#UjimaWednesdays | No Soil, No Sovereignty: The Grow or Die Campaign | 5.14.25

Month Description:

Our workshops this May, in keeping with our 2025 theme Power, Transformation, and Miracles, center local and small-scale worldbuilding. The Power in Proximity: Small Worlds, Big Shifts focuses on how  intimate spaces, from neighborhoods to collective gardens, shared workspaces to cultural hubs, become powerful sites of resistance, connection, and transformation. In these small worlds, power is not abstract or distant; it is immediate, lived, and deeply personal.

This series invites us to ask: How do communities reclaim power through the creation of shared spaces that reflect their needs, histories, and visions for the future? How can local organizing, mutual aid, and art or culture shape the way we challenge larger systems of inequality and injustice? What happens when communities create and protect worlds that center collective care, autonomy, and mutual respect? We will learn how local, grassroots movements grow from the most personal connections— from relationships and trust that form when communities come together to meet their own needs—and how they can ripple outward to challenge larger structures of power.

Event Description:

In this workshop, youth organizers from the Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project (REEP), a program of Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), share the vision behind their food justice campaign, Grow or Die. Together, we’ll explore the role of land and cultivation in Black and brown self-determination, and gather input on a proposed garden for Dacia Street.

Facilitator Bio:

REEP is a youth-led, adult-supported environmental justice organizing project of ACE. Rooted in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, REEP builds youth power by developing the leadership of young people of color and cultivating membership across the Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston.