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Our translocal membership program’s expansion within recent months has brought Ujima into contact with brilliant thought leaders and partners from across the country.
GrowHouse NYC is a community design and development cooperative that empowers Black communities in Brooklyn to design safe, brave, and flourishing communities.
Their vision is for Black communities to be sovereign, connected, and thriving. To make this vision a reality, GrowHouse helps communities to cooperatively organize, design, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward many forms of wealth (including real estate, cultural institutions, and culture production).
We spoke with Shanna Sabio–co-founder and co-director of GrowHouse–about how GrowHouse approaches its mission and vision concretely, and how relationships form seeds for collective growth.
Ujima: How and when did GrowHouse start, and what led you to its current incarnation as a community development initiative?
Shanna Sabio: We started around 2017, really informally as an arts organization. My son and I were living in Bed-Stuy at the time–a very rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. For the first time in decades, it's less than 50% black. When we started, gentrification was really kicking off, and police would involve themselves in harmless situations–black and brown young people hanging out–because the neighbors didn't feel “safe”. In response, we opened up our home as a safe space for us: our home became the first “GrowHouse,” which was a lab, a workspace, and a play space. We also started to take on travel projects for young folks; we went to Cuba in 2018, Ghana in 2019. In 2020, we were planning to go to Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Nigeria before the pandemic.
When the pandemic hit, we really decided to think more deeply about collective ownership of real estate as an anti-gentrification strategy, and it became a time for us to focus on what change could look like in Brooklyn. That's what we're doing now.
We're still educating within our community about collectivity; in New York–where the real estate market is so speculative–everyone thinks ownership is just a way to get rich, so we're trying really hard to show that the way forward is collective. Most black folks can't afford $900,000 for a house. So if folks wanna own something, we do it as a community. In the meantime, we're still using art as a way to engage our communities.
I was especially intrigued by some of the placemaking work and local narrative/history work in one of your projects, The Corridor, that’s up on your website.
The genesis of The Corridor came from thinking about work which would have been sited at the Flatbush African Burial Ground. The Burial Ground was a lot that was slated for development by New York's Housing Preservation and Development Agency a couple of years ago, and when we first came across it (without knowing about the lot’s history) we thought about becoming one of the developers; it felt like a great place to experiment with community-led development. But we soon learned that the lot was a former burial ground, and switched our approach to awareness-raising because neither we, nor our community, felt we should desecrate this space.
In building a non-extractive cultural economy, we began to plan for the Burial Ground to be a cultural anchor, a place where storytelling would unfold that would enrich the enslavement narrative from trauma to triumph. We started doing historical tours and walks, and we’d get commissioned for them. Then we figured out ways that we could connect contemporary businesses to the Burial Ground, to change its perception from morbidity to a source of legacy .
We had events along the actual corridor that connected the burial ground to a nearby former site of enslavement called Clifford House [hence the name, “The Corridor”], and we ran a youth design competition soliciting art pieces to hang on light poles along the corridor–these light poles will also soon carry augmented reality storytelling features. We want to keep layering connections and context on top of this, as we build an economy where people can get paid to embrace their heritage.
Eventually, the goal is to collectively own properties along The Corridor so that as we implement a narrative strategy for reclaiming black history, we’re also able to implement a business strategy that captures dollars–including dollars from New York’s tourism industry, to funnel capital back to long-term residents. This fall, we hope to begin fundraising for a collectively owned boutique hotel on the corridor–and this hotel could serve multiple purposes, also functioning as a gathering space, gallery space, climate resilience hub, and economy generator for black folks in Brooklyn.
How do community voices come through in GrowHouse's processes? How are community needs or wishes expressed to and through GrowHouse?
We've been holding these monthly meetings, called the Black Utopia Project! They take the form of happy hours, just spaces where people can come, get fed, and engage in conversation. Sometimes we have a specific purpose, other times it's just about being together; through that kind of relationship building, we've been hearing and confirming what our shared needs are. Warner and I are both low-income, queer Black people from Brooklyn, and we are embedded in our communities at these intersections of identities, so we use our personal experiences to inform our work as well. These Black Utopia Project happy hours also function as spaces for us to share our plans, and to receive feedback–we always have folks marking things up, marking our plans up. We create an atmosphere where critique and feedback are always welcome. One of our community agreements is “never shade, always feedback”; we don't want to encourage shadiness that seems to be so popular, but really erodes trust. We support just being direct and offering what works and what doesn't work; in this way, we can reshape culture and relationships.
To briefly circle back to the community development work, where is GrowHouse at vis a vis collective ownership and models for development?
We landed at founding a community land trust, alongside an additional community wealth building initiative (because there's some limits to community land trusts; we find that they do not adequately address the fact that generations upon generations of white families have built wealth in real estate, while Black families have been systematically iced out and stripped of wealth building opportunities). We'll have the CLT as a stabilizing aspect, to provide affordable housing. Once folks are stable and clear of precarity, then through further collective ownership structures, we will invest and grow wealth. For fundraising, we’ll likely be starting with a crowdfunding campaign at the end of this year just to secure properties.
Our long-term vision is to incubate and replicate what we're doing through open source tools and formats that we’re establishing now.
Do you have additional strategies in place for funding beyond crowdfunding? And are there other methods you’re exploring to pool folks' resources?
We’re looking at some foundations that will provide grants to us to do this work, as well as impact investors, but we don't want grant-writing to be our bread and butter and what makes or breaks our programming. That’s why investing in income-generating properties will be crucial. Hopefully those profits will go into a fund like the Ujima Fund, a fund that can invest in community residents with aligned values and great ideas about how to impact where they live.
We definitely wanna make sure that our community residents are eventually the majority owners and funders of our projects; at the same time, Warner and I often talk about how Black and brown communities are always being asked to crowdfund healthcare, crowdfund all of these things. Nevertheless, we're hoping that with the right kind of narrative storytelling, we'll be able to get the bulk of our funding from community residents who will then have active decision-making power, more power than the foundations and impact investors, so we are starting with crowdfunding (with rights, responsibilities, and relationships attached).
How do you envision this trans-local membership with Ujima moving forward?
I’m really just hoping for opportunities for exchange; Boston is not that far. We could come up to Boston, work on some things with you all and learn from your circumstances, and vice versa.
Big dream: Warner is always talking about this mycelium model of growth, these connected corridors and economies across cities such that if you're in Boston, you can experience the Boston Ujima Project and feel the same values and ethos that you would get from a GrowHouse experience in New York, or from other locations around the country. It’s always been about building a Pan-African network of folks who can share and ask questions and brainstorm with each other and learn; that was why we started traveling to the continent before the pandemic.
You've mentioned Warner a couple times, your son, I would love to learn a bit more about Warner's involvement in GrowHouse and what it’s like to found such an enterprise with family.
GrowHouse was really based on his experience and my experience maybe 25 years earlier; we had all of these parallel experiences just divided by generations, so it felt like a no brainer for us to be doing this work together because of the commonalities in our experiences with the education system, with gentrification, and with disenfranchisement.
It's been a growth opportunity for us. It's challenged gender and age dynamics; people are intrigued by it, definitely. Some folks are a bit misogynistic about it, because I'm his mother–you always see father and son organizations. But it's also been great in the way that our intergenerational relationship has become a model for other people: learning goes in both directions. I'm very open to Warner telling me and teaching me. Adults and older folks should be teachable, <laughs>, you know, we've learned a lot of toxic behaviors that younger generations have had the guts to question. And we need to be accountable to them. It's not only a one-way street where elders get respect.
What’s next for GrowHouse?
Events! Every event that we're doing this summer is really about building community relationships that are necessary to sustain community investment: it's one thing to acquire a property, but it's going to take all hands on deck to manage, maintain, and make decisions. We're hoping to bounce questions, ideas, thoughts, concerns off of our Ujima family, um, because you guys have been doing this collective decision-making work.
On July 27th, we’re doing a movie screening of a documentary called The Sun Rises in the East, which is about this organization called The East: a Pan-African cultural and economic powerhouse active in the seventies and eighties in Brooklyn. GrowHouse is modeling itself in part after them, building on their legacy. Two former members of The East will then be on a panel where we’ll talk about lessons learned, and how to not replicate the errors while building on the strengths.
On August 3rd and August 10th, we're having free community dinners! We're going to take over an entire block, lay out a table, and people can get to know their neighbors and continue dreaming and visioning for a Black Brooklyn.
Shanna Sabio (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist and designer, public historian, and lifelong resident of Brooklyn. She is the co-founding director of GrowHouse NYC and Development Group and a co-trustee of the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition. Her work supports building inclusive communities through cooperative economics, public education, and reparative land ownership and stewardship; she invites Black people and their allies to envision and create flourishing and connected communities.
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