The LA Community Action Network (LA Can) operates a rooftop farm in Skid Row that cultivates over 27 crops using traditional and hydroponic methods, transforming urban agriculture into a platform for activism and community empowerment. The farm’s accessible design—featuring elevated beds and hydroponic towers—ensures inclusivity, while culturally significant plants like collard greens and lemongrass foster connection and nostalgia. Each harvest ties to political education and policy advocacy, demonstrating how food intersects with systemic change. Urban agriculture plays a vital role in addressing food insecurity and economic disparities, particularly in underserved communities. LA Can’s model bridges the gap between sustainable farming and social justice, providing residents with skills, leadership opportunities, and a voice in policy decisions. The farm’s success highlights the power of intentional design and community-driven initiatives to create lasting impact. This post explores the farm’s layout, its role in political activism, and the educational benefits of growing culturally relevant crops. We’ll examine how accessible gardening techniques empower residents and why integrating activism into agriculture can drive systemic change. Readers will gain practical insights into designing inclusive urban farms and leveraging food production as a tool for advocacy. By adopting these strategies, urban farmers and activists can create spaces that nourish both bodies and communities
By Matthew Enloe and Todd Cunningham | Cerca Cultivation
TL;DR – Quick Summary
Discover how a rooftop farm in Skid Row is transforming lives and communities through urban agriculture and activism.
Diverse Crop Production: The LA Community Action Network’s rooftop farm grows over 27 different crops, including herbs, vegetables, and fruits, using both traditional and hydroponic methods.
Accessible Garden Design: The farm’s layout is intentionally designed to be accessible, featuring elevated beds and hydroponic towers, allowing individuals with physical challenges to participate in gardening.
Cultural Plant Growing: Residents engage in growing culturally significant plants like collard greens, lemongrass, and oregano, which not only provide food but also evoke nostalgia and community connection.
Food As Activism: The farm serves as a platform for political education and activism, with each harvest tied to organizing efforts and policy advocacy, highlighting the intersection of food and politics.
Medicinal Plant Education: Educational moments, such as learning about the medicinal properties of plants like lambs ear, empower residents with knowledge and practical skills for health and wellness.
Pro tip: Incorporate culturally relevant and fast-growing crops in your urban garden to engage and empower your community, fostering both immediate and long-term benefits.
Introduction to LA Can and Its Mission in Skid Row
Matthew: All right, Todd Cunningham, welcome to Cultivator Connections. Thanks for being on the show. Todd Cunningham: Thank you, Matthew. I’m really happy to be here. Thank you. Matthew Enloe: yeah, it’s such a pleasure. So this is our first guest. You’re our first guest. You have the honor of being the first guest. And what that means is we might be doing some technical difficulties, working some things out. I’m trying to figure out what the format of Cultivator Connections is. to help meet the mission of the podcast, which is bringing together growers of all levels to learn from people cultivating food and community. So that’s you. I want to give you the chance to introduce yourself and what you do, the organization that you work with, and how that relates to growing food and community. So go ahead. Todd Cunningham: Okay, well, thank you so much. Looking forward to this conversation. So I am, my name is Todd Cunningham and I’m the food and wellness organizer here at LA Can, Los Angeles Community Action Network. We are based in Skid Row, a community led human rights organization that whose mission is basically to help people dealing with poverty, create and discover opportunities while serving as a vehicle to ensure that we have voice, power and opinion in the decisions that directly affect us. The key things in there about creating and discovering opportunities and having voice power and opinion. These are things which when you live in a disadvantaged community like Skid Row, often you’d find that there are not a lot of services for you. And so for us, and it’s like we are deeply dedicated to that and making sure that we are helping all, we’re all helping each other together.
And as we talk about it today, our rooftop farm and what we’re doing here in our food and wellness group. Matthew Enloe:
Todd: is all directed squarely at doing that. Matthew Enloe: Yeah, and that mission of LA Can resonates with me so much. Todd and I have known each other for years now, and we’ve had the really awesome privilege of working together on a professional capacity up on the rooftop. So, Serika comes once a week and helps facilitate some of the programming, which I want to get into a little bit later on, about what that programming looks like. how that makes an impact. But before we get into that, let’s just start by talking about the garden space itself. So can you paint us a picture of what the garden looks like? Todd Cunningham: Sure, gladly. Our rooftop farm is a rooftop farm, It’s a farm with several gardens on it. It is actually on the second floor of our building. And it’s almost a world of peace unto itself. It’s where we grow produce and herbs and healing plants. But more importantly, what we’re cultivating is leadership. We’re cultivating relationships and building power. Matthew Enloe: We use the farm to train residents in how to grow urban growing and herbal care, but also in organizing, speaking to legislators and actually shaping policy. And those things are not always things are thought of as being put together, but every harvest that we have there is tied to activism because food is politics. It’s quite beautiful up there. Matthew Enloe: Mm hmm. Yeah, that is that’s the if we could take like one awesome sound bite, the food is politics. That is true. We, you know, food is a human. Both of us believe that food is a human right. And.
Matthew: Sometimes there’s elements of exclusion or limits to access that are artificial barriers, is why a group like Ellicann and a rooftop farm like what y’all have there is really important for calling out those barriers, which are sometimes just artificial and helping to empower folks to bust right past those barriers. So, on the rooftop, what does it look like up there? Todd Cunningham: So it is comprised, I wanted to just jump in one thing you’ve mentioned there, just to add on to it, I guess I would say, is that those barriers are sometimes also intentional. And so we will talk about that. But yes, sometimes they’re not real, they’re artificial, but many times they, and we’re finding of course more and more we’ve known for many years that they are intentional and we’ll talk about examples of that. But if you’re a question about what the rooftop looks like, it is. Matthew Enloe: Mm-hmm. Yes. Todd Cunningham: A beautiful display of like a, we have an herbal farm, an herbal set of gardens, which are basically in raised beds where we’re crops like rosemary and thyme and lemongrass and mint and things like that, which are all about healing, both medicinal and culinary herbs. We have a section of the farm, which is also dedicated to solidarity and uniting.
the finding where we where we honor and and plant and grow foods from other cultures around the world other in particular other cultures which are facing oppression from their government so we’re we’re tying that into it’s a teachable moment obviously lots of political education about what other groups are what are doing around the world and honoring their their their struggle and their survival and then we also have a a huge section of the farm which is dedicated to growing mass amounts of food. So the big, the most popular foods that people like. So collard greens and mustard greens and potatoes and peas and things like that. Tomatoes, which everyone is always expects in a farm. So we have that. We also have, so that’s one way, that’s one part of our gardens. The next, another part of our gardens are basically these hydroponic towers where we have about four of those which can grow about 28 different plants on each tower. And that’s just using no soil, but water and nutrients that come in and rain down on the root, you pump it up through an aquarium pump and rains down the roots and grows that in about 28 days. Most crops are grown where it takes maybe close to three months in soil. And we have trees, we have lots of fruit trees, about 15 different fruit trees and other garden beds which are more accessible for people who are are challenged, physically challenged, not able to stand up and not able to be stooping over because if you gardening, know, there’s a lot of stooping over and bending over. So we want to make that as accessible as possible.
The reason we do all those different types of gardens are basically to give people in our community a wide range of experiences, to grow your skills, but also to understand just how food is brought to us. How do we get our food? Because we don’t know where our food’s coming from more more often. It comes from a test tube, it comes from.
Design and Accessibility of the Rooftop Garden
Todd: countries far away, maybe ones that we don’t agree with their politics, but we’re not part of that. And that’s why food is political. So we’ll talk about more of that, but that’s, we invite many people to come up and visit us if you’d like. Matthew Enloe: Yeah, I think you did a really awesome job of explaining what the garden looks like. So as you’re walking up onto the second story, you’re turning and you’re seeing, what is it, 23, 20, more than that. Todd Cunningham: 27 or something like that. Matthew Enloe: 27 metal trough, like a horse trough, beds. And then towards the back of the farm, as you turn the corner, you also on the right have those elevated tables, like a four foot by eight foot bed on a table. that helps with the accessibility. And then you come around the back and towards the back we have the four hydroponic towers. What I love about how y’all have the garden arranged and especially with the crop planning and the sectioning off is it shows intentionality, which is something that we’ve been talking about, I’ve talked about on a couple of the first podcasts where it was just me, which is. that intentionality, the planning that goes into the garden. And usually the way the conversation is going is I’m talking to people growing at home and talking about, you know, their considerations are gonna be, how do I get the most bang for my buck? How do I get… How do I make this hobby of gardening into something that I can afford to keep on doing? And so the conversation is going more that way of like very practical hobby growing.
But why I’m so excited to have guests on the podcast and especially you is. we’re thinking about accessibility and what the crops are going to be used for in programming or to, or organizing. And I think that layout of the garden, how you guys have it all set up is like a way that we can take that conversation from just like the hobby grower to someone who uses that intentionality in multiple practical ways. So I guess with that planning and intentionality, how does that reflect some of the mission of LA Can with planning, execution, and where the garden parallels how LA Can takes actions out into the community for organizing and stuff like that. Todd Cunningham: Well, we have a fair amount of people who are hobbyists in terms of gardeners. A lot of people have had success at that. this garden is not a brand new thing. It’s like it’s been a labor of love for LA Can and a necessary need for our community for a number of years. So we stand on the shoulders of many people who have had the vision to do the right thing and include the community. The community has helped to design that. the very garden that you’re talking about, the way that the farm is laid out. But basically, we need to grow, we need growing practices that address a lifestyle that’s under oppression. And so food is both survival and a strategy. So basically, this is helping to solve, residents in our community are facing hunger every single day. This notion of food insecurity, where you’re worried about you’re not gonna have food for the next… meal, you don’t have money or access to food for the next meal you’re going to eat.
That’s a continuous thing. That’s an ongoing thing in Skid Row. But it’s also people face stress and trauma, insistent systemic erasure. And so because of that, it’s like the part of our mission again, as we’re helping people discover opportunities, it’s an opportunity for people to come together, socialize, to organize, and to realize that there are ways that we can come together and actually build power to take on and make demands of elected politicians who are not always listening to, not thinking to listen to people with lived experience. So it facilitates that it is a, as much a place of growth for plants as it is for individuals as well. Matthew Enloe: Yeah, yeah. And some of the experiences that we’ve shared up in the garden with folks who are facing all sorts of instabilities in their life. Like, I can think of experiences that we’ve had where folks might be just outwardly showing so much stress and some of those traumas are right up on their sleeve. And we spend two hours together and the opportunity for peace and calm and knowing that they’re also participating in something that’s gonna go beyond themselves to serve the community that they live in right there on Skid Row, those have been so, so impactful. So to get into like some of the practical of like some of the crop planning. Todd Cunningham: Those are great. Matthew Enloe: I had a question which is what crops or practices have proven most meaningful or useful for residents who rely on the garden harvest? yeah, talk to me a little bit about that. Todd Cunningham: Yeah, I would divide that into two different camps. One is a camp for like feeding.
And of course, because people are hungry every day, it’s like we’re the herbs and some of the culturally rooted plants are the ones that people are most excited about growing. And those are things like oregano and mint and lemongrass, collard greens, know, fast growing greens, kale, mustard greens, all those kinds of things. Those are most meaningful because they engage people in a nostalgia for gardening. And for some people, you have the people who grew up with gardening or come from families where there’s a long history of growing your own food or just eating culturally rich food. And then you have some people who don’t, who never did have that. And so to see their faces light up and to see, just to watch the transformation. Matthew Enloe: As you were talking about the peace that comes over people when you get a seedling and then nurture it and plant it and nurture it all the way through its many stages Harvest from it a couple of times even it’s just amazing and it’s almost like it’s this Magnetism that comes from it’s like it draws you back to it and people want to check in on the plants that they’ve been taking care of and and and noticing it gives us an opportunity to talk about you know, some topics of the day or current events. It’s like that’s often a big part of our discussions about what’s happening with them and in our community, and especially with respect to food justice. Then there are, so that’s the food thing, but we also have things that are most meaningful, crops that we’re growing that are meaningful in a different way in terms of educating what are the other uses of these crops.
So there’s many things, there’s one in particular, something called lambs ear, which is one of our favorite crops. Matthew Enloe: we grow that we learned was actually used as a bandage during the Civil War. It’s like it’s antiseptic, antibacterial, anti-everything basically. It’s like really, it’s really soft, fuzzy, it’s a beautiful plant. And it tastes good too, but like it basically it will serve to heal wounds and protect it from any kind of infections. Something we never expected to find out. We didn’t know that that was the case. And so that’s, you know, we have. It’s an educational moment. Also, people discover, we all discover that we can get plants are almost medicine as well, not just for ingesting, but also for topical kinds of things as well. use many of to create tinctures, salves, herbal teas and things like that. it is twofold in terms of like when I answer the question about what crops or things are there, they are most meaningful to us. Matthew Enloe: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think like, what that what that’s making me think about is people might be interested in hearing about, like, one of the herbal medicinal tinctures, something that comes out of the garden. Like, for instance, like the lemon balm or something that you guys have made into something else. Can you just tell us just one that comes if any come to mind that. Sure, sure. Matthew Enloe: You’ve taken a garden and made something and interacted with people. Todd Cunningham: we have a number of our members are quite well are creative, of course.
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