Women in leadership.

A local production of PBS Michiana WNIT is presented in partnership with Mr. Jerry Hammes Mr. Hammes is proud to present this program in memory of his late wife.

Doreen Dwyer Hammes and all the women who continue to impact our community for the better.

Additional funding provided by NIPSCO.

The South Bend Clinic and First Source Bank.

Thank you.

Women in Leadership showcases the dynamic talent of three Michiana women pioneers in business, industry or leadership positions in their community, demonstrating their struggles and triumphs.

I'm a woman farmer, which is really unusual, and I've always had an interest in plants and food and growing things.

Even in college, I started researching how to do a lot of things on my own.

Learning traditional skills, learning how to make and grow things, start picking up books.

And I just always had this dream in my mind of moving out into the country and having the big farm and doing everything myself.

And and obviously God had other plans for me because here I am in the middle of a city.

But this is where I was meant to be, like here actually running an urban farm and not just feeding my family, but feeding my whole community.

My farm Sunchoke Farms, is an urban farm in the near Northwest neighborhood, and we have four different urban lots that we're currently working off of.

And all together we estimate it's probably just about under an acre of production, but this under an acre of production is really, really productive and the amount of food that we're able to grow.

So we supply food for two area farmers markets.

And then in the summer, spring and fall, we have a CSA program.

Our summer CSA had close to 50 families participating so that in addition to our own, like we're feeding a lot of people on a small space by using efficient methods and just farming close together.

When you're in a big farm field, like you use big machinery and we don't use big machinery, we farm on a very human scale so we don't have to leave space for tractors to get through or big diesel hogging machines to get through.

We just need space for a person to get through, which means we have a lot less wasted space.

We can put more food in the same amount of space because we're not leaving space for big machinery.

So yeah, we would say that we farm on a human scale.

I love people, I really love people and I love feeding people.

See, I was motivated just to step up and do this, both for my love of farming, love of gardening, love of food, but yes, also because of my love of people and that I love feeding them and I love seeing the joy on people's faces when they're able to receive like good fresh food because fresh food just tastes better.

And I think that it brings people joy to have something new and fresh and something that they know that was grown in their neighborhood by someone that they care about, who put a lot of love and what they do.

People tell me that they can feel the love and the food and then they pass that love on to their friends and family as they prepare the food and there's just something really special about that.

I have experienced some resistance, but it has been more stereotypical resistance.

I feel like as a woman farmer and as an urban farmer.

So I'm doing three like really weird things in my life.

I have an urban farm, which is really unusual.

I'm a woman farmer, which is really unusual, and I have a large family, which is really unusual.

So people look at me and say, That's weird, how can you do that?

And I say, Well, I just I do it because I love it and I want to do it.

And so the resistance I get is more of, you know, this is really strange and unusual.

I will occasionally get resistance from other male farmers who maybe haven't gotten to know me yet.

Once they get to know me, the resistance goes away.

They realize, Yeah, she's a real farmer.

She knows what she's talking about.

But I think there's always that stereotype there that, you know, how could that woman do that?

She probably doesn't really know anything.

But once they get to know me and they realize, you know, I talk the talk and I walk the walk, then then that stereotype kind of dissipates.

She manages to balance personal life, career and her passion for farming.

I find that they all kind of meld together because that says urban farm right by my house.

It's a family farm.

My family can all work with me to some extent.

Now, obviously, my two year old, not so much.

She'll go and pull all the carrots before they're ready because it's so much fun to do.

But my older children all have small jobs to do and they help out.

And we just make the family life revolve around the different seasons on the farm.

My passion is farming and my passion is food, and so here I am with it.

Sometimes I wish I had more time.

I think we all wish we had more time.

Sometimes you know, when the tomatoes are ripe and I want to make bruschetta and put it in the freezer for winter, you know, sometimes I have time to do it and sometimes I don't.

But I think the most important thing is just be gentle with yourself and be thankful for the things that you can do.

And I'm definitely so thankful for all that I'm able to accomplish with the time that I have.

And beyond tending to her own community garden, much of her time is spent supporting other women in agriculture.

It's actually really hard, I feel, these days, for women to support other women in agriculture because there's not that many of us.

So I've definitely made connections with Purdue Extension and help them with their Annie's project, which is meant to support women in agriculture.

And then beyond that, I've just gotten to know other women farmers and talk to them.

And the more that you can talk to your peers in your same fields and share your struggles and share your triumphs and work together, I think the better off we are.

I've also become really good friends with other women entrepreneurs that aren't in agriculture, and we've been able to work together.

Local caterers who are women entrepreneurs, local shop owners, and then we're able to support each other, whether it's buying each other's products or advertising for each other, or having some sort of collaboration together.

I've just been amazed at all the women owners, business owners that I've been able to collaborate with here in South Bend.

So if a woman wants to get started in agriculture or really any other field, then she just has to try.

I mean, this is a big thing from the beginning.

I have been trying and learning for over a decade before I even had or started my urban farm.

And honestly, I've messed up a lot.

I've bought things that I didn't need.

I've sown things at the wrong season, I've messed up starts, I've wasted time, I've wasted money.

But the idea is not to look at all the bad things that I've done or the things that I've done wrong.

But to look at the things that I've done right, to learn from the mistakes and then just to keep trying, it's the perseverance that will actually help you win in the end.

We started to learn that like growing food and agriculture and like building gardens was like ancestral and generational for us.

My grandparents, great grandparents and whatnot where we're farmers.

And so my family were sharecroppers.

So a lot of that, a lot of that work that's for us to be tied to the land comes through our familial side.

It's really funny because I wanted to be a scientist, and so from the age of 9 to 25, I wanted to be a scientist.

I specifically wanted to be a biochemical engineer.

And I went to work for Eli Lilly, and all of those dreams fall apart.

So because there really wasn't any space for women of color, especially black women in STEM fields.

Right.

So you didn't have a lot, especially growing up in being born and raised in northwest Indiana, especially in Michigan City, there was no there wasn't a black women scientist.

There was no mentorships.

There were no one there was no one that you could connect to that had those similar interests.

So when I would go to different like different college interviews or whatnot and whatnot that were set up or through my high school, they were like, We don't have space for you.

Like, your dreams are too aspirational.

We don't have space for you.

And that's something that I've been hearing my entire life.

Your dreams are too big, so that's really funny.

My my role in agriculture has completely morphed over the last ten years.

So I started off as a community organizer around just trying to implement and address a single issue, which was food security in my neighborhood of Eastport in Michigan City.

And so when we lost our grocery store, I was really interested in before we lost our grocery store that had been a part of our a staple of our neighborhood for decades.

I was really interested in the concept of community gardening, and so it took me forever to be connected to community gardens because again, there was no space for women of color, especially black women in agriculture.

And so then learning about those historical challenges where really only 1% of black farmers have land access land is is acquired and pretty much owned and access predominantly by white farmers like at least 98 to 99% of land.

And so through out basically throughout history we have continued as black farmers and black land stewards have continued to lose land or have not or have been had have experienced institutional systemic barriers that has kept us from having land access.

So now my role in agriculture is basically looking out for urban and rural farmers, especially in the state of Indiana, that need more resources or communities that need access to food.

So looking at different resources, working with different farmers, creating different platforms in programing and allocating transformative investments directly into disinvested communities that live under food apartheid.

I'm one of the co-founders of the Northwest Indiana Food Council, so that Council was founded in 2015 and at the time I was a student at DePaul, so I was still very much learning about food systems and learning how, you know, what my role was, what my space was.

And I'll never forget when I was a service learning coordinator at the at the Steans Center that's run by Dr. Howard Rosing, who was one of my research advisors, sat next to me one day and we were kind of chopping up.

And Dr. Rosing says, Well, you know, you want a community garden, but does the community need a community garden?

And then of course that blew my mind.

And so there's been a lot of players throughout my my role in becoming basically as expert in foods and local and regional food systems.

So in one of those primary organizations has been institutionally and organizationally has been DePaul University, has been Northwest, Indiana Food Council has been the city here has been the project that I manage in Michigan City, which is the Waukesha Park Community Garden.

I started with the city of South Bend in 2020 and then working to develop a program around food security work here in the city, which is the Linden Avenue pop up markets.

And so what the Linden Avenue pop up markets, even this year we've engaged almost a thousand residents around food security work.

So and we are basically created an amazing platform for small businesses, especially black and minority and women owned businesses and black artists to showcase their talents, to provide a market for them to directly from producer to consumer.

And then there's a little bit of everything for everyone, including access to fresh, affordable food, making sure that there are no barriers to to access.

So we're also making sure that we're driving access, we're driving engagement, we're driving affordability, we're making sure that we are decreasing those blocks and those barriers that the West Side, the residents of the West Side have asked for if they wanted.

And our work comes out of the 2018 West Side qualitative study, where residents identified that they want to access to a grocery store and they also want to access to community space.

So we're like, so what we did was we are utilizing currently the corner of Linden Avenue, Birdsell, which is connected to the Martin Luther King Center, which will be revitalized starting this year.

And so not only are we giving rise to so many different things, but we're also giving rise to economic revitalization of our previously disinvested black businesses district.

I believe that what motivated me to step into a leadership role is the lack of leadership and mentorship throughout my previous professional and personal and academic pursuits.

Right?

So looking at some of the leaders that I've had to either work under worked directly with, that made it more challenging to be able to to grow professionally.

So and I always kind of think back to a lot of my my bad bosses, right?

And I say, Man, I never want to be like that, boss man.

I never want to be I will never want to make my employees feel othered or isolated.

So I have to be my own leader and I have to lead by example.

Like all civically engaged people, Dominique often struggles with demands on her time.

It's a little hard, right?

Especially when you have a lot of things that are like super intense.

So, you know, this week we have we are going to be out in the field every single day, every single night this week trying to build our financial empowerment blueprint for the city.

And there is there's really no balance, right, other than in sometimes I think my balance is like, man, today it was a really, really intense day.

I'm going to go just like decompress and like, maybe maybe just sit in the dark for a little while where I don't have like, where I'm not connected to technology.

Right?

Because you always have your phone in your hand.

You're always in front of a computer or you're in front of cameras.

Right.

And so you have to like you said, there's you eventually find a balance.

You have to find a balance.

So that you don't get burnt out.

But she always has time to spare for engaging with women facing challenges.

I'm starting school at the end of the month for my Ph.D. program, and my colleague and I were joking earlier were like, Should we just put some cry sessions on our calendar?

so we're going to have a graduate school cry sessions that we have together.

Yeah, so there is.

But I think that the way in which other women support other women is to identify that like mindedness and find those similar parallels and then, you know, find ways in which that you can connect with my current work, it's all very community level, right to working directly in communities better understanding what the needs of residents are, better understanding what that kind of policy landscape looks like, what that programmatic landscape looks like and how do we take all of that education and the theory and principle and apply it in real life?

And so I think that the the topics that I'll be learning and the things that I'll be learning throughout my coursework will be will better assess the work that we do directly in the community.

Unity Gardens started by accident.

It was a combination of so many things, primarily my work as a public health nurse where I would be teaching at Saint Mary's and taking my students out to places where people would get resources, people in poverty.

My thesis was on the culture of socioeconomic class and how that effects wellness.

And so what we were teaching was not just the basics of good nutrition, blood pressure, that kind of thing, but literally the cultural factors that lead to wellness.

So as we were going to let's say Broadway Christian Parish or Our Lady of the Road or other places where people would get food, what we noticed is people were being handed biscuits and gravy, high fat foods, high salt foods that lead straight to the exact strokes, diabetes, etc.

that we're trying to prevent.

And so it's kind of one of those weird aha moments where I was like, what if I did a garden?

My mother is exceedingly healthy.

Ancestrally we grew up growing and eating fruits and vegetables and exercising a lot.

I think we're just programed to be out in the dirt.

And so when you have that culture, you've got a leg up.

Health and wellness wise, of course, being a nurse, I've honed that interest in wellness and the nurse's jurisdiction is wellness.

It's not a recovery from illness like the physician's.

We have our own license so that we can help people navigate.

So that makes total sense.

I also have five generations in my family of growing my role in agriculture is interesting because agriculture is pretty multifaceted.

You know, we think of corn and soybeans, and I don't have a lot of interconnection there except when it's about environmental sustainability.

So agriculture can be health and wellness and eating.

It can be growing and environmental consciousness and it can even be nurturing each other.

So we kind of have a lot of intersections.

We've gotten honored at the Soil Water Conservation District, which usually interacts with traditional farmers for our water friendly or sustainable practices.

As we look at water conservation or cover crops or natural ways of growing, you know, we can afford to take those chances because of who we are in the scale.

So that's one way that my role in agriculture is, is to be able to be an example of different ways of doing things nontraditional.

Another one is that put a seed in the ground and it will grow.

Being able to connect people to the joy of gardening, not farming necessarily, although they could take it that far.

And I guess we have.

But just that joy of nurturing something from just a little seed to a plant to then something that also nourishes you is a beautiful dance of life.

A dance with a deeper meaning than what meets the eye.

I have the self-efficacy to advocate for others.

It's my passion.

My passion isn't necessarily food or healthy living or any of that, but to help others journey is.

And so being able to create meaningful employment and fresh healthy food for everyone and a journey of wellness, togetherness, you know, all of that matters to me.

I mean, think about the way we value independence and pulling yourself up from your own bootstraps and all of that is a fallacy.

And it's it's fantasy to think that any of us are self-made.

And yet the idea of free food for everyone, like what's in it for me?

Or how are you going to make money?

Or and if I was a bit more of a planner, I guess that would have occurred to me.

Thank goodness I'm not.

And somehow all of this grew, but not because of my efforts, but because of all those who dared to believe it was possible.

And that continues to happen.

Every miracle you see here, whether it's a big, huge building where we have real offices and toilets that flush after 14 years or, you know, a garden that's so prolific of seven acres or 44 of the gardens of volunteers run.

The reason it exists is because of so many people volunteering their time and believing it's possible.

And it takes a commitment of time, talent and energy.

You do not go into something of this nature thinking you want to work 20 hours a week and not have a boss.

Everyone is your boss because everyone controls your destiny and there's no limit to the number of hours.

So that worked for me because at the time Unity Gardens happened, I was a single mother of four children and it was time to teach my middle school and high school children that it's not all about yourself, that you know, you're not just chasing the dollar or what you can give yourself.

Security is good, but your your quality of life has to do with what you can give to others.

So it was beautiful to be able to have them involved in this and spend time outdoors growing.

And all of them have remained here and they're jumping in and enjoying or my work as a nurse.

Your commitment to health and wellness or as a professor where you're teaching others in their journey of wellness or as a Buddhist, where the fundamental belief is that we're all one and we're all connected.

So when you talk about women in agriculture, it would be easy to paint this picture of a minority group that doesn't always get the same networking opportunities as others.

But by the mere fact of what I do versus a soybean farmer, you know, it's not the same thing, but no one's journey is.

And so I think that the overarching takeaway would be networking occurs everywhere that you're open.

And so I'm not sure it's a woman's journey, but all of our journey, the difference might be in generational Segways and some of that.

But I don't think there's a lot other than that that my femaleness changes when people interact with Unity Gardens.

We want to make sure they come away feeling more enriched.

Every interaction should be something that either keeps on going back or is part of their positive journey.

And in that way, then we're affecting a ripple effect of kindness and good in the world.

The USDA Census reveals that 36% of American farmers are women and 56% of all farms have at least one female decision maker.

These 3 Michiana women in agriculture are making a difference in the hard fight against food insecurity.

There's been many times in the last over ten years of me doing this work that, if you will, you will experience burnout, you will experience disappointment.

And so even though I over the years have like taken a break, I've never quit for some reason I've picked it back up and I've like driven back into it.

I have tons of advice for people starting gardening, and many of the women in agriculture have taken part of our journey, whether that was taking our classes or volunteering or in fact, every single person who you're likely to run into in agriculture has had a piece of this story.

To be a woman business owner, to be a woman farmer, to have a big family like it's okay, people don't judge you here for things like that.

They they applaud you.

They don't judge you.

And so it's a great place to do this sort of thing.

And then it all just blossoms and I'll blossom from there and.

Women in Leadership.

A local production of PBS Michiana WNIT, has been presented in partnership with Mr. Jerry Hammes Mr. Hammes is proud to support this program in memory of his late wife, Doreen Dwyer Hammes and all the women who continue to impact our community for the better.

Additional funding provided by.

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This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

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