Media

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Sean spoke to Community Access C Magazine to honor and celebrate 25 Years of the Howie the Harp Advocacy Center. And to showcase Brain Food Garden Projects message.

Announcement of Partnership with Surviving Race: The Intersection of Injustice, Disability, and Human Rights

Brain Food Garden Project is pleased to announce our partnership with Surviving Race: The Intersection of Injustice, Disability, and Human Rights. In addition to BFGP bringing Feeding Our Mental Health dialogues and programming to Surviving Race’s digital platforms. Surviving Race will assist BFGP in continuing to ensure that our programming is more thoughtful and deliberate as our organization continues to develop and grow. Surviving Race will expand and add to our knowledge regarding institutional racism and the role of trauma seen through the lens of historical racism and its affects on all people of color. surviving Race will also assist BFGP with expanding our mission statement to ensure that this greater inclusivity is a vital and important part of our work moving forward. As BFGP continues our mission to promote gardening and making healthier eating choices vital and important tools for mental health recovery, it is important now more than ever that we as an organization bring as many people into green spaces to connect, garden, and grow as possible.

As well, we are pleased to announce that one of the founding members of Surviving Race Jen Padron has agreed to join BFGP’s Advisory Board to provide further assistance with ensuring Surviving Race and BFGP’s missions and work continue to align.

The Mission of Surviving Race

Create and support local and national anti-racist activities to expose and eliminate police killings, police brutality and mass incarceration generally and specifically as they relate to psychiatry/‘mental health’ and the survivor/human rights movements. We aim to shut down the pipelines that carry far too many People of Color starting in pre-school directly into foster care, mass incarceration and psychiatric confinement.

We require both a macro and micro perspective in our actions of addressing racism both at the macro level, socially, within society and at the micro level within our own movements. Standardly, we address the economic incentives of psychiatry and the economic struggles of those subjected to psychiatry.

Support People of Color in Leadership Roles in Our Movement(s)

People of Color who are overwhelmingly represented in psychiatry, and institutionalized (and particularly court-ordered psychiatry) must also be overwhelmingly overrepresented in leadership positions in the Peer industry and organizations set up as alternatives to psychiatry and advocacy and activism in the various human rights movements.

BFGP’s Statement of Support for Black Lives Matter & Trans Lives Matter

Brain Food Garden Project founder and executive director Sean Brennan believes that long unacknowledged and unchecked white privilege is one of the significant root factors for massive food inequality in America and around the world. Sean is also firmly aware that structural racism is why farming in the United States is disproportionately white and understands how it has had a profound impact on who owns, accesses, and benefits from farmland. However, Sean’s belief is resolute that all forms of farming, urban farm collectives, gardening, and growing food for our communities are intended to be the healing spaces to inspire and grow the power of intersectionality throughout humanity. Brain Food Garden Project not only acknowledges these issues but is in the fight to change these inequalities and make gardening and growing food more accessible to all.

Brain Food Garden Project stands in solidarity with the protestors and activists demanding the end to police violence against Black people and other communities of color as well as an end to the racism and white supremacy that have infected the United States for so long. With them, we mourn the deaths of Riah Milton, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and so many others. With them, we too insist that Black Lives Matter and that Trans Lives Matter.

Brain Food Garden Project will continue to serve the incredibly diverse mental health peer community with love, light, and healing and to create safe spaces for everyone to connect, garden, and grow together. We will strive to form partnerships that honor all people and honor our mission of creating one of the most diverse all-female advisory boards and eventual board of directors in the nation, putting our beliefs into action that the white male patriarchy’s time is at an end.

Sean spoke to Community Access’s C Magazine about his time attending and graduating from the Howie The Harp Advocacy Center and how his time with the program informs his work with Brain Food Garden Project.