They were a major reason why Owens and her husband Cedric chose Pickerington as the city to raise their family. Owens’ daughters, Charlize and Cooper, are her own “little boss ladies,” she says, because their initials are CEO. “Yet another traumatic relationship to something that should be so natural that was broken with slavery and wet nursing. She said, ‘We’re able to help reconnect these women to this space and we are impacting women who have given birth to multiple children and have been able to breastfeed multiple children, and now breastfeeding for those children is the norm.’ And that blew my mind.” “(Adams) was like, ‘I need you to realize we are impacting an entire generation. A lot of the moms in this group were not breastfed because of the disconnect of breastfeeding,’” says Owens. The group got national attention in 2019 when Owens and co-founder Khadija Adams spoke about it on NPR’s Stor圜orps, and that was when the impact of the Black Lactation Circle really hit home for Owens. “That was back in October of 2015 and now we have nearly 900 women in this group, all women who are Black breastfeeding moms who live here in central Ohio and a number of them actually live here in Pickerington.” “We created a group called Black Lactation Circle,” she says. When she had her first daughter, Cooper, in 2015, Owens attended a breastfeeding support group at the hospital where she gave birth, and walked in to find she was the only Black woman in the room. Through the graces of social media and her friends in Pickerington, she found she wasn’t alone in that experience, so she started meeting with a few other moms to connect about this. “So, (Forage + Black is about) reconnecting in that space and knowing the trauma that goes into reconnecting into that space because there’s a big disconnect that we can’t ignore, and that’s slavery.”īeyond reconnecting people of color with green spaces, Owens also found and created community with other Black moms in central Ohio. “You know, the average farmer is a 66-year-old white male,” she says. Owens says this disconnect exists for a very clear yet troubling reason. “I remember coming up with the concept, … and I was like, ‘I think these could be great conversation starters.’”Īnd that conversation began with the idea that there is space in the garden for people of color, too – an idea that many unfortunately don’t know or realize. “As a communications person and as a person who loves food, I love a good pun,” she says. When Owens started Forage + Black, her idea was to use punny T-shirts to connect the dots between the intersection of Black culture and green thumbs. In October, she gave a TEDx Talk titled Agricultural Education: A Love Story to share her journey. In early fall 2020, she opened her store, Forage + Black. When COVID-19 hit, Owens decided to leave her job to help her 5-year-old daughter with school, but her passion for connecting people with agricultural spaces only grew. Owens worked with local kids, teaching them about where their food comes from, showing them how to work in the community garden at Weinland Park and using her OSU connections to take them on field trips to the Waterman Dairy Farm. “When I started working there was when I really realized the issues and inequities that we have here in our own food system and our own agricultural system,” she says, “and I was like, I can’t try to go save the world when my home is messed up.” That all changed when she began working for the Godman Guild Association in Columbus after graduating. Owens pursued a degree in agricultural communication, specializing in international, social and economic development at OSU, with the original goal of working for a non-governmental organization like USAID to help developing countries become economically stable. All my friends, they would go to Kroger or Big Bear back then, but we got our fruits and vegetables in a box.” “That’s so cool nowadays, but I used to be really embarrassed by it. “When I was growing up, we actually used to belong to a coop, a fruit and vegetable co-op,” she says. Growing up, Owens’ parents and grandparents knew the value of getting out into the garden and knowing how to grow their own food, and instilled those values in Owens and her siblings, too. “From a young age, I’ve always had a really great relationship with food,” she says. Each of her communities share a central theme of feeding others. Among all her involvements, it’s pretty clear Owens’ passions lie with cultivating plants and people.
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