We are partnering with “Smart Designs By Drae”, an Etsy store owned by Andrae Goldson and Nupur Chaudhury, to provide “Mushrooms & Marx” Jan Term merch for sale!
100% of proceeds from our t-shirt and mug sales will be donated to two initiatives that support community health and regenerative agriculture:
Pandemic Research for the People or PReP is a crowd-funded effort from the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps aimed at getting research efforts underway to answer questions that will help communities around the world during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s a lot of great research being conducted right now on COVID-19, from its biomolecular characteristics to potential antivirals to epidemiologies at the broadest geographic scales. But much research remains handcuffed by a political economy going as far back as the origins of capitalism. Funding sources and political appointees gear a lot of otherwise terrific research toward saving the very systems of exploitation that help produce the problems to begin with.
Meanwhile, the needs of everyday people most immediately affected, in this case by a pandemic, are left unaddressed. Pandemic Research for the People will focus on answering questions around the people’s pandemic needs first.
The Ben Jones Community Garden is a community garden at the HUUB, a community center and gathering space in Orange, NJ. The gardens will provide a space to learn about agriculture, gardening, and food, and foster dialogue around environmental education, public health, and outdoor activities in urban environments.
The HUUB is located on Cleveland Street, which is also known as Ben Jones Place in honor of Orange’s first black councilman. Naming these community gardens after Ben Jones builds on this important local civil rights history and connects it to current environmental- and food-justice causes. The project’s gardens and programming are methods of cultivating relationships with and between our neighbors to build stronger communities. These are meaningful and fundamental qualities of a healthy city, but they are also tactics to create opportunities to talk about other issues in the city and organize resident action to address these issues. By cultivating neighborhood ownership and commitment to the gardens, this project will directly sustain and further the aim of HUUB’s mission to strengthen community relationships and increase civic participation.