Food insecurity is a symptom, not a cause. First and foremost, you must understand that food insecurity is a symptom of a problem, but it is not the actual problem. Poverty is the real culprit and most of the poverty in our inner cities was created by a system that separated African Americans from the tools humans use to build lives with, and that has yet to be corrected. If we want to solve food insecurity, it can’t solved by addressing it independently.
In many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. This in turn is creating a host of health and social problems. What exactly is a food desert? What causes a food desert? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert? How can this problem be solved? Who are the leaders helping to address this crisis?
In this interview series, called “Food Deserts: How We Are Helping To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options” we are talking to business leaders and non-profit leaders who can share the initiatives they are leading to address and solve the problem of food deserts.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Daron Babcock, Founder and CEO of Bonton Farms.
Daron Babcock is a “social entrepreneur” and the Founder and CEO of Bonton Farms, one of the largest urban farms in the United States, nestled in a once-forgotten neighborhood in South Dallas. A perpetual visionary and re-inventor of what’s possible, Daron left a successful corporate career and moved from his home in North Dallas to serve inner-city residents of Bonton with his wife, Theda. Daron has been invited to speak all over the world, most notably, TEDx Jacksonville, Philanthropy Southwest; Nairobi, Kenya; Bucharest, Romania; Itu, Brazil; Texas Public Policy Foundation; Texas State Capitol; Dallas City Hall; and countless churches, civic organizations, conferences, and corporate gatherings. In his words, “Our goal is not to simply grow food because we’re in a food desert but to address WHY Bonton is a food desert. We’re not here to fix broken people but to be the hands and feet to fix broken systems.”
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I am not sure that I chose this as much as it chose me. On second thought, I think it was mutual. Kind of like soulmates. Either way, I can’t imagine giving so much of my life to anything else. It all started when a friend of mine invited me to Bonton, a neighborhood I had never heard of before, to meet with a few men from this community who were returning home from prison and trying not to go back.
Every Saturday when we’d visit them, they’d say the same thing: “No one is giving us a chance to work, and if we can’t work, we’ll wind up dead or back in prison.” I always try to explain the impact that had on me, but it’s difficult for me to convey. I usually just say, “Sometimes you see something you can’t unsee.” For me, I couldn’t go back and live as if I’d never met them. I thought of ways to help from afar; but to no avail, I relented and asked for permission to move into their community so I could be close enough to learn and possibly help.
Moving into the community changed me in profound ways. Without that physical proximity, I would have missed many vital learning opportunities. Once I was there, we began trying to help the men build resumes and gain work experience by cleaning up our community. Working alongside them, I learned that many were not healthy enough to work. I had never been around so many sick people in my life. I started asking, “Why? Why are so many here so sick?”
Soon enough, I was then introduced to the term “food desert,” which was completely foreign to me. It was difficult to grasp how communities existing within the richest country in the history of the world wouldn’t have access to food. Personally, I didn’t have any trouble getting food, even though I was technically living in a food desert. Sure, it had become a bit less convenient to drive 3.5 miles to North Dallas to pick up groceries, but it didn’t have a noticeable impact on my life. My friends and neighbors began teaching me that these issues are a bit more complicated. I learned that poverty greatly impacts mobility. I learned that even if you’re able to spend hours each week on public buses to get to a grocery store, you still have to lug as much as you can carry from the grocery store to the bus stop and from bus stop to your home.
I also started to investigate why my new community was so poor in the first place. This is when I found myself confronted with an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about all that has happened since Emancipation Proclamation.
The deeper I went, the more convicted I was to spend my life working alongside my neighbors to develop real and lasting solutions. I found my calling in life, and I suppose, my career.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I could write several novels of incredibly interesting stories that have happened since I began working in Bonton. If I had to mention only one, I guess I would start with one that is closely related to the food desert issue.
After my neighbors educated me about food deserts, they took me on a bus ride to visit the grocery store, as most of them had to do. It opened my eyes to the challenges and dangers associated with that. Afterward, I invited some of my neighbors over for a cookout where I began asking more questions about the food insecurity they’ve experienced and its impact on their lives. Over a meal, we agreed that we were no longer okay with doing nothing and decided to plant a garden on the vacant lot next to my house.
It was equal parts hard work and fun building that garden with my new neighbors. We were all so excited to see what it would produce. When we finally got some vegetables to grow, we divided them up and everyone got to take their portion home. One of my friends, Gerry, was walking by the beer and wine store on his way home, and a guy asked what he had in his bag. Gerry replied, “Vegetables from our garden.” The guy asked to see, so Gerry opened the bag. The man offered Gerry three dollars for it, so they made a deal. As they made their exchange, a code enforcement officer walked across the street and wrote a ticket. At that time, selling vegetables from a garden classified you as a “market garden,” which was against city ordinance. While it was okay to have a community garden, those vegetables could only be given away.
I was infuriated. I went to City Hall to pick a fight, but to my surprise, I was met by people who also disagreed with the ordinance and wanted to help. Those difficult conversations with both my neighbors and the City not only led to the ordinance being lifted but inspired the City to help us acquire the city block that is now the Bonton Farms headquarters.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
I believe the first major tipping point was when the City of Dallas agreed to let us “test out” the urban farm concept by providing the land for us to get started. Since that time, there have been many more important milestones that I would consider “tipping points.” Each of those moments have opened new doors to success that we didn’t think possible before.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Without question. There were six men that allowed me into their community and called me friend. Those six men remain friends and mentors and continue to patiently teach me, protect me, and work alongside me.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Operating with love, courage, and excellence have been at the core of both my personal success and the success of our organization. Not so coincidentally, these are also our core values at Bonton Farms.
Love is the North Star that ensures our motives are pure. We call it love, but others may call it “empathy.” Either way, none of this is possible without the love we have for one another and for our community. I’ve also found that truly loving others requires building trust and being present. Had I not left my career, sold my home, and moved to Bonton, I’m not sure I could have truly accomplished those acts of being present and building trust.
Courage is defined as mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty. In my life, I’ve not experienced much that is truly good that isn’t the result of persevering or overcoming difficulty, danger, and fear. Everything we’re doing involves taking on these power structures, many of which persist only because nobody has had the courage to challenge them. There’s no shortage of reasons to quit and to find yourself stuck in the mindset that if something hasn’t changed yet, it must be too difficult to change. The truth is, you can do what others tell you is impossible, but not without unwavering courage.
Excellence, or the passion to be “all in,” sets Bonton Farms apart. I firmly believe that things done in mediocrity don’t catch fire. If you want to change the world, you must be committed to doing all things with excellence.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ― Rob Siltanen
My whole life has been about doing things I was told I couldn’t. Coming out of high school, I had no college scholarship offers. I wasn’t a straight-A student, nor was I the best athlete. I wasn’t the one that everyone was after. I learned pretty early that I was going to have to seek out my own opportunities for success. Once my classmates all went off to college or left town, I set my mind on entering this national wrestling tournament in Iowa. To everyone’s surprise, I ended up competing so well that the wrestling coach from the University of Oklahoma noticed and insisted on driving me back to Texas to meet my parents. Only 2% of all high school athletes make it to Division One schools, and I found myself in that 2% — not because I was a great athlete but because I refused to accept anything else and I was very intentional about putting myself in the right situations.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about Food Deserts. I know this is intuitive to you, but it will be helpful to expressly articulate this for our readers. Can you please tell us what exactly a food desert is? Does it mean there are places in the US where you can’t buy food?
Simply put, “food desert” is a term created by the USDA to highlight neighborhoods that lack access to food. The problem is that this term is very misleading. While it’s helpful for the purpose of identifying food insecure communities, it tends to oversimplify the problem to one of mere logistics or distribution. Sure, you can stick a grocery store in a low-income neighborhood and voila, you no longer have a food desert — but you’ve missed the whole point. A food desert is merely a symptom. In fact, it’s a huge, waving red flag of deeper systemic issues. I will argue until I’m blue in the face that the real problem is poverty, which is largely a byproduct of racist ideology baked into our infrastructure during our country’s formation. While I don’t personally believe that the attitude of racism is pervasive today, it is undeniable that the long-lasting effects of our past continue to present insurmountable barriers for all kinds of people, but predominantly African Americans. That must be challenged or food insecurity will remain a problem no matter what kind of food access you provide.
Can you help explain a few of the social consequences that arise from food deserts? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert?
I would challenge that question and ask, “What are the social consequences of building communities where people don’t have access to essential resources, one of which is food?” We often use this analogy that people are like plants. You can water a plant all day long, but if it doesn’t have access to sunlight or the proper nutrients, you’re just wasting water. People are no different.
You’d be shocked to learn how many communities lack fundamental resources that most of us completely take for granted, like medical care, adequate education for our kids, banks, safe housing, or a healthy job market to name a few. Our neighborhood exists within Dallas County right below I-30. About 45% of the population lives south of I-30 and 55% lives north, but about 95% of the jobs are north and only 5% are south. This puts people in quite a bind. If you don’t have a job, you probably can’t afford a car. If you can’t afford a car, it becomes very challenging to gain employment. If you don’t have a car, income or insurance, you’re certainly not going to be getting routine medical care. You see where I’m going with this.
In communities that lack access to essential resources, you’ll see things like perennially low high school graduation rates, higher crime rates, high levels of incarceration, high teen-birth rates, high infant mortality, children that are raised without a nuclear family, and astronomically higher rates of diet-related diseases like diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, and childhood obesity.
I say all the time that there are around two million people incarcerated in our country today and about 60% of them have the common denominator of being illiterate. So where do illiterate people come from? Well, the vast majority come from places like Bonton. If you live in a community where you have all these things working against you and your school is subpar, you start to believe that you’ll never compete with graduates from the suburbs anyway, so why even finish?
So that’s why isolating the “food desert” concept is a dangerous topic because you risk missing all these other points.
Where did this crisis come from? Can you briefly explain to our readers what brought us to this place?
At the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, you suddenly had an influx of African American people and families searching for a place to live. Of course, they weren’t allowed to live where everyone else was living, so they had to form freedman’s towns. As they attempted to integrate and access resources, whether it be riding a bus, eating at a restaurant, or trying to get a job, they were beaten, killed, and raped. By the early 1950s, there was federal funding for public housing. In Dallas, we started noticing that black people were “spilling over” into white neighborhoods due to inadequate housing options, so we used that federal funding to build public housing in freedman’s communities, like Bonton, to ensure our ability to keep those people separated. Then you had redlining, where banks wouldn’t fund businesses down here, so you could forget about bringing in economy or jobs. It’s a domino effect.
When you compare outcomes of communities that have historically been deprived of resources to “healthy” communities with health care, grocery stores, good schools, and adequate housing, it’s obvious to see how we got here and where we will end up if we continue to allow systems of deprivation to persist.
Can you describe to our readers how your work is making an impact to address this crisis? Can you share some of the initiatives you are leading to help correct this issue?
We believe in taking a holistic approach. We started by growing food in our community because everyone was sick and didn’t feel empowered to determine their health outcomes. But the truth is that food is only a part of the equation. We base our wholistic approach on what we consider to be the “seven human essentials,” which are:
- Economic Development
Initiatives aimed at job preparedness, job creation and job placement
- Health & Wellness
Initiatives addressing food security, mental health, physical health and access to health care services
- Transportation
Initiatives addressing the impact poverty has on mobility
- Housing
Initiatives to provide safe, dignified and affordable housing that aligns with available wages
- Community
Intentional community-building initiatives to create a place where people are known and belong
- Education
Initiatives geared toward early childhood education to adult education to fill in gaps that may exist
- Access to Fair Credit
Initiatives to provide financial tools that empower upward socioeconomic mobility
Can you share something about your work that makes you most proud? Is there a particular story or incident that you found most uplifting?
The thing that makes me most proud is to see the people everyone else had given up on — people that others might see as the outcasts, the thugs, the degenerates, the criminals, the prostitutes, the addicts — prove to the world that when given the right tools, they are anything but those labels. These are stories I have the privilege to witness every day. Check out this story about our friend Eddie: https://vimeo.com/521573121
In your opinion, what should other business and civic leaders do to further address these problems? Can you please share your “5 Things That Need to Be Done to Address the Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
- Food insecurity is a symptom, not a cause.
First and foremost, you must understand that food insecurity is a symptom of a problem, but it is not the actual problem. Poverty is the real culprit and most of the poverty in our inner cities was created by a system that separated African Americans from the tools humans use to build lives with, and that has yet to be corrected. If we want to solve food insecurity, it can’t solved by addressing it independently.
2. Ask the deeper questions.
Business leaders are taught to identify one problem and focus on solving it. That theory doesn’t apply here. The entire system of poverty must be considered.
3. Establish trust within your community.
A key component of our success was knowing when to be a passenger and let our community navigate us. Always wait to be invited in.
4. Leverage community influencers.
Build a network of leaders and influencers that are willing to come alongside you
5. Refuse to accept the status quo.
These problems are man-made, and if we wrote the rules, we CAN unwrite them. When the laws stand in your way, rewrite the laws.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food deserts? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
There are organizations like Restore OKC that have emulated our work in Bonton. Purpose Built Communities in Atlanta has made great progress and is someone we learn from as well.
If you had the power to influence legislation, are there laws that you would like to see introduced that might help you in your work?
As a matter of fact, on July 9, 2021 we were at the Texas State Capitol passing the Bonton Farms Bill into law, making it the Bonton Farms Act. This legislation addresses some of the inequities in the criminal justice system, but there also needs to be legislation passed regarding equality in schools. We also need legislation pertaining to predatory lending along with provision of tools for access to fair credit and access to health care. There are still even more problematic, criminal justice issues that need to be addressed.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I want to see more people focused on tackling poverty rather than focusing on the symptoms. We’ve created a system where about 14.4% of our children live in poverty. We have the power to reverse this by simply building a better system. If you’re in banking and you want to contribute, help determine ways to bring appropriate financial institutions into these communities. If you’re in real estate development, use your skills to help community leaders navigate housing development.
We have tens of thousands of non-profits here in North Texas that consume billions of philanthropic dollars each year. Those organizations are largely dealing with things like mental health issues, human trafficking, homelessness, and educational deficits — and the vast majority are serving people who will never stop needing that support because they’re only having a symptom treated.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Malcom Gladwell. He has a passion for this work, and I think he’s one of the most genius, outside-the-box thinkers we have. He’s written books that have profoundly impacted our methodology, like Tipping Point, which proposes that if you can influence early adopters to the degree that their lives change so radically that they become the example that others want to follow, you can actually “tip” a culture. I’ve had the courage to stay on this path because of Malcom Gladwell’s books.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Bontonfarms.org
Facebook.com/bontonfarms
Instagram.com/bontonfarms
Please check out our work online, but I also highly encourage people to come down to our South Dallas farm and experience this beautiful place with their own eyes, ears and hearts.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Thank you for your time.