Choy Commons

About the Organization:

Choy Commons envisions a future where AAPI communities are farming in rhythm with seasons, restoring reciprocal relationships with land, regionally adapting ancestral foodways for future generations, and ensuring food security for AAPI households. We strengthen relationships between growers and communities primarily through community farming experiences, market gatherings, preserving ancestral foodways, facilitating community education, and storytelling.

The Issue:

Choy Commons seeks to address food justice for AAPI farmers and food insecure AAPI communities in New York. Food insecurity within Asian America is culturally complex. Those in poverty suffer in relative silence due to patterns obscured within data aggregation, language and cultural barriers, and resulting oversight in social services. The model minority myth has led to the perception that few Asian Americans have difficulty affording or accessing the food they need. Furthermore, the perception of Asian America as a monolith has metastasized into viewing Chinese communities through single neighborhoods, to the detriment of those outside of a singular “Chinatown”. In the study Hidden in Plain Sight: Asian Poverty in the New York Metro Area (2021) conducted by Asian American Federation from 2010 to 2019, the number of Asian Americans living in poverty increased from 252,000 to almost 290,000. Despite a lower density, Asian American poverty surged the most in the Hudson Valley, where the total Asian American population grew by 16 percent but the number of low-income Asian Americans increased by 86 percent.

Racism is foundational in today’s food system, which explains why communities of color suffer the most from resource inequality and environmental externalities and why most organic farming is mostly done by white people for other white people. Less than 1% of farmers in the United States identify as Asian. As AAPI farmers, we endure physical and emotional pain and hardship, and take uncommon risks to survive as small-scale growers. As a community, we endure an increasing number of challenges that increase our levels of stress (e.g small business risks, labor shortage, climate crisis, lack of financial security, inaccessible USDA support for small-scale BIPOC farmers, affordable housing). We want farming to be work that preserves rather than destroys us, but struggle against a market where pricing does not reflect the value of our labor alongside inflation, infrastructure, and distribution barriers. Our organization seeks to weave a community web of producers and consumers, where one hand feeds the other and isolated parts can combine their mutual power to uplift our region’s food system and wellbeing.

The Solution:

We are seeking support to help fund the operational costs of our Choy Commons Wholesale program and Community Farm Crew work days. The Wholesale program builds capacity for Asian-led farms in our network by consolidating the harvest lists of Gentle Time Farm, Star Route Farm, and Choy Division, three Asian-led farms located in the Hudson Valley. Buyers of locally grown Asian produce can source from one place while conserving farmer resources through consolidated collaboration on outreach, logistics, and buyer relations. We are focused on working with buyers who serve Asian diaspora or want to support Asian-led farms. In solidarity, we offer discounted community pricing for partner AAPI food access buyers, including Heart of Dinner, Send Chinatown Love, Red Canary Song, Asian Americans for Equality, and Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram.

The Choy Commons Community Farm Crew is a group of verified, values-aligned volunteers to call upon when farms in our network are in need of extra hands and support. These opportunities prioritize people who identify as AAPI. People in the city have less opportunity to know farmers or experience farming; these experiences will allow people to connect with farmers, grow their ancestral foods, practice land-based traditions, be in relationship with land, and build a greater sense of belonging to a community who share their values and vision. The farmers will benefit from the extra physical help and spiritual support while getting to know those they serve. We are offering this program to weave sustaining relationships between farms and community members beyond one-off volunteering. Through the success of our multiple on-farm gleaning projects last year, we believe this effort will be another way in which we create an integrated food system through collective care.

We also provide culturally relevant produce for organizations with related missions that focus on food access for the AAPI community, such as a pilot CSA program developed in partnership with Gentle Time Farm and Asian Americans For Equality to serve the East Harlem AAPI senior community who currently travel cross-borough to buy their groceries. We will be serving 100-400 families weekly through the season.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.