Coming to the table together for food justice

Every Saturday in the summer months, these wheels of hope pull up to the PFC International Farmers Market on Buffalo’s West Side to spread the word of food justice with fresh produce grown by people cast from their homelands and making their way in a new land through food.

Since its founding in 2019, the farm collective has helped hundreds of refugees and immigrants set down roots and find healing through access to farming tools, expertise, land and camaraderie, emerging as a beacon of best practices in small farm startups, regional-scale food justice, and community-building for New Americans.

The successes and struggles of PFC are of interest to scholars and students at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, including those in the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (Food Lab). The school’s faculty and students have written about how PFC has provided access to agricultural opportunities for New Americans and strengthened the regional food system despite facing regulatory.

PFC has also been a site for learning for graduate students in the MS in International Development and Global Health program, some of whom have written their theses about the farm’s work. PFC and the school’s strengthening relationship is a prime example of how the overlapping missions of UB and community entities foster new lines of research and critical experiential student learning.

“Providence Farm Collective exemplifies the very best of community-engaged partnerships. It is not simply a site where we study community-based approaches to addressing challenges; it is a place where community members, practitioners, students, and researchers co-produce knowledge that directly informs policy and practice,” says Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, chair and associate professor of UB’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, a PFC board member and Food Lab faculty affiliate who brings his water governance class to PFC’s Orchard Park farm every year to study its practices.

“Some of our most important research questions have emerged not from the classroom, but from listening to the lived experiences and expertise of PFC's farmers and leaders,” he continues.

“To PFC, food dignity encompasses the full circle of a fair food economy, one that pays farmers fairly and provides healthy, fresh food access for all,” says Kristin Heltman-Weiss, executive director of PFC, adding that it’s important not to let the day-to-day challenges distract from the bigger issues at hand.

While its roots trace back to 2004, PFC was established in 2019 to extend the mission of farmer-led, community-rooted agriculture to the region’s entire community of refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized BIPOC  groups. Today, the collective operates out of a new barn and 37 acres of arable land in Orchard Park thanks to a $2.5 million joint capital campaign with the Western New York Land Conservancy that also supported the purchase of easements to protect the farm in perpetuity from development.

PFC supports 29 small farms, 21 incubator farms, and eight community farms, totaling over 200 farmers working small plots that grow  over 100,000 pounds of produce that feeds more than 14,000 Western New Yorkers every year.

Over the years, PFC and the UB Food Lab have convened around the same growing network of food justice actors across the region to mobilize change. In 2017, Samina Raja, Food Lab principal investigator and UB urban planning professor, worked with United Way of Buffalo & Erie County to support and document the work of a coalition of 13 community organizations, including the Somali Bantu Community Farm and then-emerging PFC, to promote food equity through a $1 million grant supported by the General Mills Foundation.

The startup PFC has since grown to be a powerhouse in the regional food system, working closely with many of the original 13 organizations repeatedly. In 2020, PFC participated in Seeding Resilience, a community-led response to food insecurity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, of which UB Food Lab was a member. PFC has also participated in health and policy conversations for refugees and immigrants through UB’s annual New American Health Summit.

Alexandra Judelsohn, an assistant professor and co-PI of the UB Food Lab, who leads food systems research in partnership with the region’s refugee communities, has written widely about the potential of organizations like PFC. She and Heltman-Weiss are co-authors of a forthcoming PFC case study to be published in the Springer Urban Agriculture book series. The chapter documents how PFC links New American farmers to land and water, cultural connection, and economic opportunities for farmer-led agriculture.

“There are a lot of immigrant and refugee communities in Western New York with agricultural backgrounds. For many, it’s important to grow food that is culturally familiar and which supports their mental and physical health, and communities,” says Judelsohn. “There has been demand for this for so long; other programs have tried and failed. One of the amazing things about PFC is they bridge immigrant communities that wouldn’t otherwise have any interaction.”

Indeed, PFC has developed its governance structure to empower farmers. As of 2025, 61 percent of PFC staff and 35 percent of its board are composed of PFC farmers. 

In a recent paper — Planning for Regional Food Equity (Journal of the American Planning Association) — co-authored by former Food Lab postdoctoral scholar Yeeli Mui, along with other Food Lab scholars including Judelsohn and Raja, the authors report that PFC fills a critical gap in the availability of culturally appropriate foods for New American and underserved populations.

Health disparities faced by the region’s refugee, immigrant and underserved communities is another area of shared interest. For instance, Judelsohn is working with the Massachusetts Avenue Project to lead a second-phase study of refugee and immigrant perceptions and remediation practices around soil contamination in Buffalo, where one-third of the state’s New American population is resettled. The first phase of the project found spatial distribution of lead contamination matching the city’s segregation patterns, with residents largely engaging in self-help actions as well as adverse behaviors like planting directly in the soil.

“Most of those surveyed say they amend their soil because it’s clay, not because it might be contaminated with lead. Many immigrant gardeners are growing directly in the ground, and blood lead levels are higher among immigrant children compared to U.S.-born children,” says Judelsohn. “Unfortunately, much is siloed in our region, and often people aren’t aware of the dangers or the remedies available, including free soil screening resources and safe growing practices like raised garden beds.”

“We’re still a very segmented region, economically and racially,” adds Heltman-Weiss.. “For a lot of people, you don’t know what you don’t see. There are huge needs here.”

Such challenges are exacerbated by the complexity of regional food systems, which encompass physical assets, transportation systems to distribute food, natural resources like soil, water and pollinators, and human resources from farmworkers to food processors to chefs.

In the case of PFC, confusion around its right to access public water is a significant – and unique – example of how the fragmentation of policies governing the food system impedes resilience.

Kate Hays, a graduate of UB’s Master of Urban Planning/Master of Public Health dual degree and now a research associate with the Food Lab, is among a team of Food Lab scholars authoring a paper on the PFC case that will examine local and state-level policies governing water and land use.

“PFC is a novel model. It’s not familiar to local policymakers. The fact that they are providing land to people who would not otherwise have it, and the way they incorporate their farmers into the organization’s leadership structure is unique. This led to confusion about what types of land uses were involved. It wasn’t as cut and dry as local government might like it to be.”

The structural disconnects impeding PFC stirred recent UB graduate Cassie Prinsen so much that she made it the topic of her thesis for the MS in International Development and Global Health program. Prinsen, who also landed a field work placement at PFC through the MSIDGH program and served as a research assistant on UB’s soil health study, said she saw PFC’s story as a window into systemic barriers to environmental justice.

“These challenges stem from structure, but also how that structure has informed people’s thinking. It has created a culture of an absence of farming.” Her thesis recommends local and state budget restructuring to support small farms – particularly regarding land ownership – and community agency through representation on food system governing boards and agencies.

Last year, PFC completed a strategic plan for land acquisition and infrastructure development for small farms and is investigating innovative models from across the United States to protect farmland.

Meanwhile, PFC’s “Food With Dignity” delivery truck is still making its weekly farmers market runs, Judelsohn is ramping up the soil health survey for implementation in the coming months, Hays is pursuing new research on land tenure for small farms, and Prinsen, who graduated in May, is considering either advanced study or a career in the region’s environmental and food justice movement.

“Providence Farm Collective reminds us that food justice is about much more than food. It is about reimagining the institutions that govern land, water, economic opportunity, and belonging,” says Frimpong Boamah.

“The story of Providence Farm Collective demonstrates that some of our greatest innovations emerge when historically excluded communities become leaders in designing solutions,” he adds.

“Our role as planners, design professionals, researchers, and public institutions is not simply to study those innovations, but to learn from them, support them, and help remove the structural barriers that limit their potential. That is the kind of partnership we hope to continue building across our school and the university.”