A self-declared homegrown Buckeye, Yolanda Owens has been contributing to the central Ohio community from a young age.
Today, the Pickerington resident and mom of two is juggling a number of roles in her many communities – she’s the president of the alumni board for The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; she’s one of the founding members of the Black Lactation Circle; she’s helping build the Wigwam Community Gardens in Violet Township and, on top of all that, she owns her own small business, Forage + Black, selling agriculture-themed apparel and goods.
Raymond G. LaVoie
Among all her involvements, it’s pretty clear Owens’ passions lie with cultivating plants and people. Each of her communities share a central theme of feeding others.
“From a young age, I’ve always had a really great relationship with food,” she says.
Growing up, Owens’ parents and grandparents knew the value of getting out into the garden and knowing how to grow their own food, and instilled those values in Owens and her siblings, too.
“When I was growing up, we actually used to belong to a coop, a fruit and vegetable co-op,” she says. “That’s so cool nowadays, but I used to be really embarrassed by it. All my friends, they would go to Kroger or Big Bear back then, but we got our fruits and vegetables in a box.”
Owens pursued a degree in agricultural communication, specializing in international, social and economic development at OSU, with the original goal of working for a non-governmental organization like USAID to help developing countries become economically stable. That all changed when she began working for the Godman Guild Association in Columbus after graduating.
“When I started working there was when I really realized the issues and inequities that we have here in our own food system and our own agricultural system,” she says, “and I was like, I can’t try to go save the world when my home is messed up.”
Owens worked with local kids, teaching them about where their food comes from, showing them how to work in the community garden at Weinland Park and using her OSU connections to take them on field trips to the Waterman Dairy Farm.
When COVID-19 hit, Owens decided to leave her job to help her 5-year-old daughter with school, but her passion for connecting people with agricultural spaces only grew. In early fall 2020, she opened her store, Forage + Black. In October, she gave a TEDx Talk titled Agricultural Education: A Love Story to share her journey.
“I talked to my husband and he said, ‘It’s great that you did this TEDx Talk about your passion and connecting these dots for kids and bringing them into that space, but now is the opportunity to do it,’” she says. “So, that was part of me trying to get more into finding the spaces that I needed to be in to be able to bring BIPOC voices into the spaces I have the privilege to be in, mainly because of my role as the (OSU College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences) alumni society president.”
That was when Owens began focusing more on Forage + Black and promoting the value in reconnecting with agriculture.
Digging In
When Owens started Forage + Black, her idea was to use punny T-shirts to connect the dots between the intersection of Black culture and green thumbs.
“As a communications person and as a person who loves food, I love a good pun,” she says. “I remember coming up with the concept, … and I was like, ‘I think these could be great conversation starters.’”
And that conversation began with the idea that there is space in the garden for people of color, too – an idea that many unfortunately don’t know or realize. Owens says this disconnect exists for a very clear yet troubling reason.
“You know, the average farmer is a 66-year-old white male,” she says. “So, (Forage + Black is about) reconnecting in that space and knowing the trauma that goes into reconnecting into that space because there’s a big disconnect that we can’t ignore, and that’s slavery.”
Beyond reconnecting people of color with green spaces, Owens also found and created community with other Black moms in central Ohio. When she had her first daughter, Cooper, in 2015, Owens attended a breastfeeding support group at the hospital where she gave birth, and walked in to find she was the only Black woman in the room. Through the graces of social media and her friends in Pickerington, she found she wasn’t alone in that experience, so she started meeting with a few other moms to connect about this.
“We created a group called Black Lactation Circle,” she says. “That was back in October of 2015 and now we have nearly 900 women in this group, all women who are Black breastfeeding moms who live here in central Ohio and a number of them actually live here in Pickerington.”
The group got national attention in 2019 when Owens and co-founder Khadija Adams spoke about it on NPR’s StoryCorps, and that was when the impact of the Black Lactation Circle really hit home for Owens.
“(Adams) was like, ‘I need you to realize we are impacting an entire generation. A lot of the moms in this group were not breastfed because of the disconnect of breastfeeding,’” says Owens. “Yet another traumatic relationship to something that should be so natural that was broken with slavery and wet nursing. She said, ‘We’re able to help reconnect these women to this space and we are impacting women who have given birth to multiple children and have been able to breastfeed multiple children, and now breastfeeding for those children is the norm.’ And that blew my mind.”
Owens’ daughters, Charlize and Cooper, are her own “little boss ladies,” she says, because their initials are CEO. They were a major reason why Owens and her husband Cedric chose Pickerington as the city to raise their family.
“The biggest thing for us was to look for an area that had both good schools and diversity,” Owens says. “We didn’t want our children to feel like they were tokenized or like they had to speak for every Black child.”
Living in Pickerington has exceeded the Owens’ expectations.
“We have amazing neighbors,” says Owens. “The fact that I exchanged gifts for Christmas with my neighbors – I just never thought that I would be there.”
In all her involvements throughout Pickerington and central Ohio, Owens is glad to have a seat at the table and use her passion to amplify not only her own voice, but the voices of those around her.
“I can’t speak for every single person,” she says, “but for some of the concerns that I see my community have or the inequities, I feel like it’s my job to make sure that I take up space and make sure that our voices are heard.”
Sarah Robinson is an editor. Feedback welcome at srobinson@cityscenemediagroup.com.
