Celebrating Year 3!

Our fourth The Soul of Food (SOF) session at East New York Farms, October 2023, showing rice and sorghum plants to participants.

December 4th marked the third year of Deep Routes, which has been full of ups and downs with global, economic, and climatic turmoil taking center stage in so many ways. Nonetheless we did our best to bring joy and curiosity to every being, space and circumstance as we pivoted, seemingly, at almost every turn.

Through it all, this year’s slate of programming continued to be incredible as we piloted new series like Flour Play as well as our staple series like The Soul of Food for community members across New York City and State as well as virtually across the U.S. AND in the midst of that we got ready to launch our second curriculum An Manje: A Celebration of Haitian Foodways (slated to officially release January 1st, 2024).

As we near the end of 2023, we’re extending deep gratitude to every single organization, workshop participant, donor, and so many more people who’ve connected with us, supported this work, inspired us, and encouraged us to keep going.

We’re hopeful for what 2024 holds as we continue creating for, connecting with, and learning from Black and Indigenous learners and educators.

Check out a some of the highlights of this past year below:

Workshops & Events

🌾

Workshops & Events 🌾

Guests conversing during the An Manje pre-launch celebration and screening on December 8th, 2023.

It was such a full year of joyful learning with community members across Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Upstate NY. Click the tabs below for a recap of this year’s programming and check out our blog for more details & photos:

• 22 Culinary & Agricultural Workshops . . .

  • Once again we began this year up in the Bronx at DreamYard to offer a workshop on Connecting with Nutritious Roots & Greens;

  • Come February we kicked off our very first sliding-scale ticketed series Flour Play: A BIPOC Baking Lab which was an 8 week series at Mayday Space that culminated in a celebratory session where participants got to bring a baked good of their choice;

  • In March we were at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Making Brooklyn Bloom conference to share our session on Bees, Trees, and Beans: Stories of Vanilla’s Ecological Interdependence;

  • Mid-April we partnered with The Young Farmer’s Coalition’s Cultivemos program to offer Gossy: Cotton, Crochet, and African Diasporic Fiber Arts where we talked about cotton’s Afro-Indigenous origins alongside the stories of African diaspora fiber arts and did some crochet 101 with participants;

  • We kicked off the summer with Greenthumb NYC and local community gardens as we continued to offer our staple series The Soul of Food with 5 workshops (including 3 new sessions) celebrating the soul of Black and brown foodways via growing and cooking with Afro-diaspora crops like rice, sorghum, and collards at East New York Farms;

  • Throughout the summer and some of the fall we had a few gardener sessions at East New York Farms! to offer sessions on seedling care and transplanting, tomato care, and cover cropping; and later in the summer we offered sessions that honored the water traditions of the African diaspora by partnering with Oko Farms to create the River Bites series.

    A recap for all these sessions can be found here.

• 2 Community Events . . .

  This spring alongside offering two workshop sessions at the Making Brooklyn Bloom conference we also tabled with some of info about the project and prizes.

  We were stoked to join so many other herbalist, farmers, and community members for Ayni Herb Farm’s 3rd Annual Garlic Festival! We offered an Ode to Garlic session where we guided folks in making Garlicky Cheesy flatbread and tomato soup in between a beautifully curated day of celebrating garlic in all its forms and gifts. A full recap can be found here.

• 2 Educational Presentations . . .

  This spring Deep Routes founder Maya Marie was invited to come moderate the featured panel Learning from the Land: Bounties of Wisdom from Black and Indigenous Growers at the Greenthumb GrowTogether conference in conversation with local growers Heather Warren-Dumbrowa, Kofi Thomas, and Alexx Caceres.

  In June she also spoke at the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education, & Policy at the Teachers College of Columbia University for their Indigenous Foodways in the Classroom series. Our session Centering Nourishment in Food Education went into some of the histories of Western ideologies around nutrition and posed the question of how can we transform and realign nutrition into something that is more nourishing for educators and learners alike?

• Pre-Launch/Year-End Celebration event . . .

  This year we hosted our first ever Pre-Launch/Year-End Celebration event at Mayday Space in honor of the forthcoming An Manje anthological curriculum! There was delicious Haitian food catered by local chef Lorsk Jean-Charles, a raffle, a screening and more. A full recap can be found here.

• 470+ Community Members Reached

  We gathered, cooked, discussed, and got our hands in the dirt with over 470 folks during our workshops, event gatherings, and presentations this year.

Workshop Highlights

Scenes from our Feb/March 2023 pilot of Flour Play: A BIPOC Baking Lab (shot by Maxine Simone)

Thanks to Our Community Partners!

Thanks to the following organizations for collaborating and supporting our work this year and big shout out as always to all the program coordinators and organizers who make these events happen!

Here's to many more collabs that uplift BIPOC food stories and center BIPOC communities:

Curriculum Materials

📖

Curriculum Materials 📖

Here at Deep Routes we define curriculum broadly as learning materials (e.g. profiles, articles, poems, recipes booklets, etc.), lesson plans, syllabi, teaching templates, and media. We’re slowly but steadily building out the curriculum in each of those areas every year in collaboration with BIPOC farmers, cooks/chefs, artists, writers, and community members.

This year, while continuing to incorporate our 2021 1st Edition Core Curriculum in our own programming and offerings, we concentrated our efforts on bringing together the final leg of the written components of An Manje. We worked on final edits to format all the essays, prose, poetry, and recipes that make up the curriculum as well as photographing some of the ingredients and dishes the contributing chefs and cooks wanted to highlight.

In January 2024 we’ll be releasing the first part of the An Manje anthology’s visuals: a 3-part video series by Shana Jeanott-Thomas of The Global Taste, featuring 3 Haitian chefs. And later in 2024 we’ll be releasing the video on Ayitian/Haitian and Kiskeyan/Dominican solidarity by Merelis Catalina Ortiz.

Additionally, a critical part of the curriculum’s integration in The Soul of Food series this year was to include a teaching/growing space which we had thanks to the generosity of East New York Farm’s Farm Manager Alexx Caceres. Here we had two Afro-Indigenous diaspora plots dedicated to growing rice, sorghum, bissap/sorrel, sesame, collards, onions, field peas, and callaloo for the purpose of using throughout our workshop sessions and to give away to participants.

While all that’s been happening, we’ve also been steadily chipping away at work on region and cuisine specific learning materials that are set to release in a few years. So this year had just a few small additions to our curriculum shop in the form of mini booklets that were offered to participants of our River Bites series with Oko Farms. Check it all out below:

Bays & River Foodways of the South (River Bites Mini Book #1)

Coastal Stories of Akara (River Bites Mini Book #2)

Coming Soon

✨

Coming Soon ✨

The next edition of Deep Routes curriculum uplifts the stories and beauty of Haiti/Ayiti, and is coming to your doors January 2024! Have you preordered your copy? If not, do so here.

AND we’re still fundraising for additional parts to be released (including translation in Haitian Kreyol and Spanish) in 2024, donate here.