Project Feed The Hood, our food justice campaign, is designed to increase access to healthy food, with a specific focus on low-income families who often lack access to nutritious food for their children, as part of our work to improve health equity and educational outcomes in our communities. Now in its 10th season, PFTH impacts tens of thousands of young people every year, and has been one of SWOP’s most successful means of developing our members and recruiting new people into the organization. We now work with high school students who first became interested in gardening at school gardens that SWOP built in their elementary schools. We’ve helped create youth jobs, scholarships, and contracts, and now full time jobs for the school district. This work also opens up higher education opportunities, as we’ve shared a vision of food justice as a career pathway. Along with the policies we've passed that support local farmers and growers, our work has also spun off into catering companies and microbusinesses.
SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP) was founded in 1980 with a mission to empower the disenfranchised of the southwest to realize gender and racial equity and social and economic justice. SWOP’s work is built on a foundation of community organizing and mobilization, which means that affected people will continue to identify problems, solutions, and strategies in conjunction with our organizers. Success to us looks like increased community involvement and control over the decision making that affects them. SWOP organizes in low-income communities to develop leaders and solutions, building around identities of workers, healers, educators, growers, families and children. SWOP’s four core issue areas are environmental health and justice in low income communities of color, youth rights with a focus on leadership development, gender justice with a focus on feminisms, and food justice, security and systems throughout New Mexico. We place an emphasis on leadership development with youth organizers from the barrio. Part of the strategic vision of the organization is to invest in our young people, and we are dedicated to an intergenerational approach to community organizing.
211 10th St SW