The Ron Finley Project

Ron Finley is a rebel with a green thumb. In 2010 Ron set out to fix a problem in his South Central neighborhood parkways; those often neglected dirt patches next to our streets. He planted some vegetables there. Soon after he was cited for gardening without a permit by the apparent owners of those dirt patches: the City of Los Angeles. Queue the beginning of a horticulture revolution.

Ron fought back, and won. He started a petition with fellow green activists, and demanded the right to garden and grow food in his neighborhood. Having grown up in the South Central Los Angeles food prison, Ron is familiar with the area’s lack of fresh produce. He knew what it was like to drive 45 minutes just to get a fresh tomato. Boldly and tenderly, Ron’s vision to rejuvenate communities around the world through gardening, knowledge, and togetherness has taken root.

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Alma Backyard Farms

Alma Backyard Farms was inspired by the voices and ideas shared by juvenile offenders and prisoners eager to transform their lives and communities by “giving back” to the communities they “took from” and were taken away from. For most people experiencing incarceration, there are few opportunities to see and interact with nature and few opportunities to provide nurture to others. Yet few are given the opportunities to learn skills and make that possible.

Alma Backyard Farms has listened to the formerly incarcerated and been inspired by their willingness to reorient their lives as caretakers of community. Recognizing that Los Angeles is a place were no life or space is wasted, Alma creates multiple opportunities for women and men who were incarcerated to give back to the health and safety of communities by growing food in and for these communities.

Rooted in restorative justice and environmental stewardship, Alma started in 2013 to implement this project of reclaiming lives, repurposing land and reimagining community. Alma proposes real solutions to the challenges of California’s overcrowded prisons and food injustice in low-income neighborhoods. Recognizing that no lives or land is to be wasted, Alma creates opportunities for the previously incarcerated to become agents of health, safety and community .

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Fallen Fruit

David Allen Burns and Austin Young / Fallen Fruit creates beautiful and sumptuous spaces where audiences can enjoy museum collections in new, unexpected ways that simultaneously reveal a series of layered social constructs. This Art project began in Lost Angeles by creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. The work of Fallen Fruit includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, and site-specific installation artworks. Using fruit (and public spaces and public archives) as a material for interrogating the familiar, Fallen Fruit investigates interstitial urban spaces, bodies of knowledge, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for utopian shared spaces, Fallen Fruit’s work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of what is considered both- public and private. From their work, the artists have learned that “fruit” is symbolic and that it can be many things; it’s a subject an an object at the same time it is aesthetic. Much of the work they create is linked to ideas of place and generational knowledge, and it echoes a sense of connectedness with something very primal- our capacity to share the world with others. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work.

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Los Angeles Mission

Los Angeles Mission breaks the cycle of homelessness and poverty, by stabilizing people in a safe and spiritual environment, connecting them to solutions and walking with them on their journey. LA Mission is one of the largest providers of services to homeless people in the country.