Social Entrepreneurship in Action: Restorative Farms in Dallas

As part of my ongoing pursuit of solving local and perhaps more broadly, nationally or global issues related to poverty; economic opportunity, hunger, education, equity, sustainable, renewable energy, and care for the environment. One might say, those problems are too many, too much, too hard - indeed struggling to find ways of providing pathways for those struggling to reach a decent standard of living is difficult.

However, we have taken a small step in Dallas Texas to construct, using systems thinking, as part of a scalable, urban agriculture model. The first farm in the system, under the overall banner of Restorative Farms, is Hatcher Station Training Farm and Community Garden. Www.restorativefarms.com.

The BIG IDEA

We co-founded Restorative Farms in 2017 as a local food intervention in one of the nation’s largest and seemingly intractable food deserts (South Dallas). The intervention was based on a 10-year active research, non-profit board work, community engagement, and local social entrepreneurial support in the community. We believe that you cannot build an inclusive economy for a community by defining what it excludes; rather, to develop ALL of Dallas’s economy requires a systems theory-informed refocus on what assets it does include. Each asset or component, for example, a vermiculture compost farm, needs to be developed and leveraged to support itself and the other local agri-systems’ components until a virtuous cycle forms. So that the system can produce at the scale needed to supply the market. It’s a chicken and egg paradox. A robust local market (value to the seller and producer)is required for a viable agri-system to form, but a large scale consistent supply of quality product (value to the buyer) is required for a market to be established. Restorative Farms’ mission is to work on both the local supply and demand, to systematically encourage the development of an urban farm system through the provision of human resources at the community level. Restorative Farms is utilizing material assistance and agricultural expertise in sustainable farming techniques to encourage long-term growth of urban farms that contribute to the improvement of the neighborhoods’ quality of life (determinants of health).