The organic industry has a history of fierce pioneers who paved the way for the increased demand we are experiencing today for all things healthy and better for the environment. Tanya Fields is one of our favorite local pioneers who has taken this movement a step further by making “green” living and sustainability more accessible to all, which is why we are crowning her as this month’s Fierce Woman of the Month.
As a resident of the South Bronx, Tanya noticed the lack of edible produce and healthy food that was available in her community. Noticing the injustice that communities of color and/or poor communities face when accessing quality food, Tanya became an ardent food justice advocate. So much so that she created the South Bronx Mobile Bus which is essentially a farmers market on wheels so that the people in her neighborhood didn’t have to travel downtown to have healthy foods.
Not only does this fun blue bus on wheels help educate people about nutrition but it also supports local farmers. Her mobile market is just one of the initiatives under the Blk Project which Tanya also founded to connect food justice with economic justice. Creating healthy communities and empowering the people in those communities is work close to her heart and something she takes very seriously.
Despite all of her significant work, Tanya, a loving and vibrant unmarried mom who is expecting her fifth child, has been publicly attacked about her family lifestyle. It says a lot about society’s misplaced priorities. However, she stays strong and brushes it off knowing that she is supported by family and the many people that she has touched through her service.
What is also admirable about Tanya is that she is real. There’s no pretense about her, she will tell it like it is. She’s honest and vulnerable in person and online. She took some time out from her busy schedule of organizing, parenting, speaking and woman-ing the mobile market to talk with us.
1. At Maxim Hygiene, we define a Fierce Woman as a “glorious female creature whose idea of beauty is hinged upon the idea that she can change the world with each choice, each moment and each breath of her life.” Who in your life is a Fierce Woman and why?
My grandmothers Alice and Lucy! She raised seven children. She raised them to be kind, caring, responsible, successful and loving. My family has such a sense of unity, no matter what is going on with us we rally around each other and we got that from my grandmother. She was one of my biggest examples of what it meant to be strong and not to let anything stop you and she doesn’t take any shit. Even at 81 that lady is vibrant and funny. My other grandmother, Lucy she is something else too. Without her I would not have been able to get through college while raising my children. These women did what they had to without compromising themselves or their families. They walked proud and defied gender roles. They were matriarchs and raised fierce daughters and granddaughters.
2. Please share with us a little bit more about how and why you created the South Bronx Mobile Market and the Blk Projek. How do those entities work together? What are your goals for both and where do you see them going?
I created the market to save my life, to save the lives of the people in my community. The people who influence the policies, structures and laws of our communities are trying to kill us. I am not going to mince words…a lot of the sh*t in our community especially the food is poison and I am not immune to that. I found myself with an asthmatic kid with food and skin allergies and I couldn’t get her good food. I found myself gaining more weight than I was comfortable with and I found that I was feeding my kids too much junk as a response to very little time and not a whole lot of money and sh*tty food choices in my community.
I tried to start a farmer’s market and I failed. I was so disappointed, I thought about giving up but my mentor Kolu encouraged me to go back and rethink my approach and in my research I discovered mobile markets. I learned about this fierce chick Dara Cooper who helped start a mobile market on the effing westside of Chicago. I was inspired. I was like oh hell yea…I can do this. I already had a relationship with farmers and they had a bus and they were generous enough to loan it to me and work with me to develop this project. That’s how the South Bronx Mobile Market came to be.
The BLK Projek is the overarching non-profit that was created in 2009 to harness the local food movement as a platform for economic development. I was not interested in more status quo, charity approaches to food inaccess. In my opinion many of those solutions unintentionally continue to perpetuate victimhood and poverty, in the absence of solutions that raise folks up, that create economic situations that allow folks to thrive they aren’t more than stop gaps in the vicious cycle of poverty. I wanted to create solutions that did more, that encouraged folks to develop their communities without the reliance of government intervention. I was inspired by Shirley Chisholm and the Panther Breakfast program, the People’s Landless Movement, the Zapatistas…kick ass solutions like that.
3. You are doing a variety of social justice work with the South Bronx Mobile Market and BLK Projek, and thus you see a lot of injustice on a daily basis. Does it ever get overwhelming? If so, what do you do to get yourself back on track?
Every day is trying. Almost on a daily basis I ask myself why I am living in damn near voluntary “poverty” to do this work…also real talk people like to romanticize this work and its messy and dirty and sometimes mean. The people you are fighting for and with are traumatized. They often need healing and you can inadvertently become the enemy or feel like it’s thankless. But I remember I am to act from a place of love, that I do this work out of a sense of obligation and from a place of love and when I am not feeling loving I take a step back.
I remember the little girls who picked the marigolds we planted in an underdeveloped lot and put them in their hair or the people who tell me how much better the food they bought from me tasted. I have coffee with my sister friends, I laugh with my mother, I dance with my four children, I make crazy drunk in love love with my super fine man lol. I pull back, I remember I am a full human being who does not have to embody struggle with every breathe, and that I owe myself just as much love as I owe the community. I remember to celebrate life and to celebrate my wholeness and my fullness. I often remind myself that I only have this one life that I better live it the way I want so I don’t raise my daughters while trying to live through them, projecting my regrets on to them, sucking their life force because I am bitter and sad and regretful. I’m not always graceful but I’m generally happy and fulfilled.
4. You are very open about being a single mother with your 5th child on the way (congrats!), and thus have received a lot of criticism and negative commentary. You have also received support from high-profile women such as Melissa Harris Perry. How do you deal with this and find balance in sharing your personal and professional life?
I’ve actually stopped using the term single mother, one because it comes with a crapload of uniformed stigma and assumptions. I have a partner and I love him so much. He is a good partner but yes it’s challenging. I use the term unmarried…do I want to get married? I don’t know. I think I do but mainly because I realize it for many people “legitimizes” my large family and that infuriates me, that I have internalized that. The attention at first bothered me. I spent a lot of time crying, feeling defensive and in some ways fighting feelings of shame and wanting to hide, being angry with myself for saying anything to begin with. Then I think of my grandmothers, women who raised their children successfully and whom are now surrounded by so much love. I think how defiant they were and how they raised me and sustained me. I think of my dad, who wa
s a single father in the 80’s who called me to tell me that he was proud of me as a mother, as a woman and as his child, he reminded me that the shit I was hearing and seeing and reading said more about those folks then me. Who in the hell attacks a woman who CHOOSES to raise and love her children? When was it ok to beat down our mothers, our life-givers? When did reproductive choice mean only the choice to have an abortion(s)?
So I find balance in the face and smiles of my children, in the success of my work. I don’t deal with it anymore…I don’t have sh*t to prove to anyone but myself and my kids. My uterus is my business because I am open about the pride I have in my family doesn’t mean I am open to public inquiry or that I am public property. So no you can’t ask me how many “baby fathers I have” or “where he/they are” or “why I didn’t stop having kids” or “why I didn’t have my tubes tied” or “will I have more”, that is insanity and sexist and misogyny and I don’t deal with that. I am ALWAYS GRATEFUL for support but I rather people support my work and me as a full human being not because they think I am some sort of political statement on either side of the issue.
5. What advice would you give to other women entrepreneurs or socialpreneurs?
To be bold and fierce, to be persistent. To be aware and self reflective but also rebellious. Folks will tell you especially if you are a woman, especially if you are a woman of color, especially if you are a low-income/working class indigenous/woman of color that you can’t do it, to just get a regular job and they will beat you down sometimes with “concern” and other times out of maliciousness but they will do it. Ignore them or use it as fuel to motivate you but keep going. Educate yourself at every turn, sit in your resolve but be receptive to always getting better and open minded to new experiences and look at each “failure” not as a failure but as an opportunity to learn more.
6. How can the community at large contribute to the Blk Projek and South Bronx Mobile Market? What are its most important needs? What are the South Bronx Mobile Market’s biggest challenges right now?
MONEY! MONEY! MONEY! LOL, folks have a ton of encouraging words and affirmations and they are sustaining in their own way but we need to build capacity. I realize I cannot continue to do this all by myself. We need to raise more money and folks can donate at our website. We also are looking for real, organic partnerships with other organizations, who can provide some support and help us expand. We need interns and volunteers. My business is all over the innawebs, I am not hard to find, people can find me on Facebook and Twitter or send me an email: ed(at)theblkprojek(dot)com.