Our Five Borough Farm III Fellows Sheryll Durrant and D Rooney were in Oakland, CA for the Black Farmer and Urban Gardeners Conference (BUGS) to conduct a workshop on Information Preservation as Self-Defense and present the Farming Concrete Data Collection Toolkit as a way to tell their own stories and show the impact of the work they do in community gardens and urban farms.

We face various obstacles in practicing urban agriculture such as funding scarcity, land access and political support. Gathering and organizing the information from the work it takes to grow food can strengthen our practice. Through lively discussion and dialogue we explored the role of data collection as information preservation.

We were joined by Terry Rodriguez from Community Supported Kitchen in East Harlem, NY.

Discussion centered around telling our own stories as opposed to having them told from outside, which undermines our ability to determine how our issues should be solved. By organizing our information we ultimately preserve our work and experiences not for others, but for ourselves.

We did a simple exercise with the participants to assess how many people their work affected—collectively resulting in over 800,000. Then the question was: Does anyone know the impact of your work?

We demonstrated how one can easily show the impact of their work using the Farming Concrete Data Collection Toolkit. The toolkit is a resource created by NYC community gardeners and urban farmers as a way to preserve their information and communicate it to the larger public. We showcased the hardcopy of the toolkit and an online PDF version which could be downloaded in its entirety or in part; the online version and all the tools available for collecting data—known as The Barn and The Mill, the public face that can be accessed by the general public, policymakers and funders.

Learn more about our Five Borough Farm project, and how the Farming Concrete Data Collection was developed.