Sarah Holway
I have been with DC Greens since its founding in 2010, and at the end of this year, I will be leaving the organization that has shaped me so much more than I ever shaped it.
In 2009 I took a job as art teacher at Bancroft Elementary because the principal toured me through their school garden in late July. We walked across the blacktop and entered what felt like the wild in comparison. Massive sunflowers towered above us, birds flitted about, squash vines snaked around our feet and aromatic herbs peeked out from between bean plants and zinnias. I had been teaching for almost 10 years and had never seen anything like it on school grounds. That spring, I started teaching a lot of my classes in the garden and soon realized that what I was really trying to teach - through art, through the garden, was truth and beauty. I thought art was their way into that, and I wasn't wrong, but reconnecting to earth through working with plants and growing a garden was a much more direct route, and one that allowed students to learn how the world actually works, and in a city where for lots of kids, cultivating in an outdoor space was not accessible. School gardens provided a way for all kids to have some access to understanding firsthand the natural cycles of the earth. When I started to reconnect with earth through gardening, the veil began to fall. I started to see what was underneath this post industrial world we have constructed. It was the beginning of my unlearning, and a way into seeing the system we are all living in for what it is, a construct that veils the real world. Reconnection to this real world is foundational to healing and thriving and I wanted every child to have access to it.
In 2010, after witnessing the explosion of interest in school gardens sparked by Michelle Obama's work, and having participated with my students in the planting of the White House Garden, I found myself frustrated with what was missing from all the publicity. I had spent some time finding other garden programs in the city and what I found (alongside some really beautiful and thriving garden programs) was that a lot of the gardens were not actually being used, were frequently being neglected, and had no dedicated staff attached to them. I wrote this piece and soon got to know school garden educators around the country who faced the same struggles. I spent a lot of time exploring school gardens in California, a state that has always been a leader in the school garden movement, and learned what things made a school garden sustainable.
That same year, DC City Council convened a group of nonprofits, educators and parents to draft The Healthy Schools Act, legislation that would provide funding for school gardens, among other things. We connected with OSSE the State Superintendent of Education and together pushed for the bulk of that money to go toward hiring school garden coordinators. And from there DC's School Garden community coalesced. Many schools got garden grants and hired staff, and we teamed up with OSSE to provide a network, support and professional development for those teachers, since their schools lacked the expertise to know how to support them.
After eight wonderful years of working with this inspiring community of dedicated garden and food educators and watching school gardens pop up and grow all over the city, I began to step back. It felt like the support DC Greens had been providing was no longer crucial - teachers were creating their own communities, OSSE was really taking on responsibility for this professional development, and the value of school garden and food education was widely accepted and supported institutionally in the city, which were our goals all along.
Around the same time, DC Greens, which began as a small organization made up of all white women, had grown into a multiracial and multicultural organization. And we became aware that what we, the founders, had always thought of as a culture intentionally created to push back against the qualities of our society we hated - formality, rigidity and stifling bureaucracy, was actually a culture rooted in inequality and perpetuated the oppression of some staff while allowing senior staff, who were all white, to continue to feel this freedom. Not everyone had access to this freedom because there were no clear processes around how decisions were made, how pay was determined, how you got promoted; no structured communication channels that allowed staff to share any of the experiences they were having. Without knowing it, we had replicated the inequalities we saw in the world inside our own organization. We realized the culture we had created was at its root, still white supremacy culture. We spent the next few years working with four racial equity facilitators to support us in looking deeply at the culture and structure of the organization. This included lots of all staff conversations, caucusing, coaching, restorative conversations between staff and leadership, and taking steps to build organizational processes around pay, strategy and organizational structure that were clear, transparent and equitable. During this process it became clear to me how inappropriate it was for me, a privileged white woman, to be in a leadership position at an organization that worked with poor Black residents of this city, in communities I had no relationship with and no understanding of. Communities that were not my own. I told staff that I planned to leave in 6 months, and they asked me to stay because we were in the middle of real growth and there was more work that needed to be done internally before I left. I agreed, and made my new departure date the end of this year.
Over the last couple of years I watched as staff left the organization for new paths. I heard from them that they felt both real appreciation for the deep commitment the organization had made to uprooting racism and white supremacy culture, and frustration that certain things weren’t changing fast enough. As I join them now, I see that as a white woman with privilege and power, I was not able to fully feel the same sense of urgency for change that my Black, Indigenous, Muslim, Latinex, Indian colleagues felt. As suppressed, unwell, and boxed in as I feel in white supremacy culture, it also is a structure I am, in many ways, able to easily navigate.
In the same vein, while I know that I held power in my position, I also have felt powerless. I have disengaged as a way to avoid really looking at my power and stepping up to the responsibilities that come with the privilege and position I had within the organization and in my own life outside the organization. Yes, there are ways I was powerless inside the organization and definitely am inside the system of racial capitalism, but there are possibly more ways that I actually had and have power. Even while I worked to understand the places where I had real power to change things and advocate for people and policies and the places where I did not, I failed many times to see the responsibilities that come with my privilege and power, and let people down as a result.
As my time here comes to a close, and I leave this organization to the incredible people who have joined it over the last few years and make it what it is today, I feel a lot of things and have lots of hope.
Organizationally, I feel proud of us for putting the time and funding toward doing deep internal racial equity work; for hearing the experiences of every staff member; for, at times, breaking down the walls between "professional" and "personal" and understanding that separation is sometimes what allows white supremacy culture to persist; and for understanding that what we are building internally is what is reflected externally. The work we do externally can only be a reflection of our internal culture and that is most important to get right. I'm personally grateful that through this process I learned the same is true for me individually.
I hope in the future DC Greens can continue to lean in to transparency and putting funding and staffing toward ensuring that every staff person is supported and heard; let go of the egoistic idea that we have to do everything; create realistic job descriptions so that people can start working at their actual human capacity; and start modeling, at the leadership level, working at actual capacity. This is the most important one, and the one that has taken the longest to make progress toward. My greatest hope, and the best way to do this, is that DC Greens will center employee wellness and push back against the system that doesn't center our wellness by adopting a four day work week. I know we understand the marriage and entanglement of capitalism and racism, and how their values overlap, align, and support the existence of one another, and I know if we want real change to happen in this uprooting, we have to also uproot some of the capitalist values that have created our workplace culture.
I have learned that the way I make money in order to survive in this system and the real work I do in the world do not have to be one in the same. My income source need not be the only part we play in fighting for social justice. I have always had an intrinsic desire to "help" only now I am working toward understanding how to channel that in a way that doesn't look like white saviorism, and to recognize when it does, and to see how to transfer and share resources directly, and without directing. When I first conceived of leaving DC Greens, I had no idea where I should be putting my energy. If not there, where? It has taken me a long time but I feel so clear now that the place for me is in my own immediate community and my work is to find out what my role is within it. As a descendant of white settlers who directly benefited from enslaving Africans and from and stealing land from Cherokee first families, my work is also about directly transferring and sharing my own resources and social capital; staying vigilant in my unlearning around race, white supremacy culture and capitalism; and finding out what my responsibilities are now. In bringing my own actions in line with my heart I can work toward living more congruently and building a world where everyone can be free.
