Under warm, sunny skies on Saturday morning, Oct. 22, roughly 100 volunteers gathered on the last operating farm in San Francisco — the Florence Fang Community Farm — to install a new state-of-the-art and much-needed upgrade to its irrigation system.
The one-acre farm sits atop of a functioning Caltrain tunnel surrounded by dense housing units in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. It’s a green-space oasis, a fertile spot in an area the USDA dubbed a “food desert” due to its lack of available healthy foods.
With much of the West undergoing a severe drought, the new irrigation system will be water-efficient and help the farm continue its mission: to provide fresh produce and other staples to a diverse and underserved community.
The group of volunteers who showed up Saturday morning “are just a godsend that has come to us right at the time that we needed it,” Teddy Fang, the farm’s executive director and son of its namesake, told the Church’s Newsroom.
Saturday’s community service event was the first of many planned collaborations between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in cities across North America.
Last year, the Church pledged $2 million a year for three years to help fund these type of joint projects.
“This is a wonderful day,” said Elder Patrick Kearon of the Presidency of the Seventy. “We’re here from all kinds of backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, all working together to make this extraordinary garden a better place. … We’re looking at problems together and here we are actually working on solutions and that’s wonderfully symbolic, but utterly practical as well. And we hope there’s more of this.”
Elder Mark A. Bragg, North America West Area president and a native Californian, added: “What touched me was not just the community and not just the diversity of the people that are here, but the diversity of what they’re doing here. You’ve got crops here. You’ve got chicken production. You’ve got honey. You’ve got organic farming. I just love how they brought everything together, and it truly represents this area. I couldn’t think of a better project to start on than this one.”
The inaugural service project was chosen in honor of the Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown, a renowned civil rights leader and pastor of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and a friend of President Russell M. Nelson.
Jay Pimentel, director of Church communication in the North America West Area, explained that the decision to serve at the Fang Community Farm was inspired by the Rev. Brown’s care about interracial communication and cooperation. “He likes this garden because it has an Asian component, it has a Black component, and then also others who live in these neighborhoods that could benefit from having a community garden.”
According to the Fang Community Farm website, the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood is roughly 37% Asian, 23% white and 20% African American, with a 20% Latino population. The farm serves roughly 100 local families.
The hardworking volunteers who supported the service project finished the irrigation installation before noon, providing an estimated 300 hours of labor.
Volunteer Rebecca Jackson commented, “I don’t think there’s anything healthier for the soul than being out in the dirt in the sunshine and doing it with others. It’s just sharing in that joy.”
Jonathan Butler, the second vice president of the NAACP’s San Francisco branch, said such service is critical to solve the “division and isolation that is happening in our communities that is a detriment to our own health and well-being.”
“Love is the essence of what we’re doing,” Butler said. “We love ourselves, and then we love each other. And that is under the umbrella of loving God.”
Veronica Shepard, a director in San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, described Saturday’s service as “kingdom work.”
“We’re lifting up the kingdom of God,” Shepard said. “The vision that I see is that we will learn and engage from each other — cultural norms, understanding cultural experiences, unpacking what we’ve learned about each other, good and bad. And then creating a new narrative that embraces us all for just being the human beings we’ve been created to be on planet Earth so we can then come together and understand our purpose. I’m excited about that.”
The NAACP and the Church of Jesus Christ have been in close collaboration for nearly five years. The organizations came together in May 2018 to call for greater civility and racial harmony in society. President Nelson spoke at an NAACP national convention in 2019.
On June 14, 2021, the First Presidency announced education and humanitarian initiatives as part of an ongoing partnership between the Church and the NAACP.
The initiatives were threefold: First, the Church pledged $2 million per year for the next three years “to encourage service and help to those in need” and promote self-reliance.
Second, Latter-day Saints committed to fund a $1 million scholarship donation per year for three years, overseen by the United Negro College Fund.
Third, the Church donated $250,000 to create the Amos C. Brown Student Fellowship to Ghana — allowing students from the United States to learn more about their heritage.
In August of this year, 43 university students from the United States began a 10-day trip to Ghana as participants in the inaugural Amos C. Brown Fellowship.
