Burundian Eggplant Sauce
This is a popular dish that uses small white eggplants that look just like eggs. The Burundian community at Providence Farm Collective grows these little gems as they are very diff...
Providence Farm Collective's Programs for Empowerment
A Seat at the Table
When I arrived at 5701 Burton Road in Orchard Park, Providence Farm Collective’s new 37-acre property, it was abuzz with the sounds of planting day: tractors plowing, shovels digging. The infectious excitement of six refugee farming communities could be heard a mile away. Sharing in their elation was Kristin M. Heltman-Weiss, the president of Providence Farm Collective and my tour guide for the day.
“All of our programs are for underserved communities and individuals,” said Heltman-Weiss, whose unlikely journey to her current role began in 2017 when she volunteered as an educational therapist for the Somali Bantu after-school program in the city.
“That year I grew closer to the kids and the families,” she said. “I was particularly good friends with the Somali Bantu Supervisor, Mahamud Mbwera. So I asked him, ‘What does your community need?’”
Heltman-Weiss later read Mbwera’s list—a passenger van, board members, a grant writer and a farm—to a group of politically active friends. One ally happened to have unused land on a horse farm in East Aurora and offered it up. The next day, the Somali Bantu elders accepted.
“Within a couple of weeks my group of friends had secured seeds and tools, and a neighbor to the farm plowed the first paddock. On June 3rd, 2017, we planted the first garden of the Somali Bantu community,” Heltman-Weiss recalled. Her personal knowledge and passion for farming began to grow, too.
“I learned that for many people in this community, who have been marginalized or persecuted in another country, the only work they know is subsistence farming,” she said. “Meanwhile, they’re often resettled into cities, and typically into food deserts. There’s a huge problem with resettled refugees in Buffalo where within a year they start to suffer terrible health outcomes solely based upon food access. Suddenly, a population that has never seen diabetes or high blood pressure is experiencing high occurrence of those, plus childhood obesity that never existed in the population.”
Photo 1: Mahamud "Mo", Providence Farm Collective farm mentor and community liaison.
Photo 2: Kristin Heltman-Weiss, president of the Providence Farm Collective
Inspired to help, by the end of that first season Heltman-Weiss joined the Somali Bantu Board and began the pilot program that would create Providence Farm Collective, an organization providing rural access to farmland to address food insecurity.
“By a small miracle I wrote my first grant,” laughed Heltman-Weiss, ultimately winning $74,000 for the Somali Bantu from a General Mills RFP looking for food nonprofits in Western New York. “We used that to buy a passenger van, a pickup truck, a walk-behind tractor, seeds, fencing, all sorts of things.”
Yet even with the financial boost, a soil test on the horse farm in East Aurora revealed it wasn’t ideal for growing—a determination that would spark the organization’s move to their new Orchard Park location in April of 2021 via a capital campaign. As we toured the grounds, Heltman-Weiss displayed the shared land now farmed by six refugee communities from Buffalo’s West Side (Somali Bantu, Liberian, Congolese, Burundian, Chin and Karenni) alongside Buffalo Go Green. Each group grows culturally relevant foods of its own choosing.
Photo 1: Congolese Babondo community members: Etando, Agustine, Hussein and Kiza.
Photo 2: Josephin from Karenni Garden of Hope.
The season typically lasts from May to November with volunteers working and harvesting for their families, communities and other Western New Yorkers impacted by food insecurity, as well as for selling at local farmers markets and their Monday roadside stand. Crops such as maize, amaranth, collards, tomatoes and sunflowers are commonly chosen for community plots as well as individual incubators—a Providence Farm Collective program that provides an extra quarter-acre of turnkey land where participants obtain tenancy upon completion of the required three-year training. A demo plot is used for education, training the refugee farmers in organic succession planting methods.
Officially launching in the spring of 2020, the farm is entirely prepared and coordinated by Providence Farm Collective’s small and invested staff: Farm Director Beth Leipler, Farm Mentor Mahamud Mbwera and Director of Development and Administration Bari Zaiger, along with a handful of seasonal staff. The pandemic only emphasized the importance of the work Heltman-Weiss and her team were doing. Many of their over 200 volunteer farmers were impacted and struggled with economic survival.
“If COVID has taught us anything, it is the fragility of our Western New York food and agriculture systems,” said Heltman-Weiss. “By the end of the summer many in our community started to become shelter insecure.” A serendipitous visit from Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz helped the farm to utilize the youth employment summer program to provide their communities some aid.
“Many of the kids came out and helped the parents farm and we were able to pay them for that,” Heltman-Weiss recalled. “Kids were so proud of being able to help their families pay the rent and keep the household going.” Through this program, 65 refugee children participated on the farm in 2020, with 120 expected in 2021.
Providence Farm Collective has big plans in the coming year. They’ll be hosting weekly farm-to-table lunches for volunteers, designing a farm soccer field, offering training on chicken farming, and working toward obtaining greenhouses for farmers while helping them start their own cooperatives.
“I want us to be remembered as an organization that successfully re-envisioned what farming looks like,” Heltman-Weiss reflected. “One that gave our folks a seat at the table as equal players with the same social, political and economic capital as anybody else.
“That, to me, seems like a sustainable future for both farming and our region.”
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