Cicero Community Farm
Environmental Justice is a thread for all human rights.
About Us:
Cicero has a longstanding relationship with industry & manufacturing, once having homed over 115 factories. Still very industrialized, Cicero is in proximity to: a Waste Management facility, Water Reclamation of Greater Chicago (Stickney), Citgo plant (Stickney), Amazon warehouse, along with 15+ steel, food packaging, and manufacturing operations. Maintaining this relationship with industry without creating more green spaces has led to the decline of Cicero's ecology and poor access to nutrient rich produce/food options for its residents.
Our leadership team is made up of community members from Cicero. We move with the well-being of Cicero’s ecology and the Cicero community at the forefront of this work.
All food, workshops, events, provided to the community will be donation based/pay what you can. No one will be turned away from a lack of funds.
-
Our Radical Standards and Position on Human Rights
Human Rights are not conditional nor should they be a compromise/middle ground for basic human rights. We hope to gain partners willing to challenge the status quo within and outside of the organization.
Our Approach
Our approach is rooted in sustainability and recognizes the ways in which Indigenous communities have sustained the land for thousands of years rather than current western imperialist land practices, which create barren and unusable environmental conditions for years.
Cicero Community Farm acknowledges current barriers and oppression that limits the resistance of the community, evidenced by a lack of community participation in Town proceedings and structural governance. We want to encourage participation in a multi-generational community coalition, where community members will build collective civic processes for environmental justice. As we do this, we will collectively learn how to care for and cultivate the land in ways that align with our cultural lineages. Cicero Community Farm exists in Cicero to emphasize and commit to environmental stewardship, autonomous connected communities, and food security.
-
Cicero Community Farm is a community led group taking accountability for remediating the land, providing the offerings of the land to all community residents and building a multi-generational coalition fighting for environmental justice to halt the destruction of our air, water, and soil.
Urban Agriculture and Environmental justice are not mutually exclusive- they are interwoven and they provide a framework for understanding that mass production, via capitalism, comes at the expense of BIPOC communities and the environment. To defend the land and provide free food is to address the ways in which industries are extracting resources, polluting our community, and working us beyond our limit.
We consider the environment to also encompass our social and physical environment where we fight to be involved in the democratic civic process that implements eco-rights as well as providing agricultural teachings and a decolonial praxis to land care.
-
To join the process of accountability for our local environment in Cicero meaning we remediate, care for, and cultivate the land previous to what it was before and ongoing colonization. Caring for and protecting our environment includes working with the community to hold officials and institutions accountable for neglect and harm. We seek partnerships with organizations and collectives who aim to disrupt current systems who have historically marginalized people from community control of their own local institutions.
