lower 9th Ward to convert vacant land into urban farms. We were inspired by the faith and resilience of these survivors, and by their gritty bottom-up approach to community building. We decided to take this model back home and apply what we had learned to Philadelphia. 

 

As individuals became a team, and our team grew into a family, we created the Urban Creators with the mission of pooling together a diverse network of change agents to address issues of blight, cyclical poverty, food insecurity, and inequality from the ground up.

 

We spent our first year organizing door-to-door in our local community to identify the issues and needs of our neighbors, and gauge their interest and ideas for change. From those conversations came the concept to transform a vacant lot into a farm in order to remediate blight, create food security, and give kids a safe space to spend their extracurricular time. In 2011, we gained access to a two-acre plot of land to begin laying the foundation for our vision. We called this land “Life Do Grow,” and spent the next two years clearing away the trash from this garbage dump and sowing the first seeds of our movement to remediate the polluted soils of injustice in North Philadelphia.

 

Today, we provide dozens of local families with access to fresh, affordable produce, and operate a produce and value-added distribution business to financially sustain our operation. We engage hundreds of students every year in hands-on training in our farms and gardens, empowering them with skills, resources, analysis, and networks to cultivate their own visions for social change and become leaders of urban innovation in their own communities.  We have been contracted to develop six gardens and three greenhouses in Philly and New York. And now, we are beginning to experiment with replicating our model in other cities across the nation. 

 

As Milllenials, we spend our days in urban communities teaching youth about sustainability, healthy living, and entrepreneurship, and are growing a generation of young community organizers, farmers, storytellers, and creators from the ground up.

Alex Epstein, Outreach & Resource Coordinator

aka "The Social Justice Hustler"

 

Alex Epstein is the social justice hustler and visionary that has made it possible for thousands of middle class white kids to integrate with low income communities of color in New York, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, and build diversified movements for justice. Born on the border between New York's Upper East Side and East Harlem, Alex grew up witnessing the pervasive nature and adaptability of racism and segregation in America. After participating in a service-learning trip to New Orleans in 2006 and working with community organizers in the Lower Ninth Ward, Alex became determined to build bridges between segregated communities and fight systemic inequalities of all kinds. In 2008, he and many of his friends co-founded the New York 2 New Orleans coalition in order to bring New York City high school students to New Orleans to support the initiatives of local organizers, and return home ready to address racism in their own city. 

 

In 2009, he moved to North Philadelphia to attend Temple University, but was warned never to leave the campus because the surrounding neighborhoods were “too dirty and dangerous.” Alex found this disconnect extremely disturbing and ventured out into the community to discover the truth for himself. Along the way, he met Denzel, Devon, Jeaninne at a poetry show, and so many incredible local people who, despite coming from drastically different backgrounds, shared many values and visions for social change. Together this group decided to co-found the Philadelphia Urban Creators. 

 

Devon Bailey, Site & Development Manager

aka "The Mad Scientist"

 

Devon is the muscle, the engine, and the foundation of our Urban Creator clan. A life -long resident of North Philly, he is a master carpenter who can do “everything under the sun except for electric," and has integrated his skills and networks within the community into Urban Creators' evolving operations. His grandfather, Ike, owned an auto body shop on the corner of 11th & Dakota where Dev spent much of his childhood learning the “old fashioned ways of fixing and building things” under Ike’s wing. 

 

On a brisk February evening in 2011, Devon encountered two odd characters dropping what seemed to be trash on the lot across the street from his home. He had seen these two (Alex & Jeaninne) there once or twice before, and had taken some of the lumber that they left behind to add into Ike’s wood burning stove to heat the shop. One day, he decided to confront the two, questioning whether they were “dumping in his neighborhood.” The two complaind that they were just dropping off supplies and scrap wood to “build a farm in the hood,” but that some guy had been stealing all their stuff. Devon admitted that he was the one who had been taking their supplies, and warned them to be aware of how they carry themselves in his community. 

 

For the next several months, Devon and his grandfather sat outside the building watching as this weird group of kids started cleaning up the lot piece by piece, silently mocking them, confident that they would eventually run out of energy and quit their project like “every other non profit or city program had done that comes in and out of the neighborhood tryin’ to change the way things are.” One day, he saw the group attempting to build a raised bed, but had no idea how to use their power drill. Devon decided to lend a hand, and showed them how to build the bed the right way. 

 

From then on, Devon continued to pitch in, gradually becoming more and more involved with the group, its mission, and its daily operations. Today, Devon is our Site & Development Manager. He is the mad scientist behind all of our designs, our guardian in the “hood.” When Devon first encountered the group, he was suffering from the loss of his wife, and was deeply embedded in the street culture and selling drugs as a way of coping and surviving. “PUC saved me,” he sais. “I had asked God to send me a new group of friends, and he gave me more than I ever asked for. He gave me a new family. And this family gave me a new purpose.” 

 

Today, Ike is sadly no longer with us, but Devon has inherited his shop which now serves as his home and the Urban Creators office/workshop, and on just about any morning at 8am you can catch Devon sitting out front of the shop right where his grandfather used to sit, proudly proclaiming “I'm an Urban Farmer. This property has been in my family for 40 years, and I plan to keep it for at least another 40 until I pass this all down to my son. I’ve seen this thing turn from absolutely nothing into what it is now. Every community should have one of these.”