Pathways to Transmutation
This has been an incredible year of deepening our collective work. You are part of our collective vision for a just and abundant world that is delicious and filled with joy. It takes all of us to do our part, face ourselves and support one another in this challenging time of change. We shall continue to strive forward and want each of you to join us in this mission.
This week as the hours of daylight wane, Urban Growers Collective has entered our season of Winter Work and is returning from a trip to Montgomery, AL to illuminate the history and legacy of racial injustice in America. UGC staff spent this past weekend visiting More Up's Campus and Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy sites, thanks to an anonymous funder that supports organizations working with youth in urban agriculture nationally.
This visit enriched our strategic planning and held space for us to reflect on how UGC’s work continues to create pathways for not just transformation, but transmutation. The process of transmutation reflects nature, and asks that we consider our work together as ongoing and adaptive.
Throughout our time in Montgomery, we were confronted with the legacy of injustice through the kidnapping, trafficking, abusing, dehumanizing African people and their descendants. Of course we know of this legacy from what was taught in school, or shared by our elders, or through our own lived experiences. But to share an embodied experience and bear witness to the erasure of those experiences from the archives, walking the earth of the historical sites, and sharing stories over meals was to remember the legacy of injustice and how it persists.
Now that we have returned to Chicago, many of us were left with the question– “Where do we go from here?” We look to fungi for an answer. Like our collective, fungi use their mycelial networks – a branched, entangled, and resilient web of filaments – to explore their environments, break down and absorb nutrients, and communicate.
“Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them. From another copy I will remove the pages, mash them up, and using a weak acid break the cellulose of the paper into sugars. To the sugar solution I’ll add a yeast. Once it’s fermented into a beer, I’ll drink it and close the cycle.”
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021.
The environmental alchemy of fungi reminds us of the pathways that Urban Growers Collective is constantly unmaking and making. These are Pathways to Transmutation, creating a reality that is irreparably different from what came before. From cultivating seeds to harvest, to sharing abundant feasts that heal and recovering food waste so that it can once more nourish our fields as compost, UGC transmutes inequities within our communities to cultivate pathways to freedom.
In the spirit of transmutation, over the next few weeks you’ll receive emails about how UGC has cultivated these pathways. These snapshots will show how UGC has been able to refine and develop our work. We invite you, as a part of our collective mycelial network, to reflect with us on your own growth. We’ll include opportunities to share your reflections and, if you’re able to, make a contribution that is meaningful to you that will support UGC in continuing along these Pathways to Transmutation.
In gratitude for all your support, and on behalf of Directors and the Urban Growers Collective team.
Erika Allen
CEO, Urban Growers Collective