Building collective power with small farmers and the urban poor through community kitchens + community gardens
Food Today, Food Tomorrow is a coalition of small farmers, urban poor growers, community organizers, food justice activists and advocates, and volunteers working collectively toward:
Access to good food
By providing community kitchens fresh organic produce grown ethically and ecologically by small farmers.
Food gardens
for all
By training urban poor growers to sustain their own food gardens and become farmer-trainers themselves.
Bahay kubo biodiversity
By growing agrobiodiverse gardens through a model of solidarity gardening, rooted in agroecology and advocating for the rights of peoples.
Our collaborators & supporters who have sustained and continue to sustain us—Good Food Co., Me & My Veg Mouth, The Vegan Neighbors, Project Pulo, Kids for Kids, Gantala Press, Toyo Eatery, Gallery by Chele, Margarita Fores, Astig Vegan, Sulong Likha, Headshot Clinic, Uber Philippines, Mary Ruth Organics, BestPak, Ugnayan Cards, and many more like-minded Civil Service Organizations and individual volunteers.
Food Today:
Community Kitchens
Every week, we deliver fresh organic produce to community kitchens (Kusinang Bayan) led and organized by the members of Pinagkaisang Lakas ng Mamamayan (PLM). Currently, the Kusinang Bayan is held at the barangays of Payatas-Molave, Bagong Silangan, Tatalon, and San Isidro.
Food Tomorrow:
Community Gardens
We train and support urban poor communities who want to grow their own food gardens through agroecological farming workshops. Our dream is to make urban food gardens as common as sarisari stores.
Join the movement
Support our weekly Kusinang Bayan or community kitchens by pledging Php 150/month.
Sustain our Food Gardens by checking our resource map for some of the items we need.
Join a Kusinang Bayan or start your own fundraising campaign!
"It is only on our own that we experience scarcity. In this interconnected and interdependent world, together we have everything we need. When our work and our lives are rooted in that core assumption, we are being the world we want to see. And that is when magic can happen." - On Collective Enoughness (creatingthefuture.org)
Our Roots
Food Today, Food Tomorrow is borne of the multiple crises that the urban poor face in Metro Manila during the COVID19 pandemic.Despite the systemic hardships and deprivation that the urban poor faced, violent evictions and displacement continued. These days prices are skyrocketing, joblessness has increased, agriculture is buckling under the climate emergency, and the threat of a food crisis looms.Food Today, Food Tomorrow recognizes the broader context within which the problem of food insecurity plays out–a world where the economic, social, and political rights of the urban poor are neglected, where their agency and power over their lives are persistently undermined. Our task is to highlight the urban poor’s agency and capacity when treated with dignity and fairness and when given with the right resources.Food is essential to our ability to survive and thrive in this age of emergency. Not just any food though. We need food that is safe, nutritious, delicious, and affordable. Food that is fair and just, and does not exploit the labor that brings it to our plates.
How We Started
Food Today started as Lingap Maralita, a food relief project that we put together with friends and volunteers during the early days of the pandemic. As the world’s longest and strictest lockdown was enforced, millions of low-income households with no savings to rely on and lived a hand-to-mouth existence did not know where their next meal would come from. “Mas mauna pa kaming mamatay sa gutom kaysa sa virus” was the widespread sentiment of the country’s poor. Some were forced to violate lockdowns so that they could feed themselves and their families, and were violently dispersed and arrested.Lingap Maralita was an immediate response to the growing hunger and delay in aid that we were seeing all around. With widespread support from citizens all over the country, what we envisioned as a one-week food relief activity ran for 15 weeks. Local rice and fresh organic produce were sourced from small farmers who suddenly saw their markets closing and were distributed to 500 urban-poor households every week. Leaders and mothers from the urban poor communities led the Kusinang Bayan (community kitchen) to show that the poor, despite lacking in resources, have something to contribute to the project. In fact, because of the Kusinang Bayan, sometimes the project exceeded its weekly target number of households.Food Today continues the early work of Lingap Maralita and is powered by Solidarity Share, a way for Filipino families with the means and social safety nets to support families with very limited means and little to no social protection by purchasing farm shares at a subsidized rate.Food Tomorrow started when leaders of PML - Payatas expressed their interest in a more sustainable way to secure food–by growing it themselves. Like a lot of urban poor, some of them were either farmers who migrated to the city in search of a better life or had experience growing food but found the cost of seeds and soil prohibitive, and the lack of viable space in Payatas discouraging.Food Tomorrow provides participating households with a garden starter kit that includes organic soil, vermicompost, shade nets, seeds, and cuttings of organic vegetables. It also offers training and guidance on urban food gardening over a 16-week program on urban agroecology including topics on plant health and soil nutrition, composting, seed saving, organic plant concoctions, and healthy food preparation.Food Tomorrow promotes the use of agroecology. More than a way to grow food in a manner that is holistic and regenerative, agroecology is a socio-political movement that connects these production principles and practices to the broader goal of systemic change.Agroecology recognizes the specific environment, struggles, and experiences of food producers and how it places importance on the practical, appropriate, and collective. The community of practice in the urban poor communities creates a body of knowledge and practice on urban agriculture that is responsive to the realities and constraints of the urban poor. It is, as La Via Campesina says, “a tool for the collective transformation of reality.”
Ongoing Activities
Weekly Kusinang Bayan. Nanay volunteers from PLM prepare healthy meals for their community, from fresh & organic vegetables grown and shared by organic farmers who have been working with Good Food Community.On-site Public Health Survey. We interview households and distribute health survey forms.The gathered data is used to design programs that cater to urgent health needs and work with the nearest community health center.Monthly FTFT Volunteer Visits. We conduct monthly visits with volunteers to participate in the Kusinang Bayan. Each visit includes an orientation about the place on certain economic affairs that determine their situation with regards to housing, land, and issues about food. FTFT collaborates with partners on the ground to conceive training programs like cooking demos or talks, prepared by either volunteers or locals.Food as Medicine Program. A series of workshops and discussions on the role of food in healing our bodies. This is a dialogical program, with locals giving their inputs, designing their own modules and eventually leading in other sessions, recalling indigenous foodways and other traditional modes of healing.
Past Activities
Lingap Maralita
Garden Toolkit
Makisawsaw
Food, Farming, & Freedom
Called to the garden
Hi, I’m Jen, a recovering activist.I’m ashamed to admit that I’d forgotten what it meant to tend to my garden of hope, and to nurture my own expression of activism.
The old seedI found my own meaningful expression of activism over a decade ago with Muni, where we grew a community through gatherings towards a more mindful, equitable and livable world. We put together meetups and pop-up markets, many of which had us collaborating with Good Food Community in our infant years all the way to pre-pubescence. Throughout this time, I had my own seasons of hope and hopelessness.Over the course of a decade, we’ve all witnessed our country get battered by typhoons and tyrants. We survived the height of the pandemic through collective care and community pantries, held onto hope in a rose-tinted future, only for that to be stripped from us — with a new administration, and with a return to our ways of being pre-pandemic.Perhaps you grieved losses both personal and political then, and perhaps you still grieve them now.
At some point in 2022, I’d forgotten what it meant to tend to my garden of hope, and to nurture my own expression of activism. My privilege allowed me to buffer or numb myself so I could stay “functional” and be a “productive” member of society. All while forgetting what it meant to be in community.
I saw faults in the system, and shortcomings in what I thought were ways out of the culture of dominance and oppression. Add to that global events, such as the genocide in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan, calls for ceasefire falling on deaf ears; and local events, such as the recent arrest of Edison Yu — and it can leave us feeling little hope in humanity and in our ability to make a difference.
The new seedI’d forgotten that nature has cycles of growth and decay, that the best gardens are the ones that allow for different plants to flourish at different times, and that sometimes, the life cycle of one plant is over, and it’s time to plant anew. I’d isolated myself, thinking I needed to do my own inner work. I’d forgotten that inner work can happen, and is actually supported by community too. I’d forgotten what it was like to be in community. But I remembered I could reconnect with it.
I realize more clearly now that we don’t find resilience in numbing.We find resilience in the full acceptance of what is, and in the creative pursuit of what can be, especially in community.
Sharing my uncertainty and grief with others doesn’t diminish my capacity for change and growth. It expands it.When we come back to community, we realize that the weight of our own and the world’s problems is not just for us to bear alone, and at the same time, our seemingly meager contribution in the grand scheme of things is not insignificant.
Heeding the callI started dropping by Good Food Sundays late last year, and having conversations with old friends and new ones. I joined some workshops and community conversations as a participant. Earlier this year, I began hosting those community conversations — with Ugnayan Cards and Silent Book Club Manila.I wanted to continue expanding my definition of community and perspectives on solidarity even more. I sought to support their work with Food Today, Food Tomorrow by helping raise funds, and by joining visits to the communities they serve — from the urban poor communities in Payatas and Bagong Silangan, Quezon City, to the political prisoners at the Correctional Institute for Women in Mandaluyong.
I felt a call back to community, and heeding that call is one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. While I’m still navigating my place in this garden, I’m reminded that we don’t find our place in sowing seeds of change by sitting back and waiting for answers, but by living the questions, as Rilke said.
✽ What do I want to compost from my past experiences?
✽ Which perspectives of mine need expanding? Which ones need pruning?
✽ What if I didn’t have to bury myself alone with my worries and fears?
✽ What does a good life or a thriving garden look like to me today?
✽ What environments help me explore what it means to flourish, individually and collectively?I join these FTFT community visits not because I think I can “save” anyone, but because they (the communities and the FTFT team) inspire me with their collective care for each other. They teach me what it means to persist, against the odds, so that everyone will have access to health, justice and dignity.I don’t think my activism compares to theirs, and I have much to learn from them, but my expression of activism is still growing and evolving in this garden. We find our own ways and our own seasons to bloom and bear fruit. But we need to remember that our presence here matters, that we have as much a role in the flourishing in this garden, as much as we need it to nourish us and remind us what it feels like to be alive.
The garden is waiting.
Jen Horn (@jenhorn_ / @pagbubuo) is a facilitator, coach and writer, born and raised in the Philippines. She cultivates connection through spaces for reflection and conversation as one of the co-creators of Ugnayan Cards, as a human-centered coach at Haraya Coaching, and as chapter lead of Culture First Manila, so that individuals and teams can unblock courageous and joyful flow. Her curiosities and practice lie in the intersections of culture, creativity, and the wellbeing of the individual, communities and the planet. This compelled her to become an FTFT volunteer, and she’s since helped raise awareness and funds for our community kitchens and community gardens in Quezon City. Learn more about how you can also support the movement here.Join us at our next Kusinang Bayan and Agroecology Workshop on June 29 (Saturday) at Bagong Silangan, Quezon City. You may sign up through our volunteer form to receive more info. See you!
Module 1: Introduction to Agroecology
Agroecology is more than a way to grow food. Yes, it is an applied science that uses a holistic approach to agro-ecosystem and food systems, with its set of regenerative and ecological principles and practices. But more than this, agroecology is a socio-political movement that connects these principles and practices to the broader goal of systemic change. It is a tool for organizing to fight the growing hold of corporations on our food system.Agroecology works to shift the power from global corporate agribusinesses and industrial food chain to the small food producers. The industrial food chain uses 75% of the world’s agricultural resources while feeding only 30% of the world’s population, while peasant farmers are actually responsible for feeding 70% of the world while using only 25% of resources. And yet, the small farmers, continue to remain powerless and marginalized. The corporate food system is also implicated in numerous existential threats facing the world today such as the climate emergency, the double crises of malnutrition and obesity, and growing inequities.As a holistic approach to farming, agroecology, according to Pesticide Action Network - Asia Pacific, recognizes people and communities as part of the agroecosystem, seeking “to establish system equilibrium by supporting reciprocal relationships among the agroecosystem’s components, the natural world and the society in which we live.” According to PANAP, agroecology has five guiding principles:
Puts farmers first
Promotes soil health, biodiversity, and natural ecosystem function
Integrates science with knowledge and practice
Promotes complexity over simplicity
Minimises waste and optimises energy use