El Sobrante food-justice community center, café in works
Church teams with Oakland nonprofit to start retail farm at former Adachi nursery
With luck, the improbable stories of 2021 will be tales of good fortune emerging from last year — despite the rubble of 2020’s tragic pandemic and response, social justice unrest and gaping economic and political divides that threatened our lives and our nation.
These new narratives will be like the one involving Planting Justice, The Good Table United Church of Christ, a land owner and a community that rose up with 900 signatures on a petition to protect a creek and a former ranch and plum orchard in El Sobrante from suburban development and yet another gas station.
On Ohlone land that had since the early 1900s housed the historic, Japanese-American familyowned Adachi Florist & Nursery, Planting Justice is establishing a 4-acre retail farm. On the specific, 1.3acre site that was to be a gas station, the Oakland nonprofit whose mission is to correct perceived inequity in the food distribution system has joined in a unique, intergenerational partnership with members of Good Table UCC. Together, they plan to open a “pay-whatyou-can” café, nursery/farm store, commercial kitchen and a community center offering spiritual programming, heath and wellness education, sustainable agriculture training, arts and music events and more.
Gavin Raders and Haleh Zandi are the co-founders of Planting Justice. After two years of discussions with the land owner about how the nonprofit could buy the land and preserve it for use as a retail nursery, the developer inadvertently played matchmaker.
“The Adachi family had been in business since 1905 — one of the oldest businesses in the (Contra Costa) county and one of the last Japanese nurseries to remain
open,” recalls Raders. “The gas station developer was going to tear down this beautiful building and build yet another gas station, like we need another one of those in El Sobrante. Luckily, in one of those calls he was attempting to light a fire, I believe, and he said, ‘You better make an offer because there’s another organization interested.’ He gave me the name of Rev. Dr. Melinda McLain, pastor at Mira Vista United Church of Christ (which
changed its name in 2020 to The Good Table United Church of Christ). We met to talk about it.”
McLain, whose church members had sold their former church property with intention to enact their values more broadly in the world by investing in a social project that would include buying land and opening a community café and center for spiritual practice, education and outreach, remembers the “magic” of that first meeting.
“They are a millennialled fundraising powerhouse. We are an established organization with older members and a legacy capital. We’ve been around for 70 years, and they’ve been around for 10, so it’s a perfect intergenerational mix of gifts and skills. We have more capital, and they have more energy. We need each other to pull it off.”
The church bought the land; Planting Justice agreed to renovate and run the retail and farm operations. The melding of an older group with a younger group, McLain adds, is rare.
“I’ve been with nonprofits for more than 30 years, in political, arts, spiritual and social justice arenas. I don’t see this model anywhere.”
The plans for spiritual programming include meditation, yoga, a book group and more.
“You don’t have to be a member of the church. It will be beyond ordinary things churches do — like the meditation group I already have that includes atheists, Buddhists as well as Christians,” says McLain.
She says that COVID-19 closures have brought social isolation to the forefront and are a primary reason behind the why and when of opening the center in 2021.
“We’re going to launch this just as we come out of the pandemic and can be together,” she says. “It’s been a great source of hope for me, and it will be a great way to be in community again.”
Raders knew the 4,700-square foot building would be a terrific retail nursery and a strong support vehicle to the East Oakland nursery that Planting Justice already owns and operates. That garden is primarily a mail-order nursery, selling plants and trees while simultaneously fulfilling the organization’s mission to provide full-time, living wage jobs for neighborhood residents, formerly incarcerated people working to reintegrate into society and other people most impacted by food insecurity.
“At our nursery in East Oakland we brought a small family business that