Why Mount Airy’s Ashley Gripper is teaching Philly residents how to heal as they garden

There are a lot of seeds that led to Land Based Jawns.

One was planted as its founder, Ashley Gripper, read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Gripper, a Philly native who’d migrated to New England for a doctoral program in environmental health at Harvard, picked up the book in December 2019 when her pastor had the church read it together as a congregation.

The science fiction novel, first published in 1993, leaps forward to California in the mid-2020s. Butler’s characters eerily live in a nation whose government is in shreds, enduring the damage of global warming, with its middle class walled off in gated communities. The protagonist is a Black teenager with “hyperempathy,” a disorder that causes her to feel what others feel. She creates her own belief system, Earthseed. And she makes way for another way to live.

“I don’t know how to explain it other than I felt like Octavia was speaking to me,” Gripper said Friday, ahead of the Saturday launch of Land Based Jawns’ new workshop series. “She was laying a roadmap to how we heal, how we get free, how we survive, how we thrive, given the context that we’re in as a society as Black folks in America.”

“That’s when I kind of started to think about, ‘OK, what would it mean for me to know how to grow my own food? What does it mean for me to know how to defend myself?” she explained. “What does it mean for me to live cooperatively with family and friends to work, to care for the land, and work the land, to know how to build, to be an educator, to be all of these things in community with other folks?”

Land Based Jawns offers ways to approach these questions. This interdisciplinary series will cover agricultural skills, food justice, nutrition, environmental health, but also turning to the land for mental health. Participants will learn how to build their own raised beds and get food growing, but they’ll also learn self-defense and self-forgiveness. Gripper has grounded the offerings in reconnecting with the land spiritually, in line with Black ancestral traditions.

Students will leave with the tools to start their own gardens. Gripper, who mentioned that her neighbors love to visit her garden for food, but also to take in the aromas, is hoping their work can lead to more community gardens on residential blocks in the city.

The lineup of instructors includes chef Laquanda Dobson, therapist and trauma specialist Tien Sydnor-Campbell, Glover Gardens owner Hajjah Glover, Nana Catherine’s Apothecary owner Desiree Thompson, all of Philadelphia, as well as agriculture scholar-activist and Philly native Shakira Tyler, who is based in Detroit.

For this workshop series, Land Based Jawns received a grant from the Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, which is a partnership from the Reinvestment Fund and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. The first session was virtual, but the remaining sessions of their Earthseed program take place at Bartram’s Garden with one session at Muay Thai studio 8 Limbs Academy. The classes, which will end in early May, will be limited to 15 people.

Gripper has been crowdfunding for this skill-share series on GoFundMe. The long-term goal for Land Based Jawns, Gripper said, would be to have a 20- to 30-acre farm within an hour’s drive of Philly. There, she explained, they would plan to have an agricultural training center for more workshops and retreats.

A principle that guides her work, Gripper explained, is grief prevention. Last March, her father became ill about the same time that the pandemic hit and changed daily life.

It was the first time in a long time that her father, Paul Gripper III, had gone to a hospital, she recalled, due to mistrust of medical systems.

“I was like, ‘OK, let me just move home now, so in case anything happens, I’m here,’” Gripper remembered.

Her father died of heart disease in April, just a couple weeks after the hospital discharged him.

Paul Gripper, she said, had been “loving, fierce, unapologetic and forgiving.” He’d also been a legendary basketball coach, one who’d “woven himself deep into the fabric of Philly hoops,” as The Inquirer noted in his obituary.

Her father had experienced delays in care, and her public health training made her question why his treatment hadn’t been handled more urgently.

“I really struggled with that,” she explained. “I really do feel like, because my dad was a Black disabled man, he did not receive the care that he needed or the support that he needed.”

She senses that she inherited those attributes that she loved about him the day that he died. She’s teaching how to go to the land to heal, in part, because that’s what she did.

Gripper’s dissertation is on “urban agriculture and mental health, spirituality and collective agency of Black folks of Philadelphia.” Over the last year, she’s been making the transition from scholar to scholar-practitioner.

Thinking about her father, she considers the lack of access he had to high-quality food. She also thinks about how his health changed after her mother, Dawn Kipkin, died.

Kipkin had been sweet and nurturing, her daughter remembered, a corny-joke mom. Kipkin died of liver failure in 2011 while Gripper was a college senior. Her mother’s death, she explained, also stemmed from grief. Kipkin had begun to experience alcoholism after the death of Gripper’s grandfather.

“She carried that grief, and didn’t know what to do with it, or where to place it, in such a way that it impacted her physical health,” said Gripper. “Seeing that cycle that had been with my parents. ... Grief untreated is really dangerous.”

Gripper, who now lives in West Philly, started learning how to grow at Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden in June.

“I felt held, really, in my grief,” Gripper said. “Really being on the land, being on the farm, was a safe space for me to kind of talk to my ancestors, for me to really connect with them, for me to let out the pain and the tears, for me to learn about the bees and the dragonflies, and for the dragonflies to surround me.”

That might have been the last seed she needed. She started Land Based Jawns that August.

She would take her time in the African Diaspora Garden at Sankofa around the holy basil. In collards that grew, in the sweet potatoes and okra she felt comfort and love.

Sometimes she’ll be on the farm, or in a garden, or in the woods. And she sees how being on the land can be healing. Out there, she explained, she receives the understanding that death and life are connected.

“I don’t know why,” she began. “But something about that reminder helps me to feel not alone.”

Now that the workshops are underway, Gripper said she’s deeply grateful.

“This was the first speaking thing [in this time] that I didn’t feel depleted afterward,” she explained of the workshop. “As I was pouring out my heart and my story, people were pouring back into me.”