ABOUT JULIUS BUZZARD:
A native Michigander, Julius found his home in Ypsilanti in 2013, and never looked back. He spent the formative years of his career within the local nonprofit and education sectors and always created ways to tie his passion for growing and environmental justice into each context. Developing meaningful and intentional relationships with the community is at the core of everything Julius does—knowing that together, we can foster a safe, caring and just food system and community as a whole.
Whether it was gardening with his grandparents, participating in community gardens, teaching students how to grow and harvest, or tending his own garden; Julius has lived a life with his hands in the dirt. These experiences shape the way he enters into the work of Growing Hope, leaving him three basic principles: relationships matter, food is for everyone, and the land will be our liberator.
Julius has a deep spirit of curiosity, hopes to listen and learn daily, and believes in the art of storytelling. Julius recharges by spending time with his wife and daughter, running, bicycling, writing and volunteering within the community.
RESOURCES:
Ypsilanti Farmers' Market on Facebook
Ypsilanti Farmers' Market on Instagram
Ypsilanti Farmers' Market on YouTube
TRANSCRIPTION:
David Fair: This is 89.1 WEMU, and today we're going to look to the soil for inspiration. I'm David Fair, and welcome to Washtenaw United. It is our weekly exploration of equity and opportunity in our community. Those who work the ground and bring to life nourishment for the body, and often do much more than that. It's fair to say, they're growing hope. That's the name of an Ypsilanti-based nonprofit whose mission is to help people and communities thrive through food. Julius Buzzard is executive director of Growing Hope, and I'm happy to say he's on the other end of the WEMU phone line! And thank you for the time today, Julius!
Julius Buzzard: Absolutely! Thank you, David! So good to talk with you today!
David Fair: 2025--it's been a difficult year in so many respects, and that includes unstable access to food. Food insecurity is growing, and the pause in the SNAP program highlighted just how fragile we can be. As you reflect, how do you assess the 2025 year?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. 2025, I think there's a lot of ways that people have and will and do describe it: unprecedented, chaotic, unpredictable. But I think one of the things through all of that and through the work that we do here at Growing Hope and things around food access that we've also seen, alongside of that, is just the incredible ways that our community comes together to care for people who have different needs. At a very basic level, doing that around food is a lot of why Growing Hope does the work that we do and supporting gardeners and supporting farmers and supporting our farmers' markets, because we want to create and invest in and build these systems that are built on our community and that care for themselves and one another.
David Fair: You use a phrase that has not been a regular part of my personal vocabulary, but with your permission, I'm going to steal it for sure. How do you define "food sovereignty"?
Julius Buzzard: The work that we're doing is about inviting people into more intimate, more just and more joyful relationships with food and the food system. And that's however they're interacting with food or the food system, whether they're eating it, they're growing it, they're cooking it, producing it, selling it, or anything else.
David Fair: Your guiding principles are relationships matter, food is for everyone, and land will be our liberator--short and sweet and full of implications. There is the individual and personal in there. There's the community and social justice aspect of it. There is also a bit of the political. What in your life experience brought you to these principles?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah, in my own life experience, I grew up in mid-Michigan in Bay City, on farmland with my grandparents. And everybody around us was also on farmland, whether or not they were actively farming. And I'd say more so than like the act of farming is what I glean from that time of my life. It's more so the seeing the relationship that my grandparents were building in community that they were building with the earth and how that shaped the way that they lived out their lives. So, from a very, very young age, I just had this very basic understanding of we are in relationship with the earth, the way that we care for the earth, the way that we steward the land that has been given to us and shared with us in these different ways.
David Fair: This is 89.1 WEMU's Washtenaw United, and today, we're talking with Growing Hope Executive Director Julius Buzzard. And to bring it back to community, as you've indicated, you consider food as a matter of empowerment. Where can you point to for examples of food as the impetus for lifting people and community?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. I mean, there's places I think all around the world, all around the country and all around even our community where food is this empowering piece that people come together around. One that I really like around like right here in Ypsilanti, and this really has nothing to do with what Growing Hope does other than they do it in our space, is there's a group of folks who host a monthly brunch called "Around the Kitchen Table". And it's hosted at the Ypsilanti Farmers' Marketplace, where we run the farmers' markets. And it's just, I think, a really beautiful picture of what can happen when people come together around the table and building that community. And you don't know necessarily who it is that you're sitting next to. We have people of different amounts of wealth, people of different social, religious, political backgrounds coming around the table and being in community with one another. And that, I think, is what builds these pieces of power, both communally and individually, to impact our community and change people's lives.
David Fair: It's sometimes about who we talk with, but it's also about how we talk about these kinds of issues. Why, in your estimation, isn't food and food insecurity and access to nutrition more a part of the conversation on racism and social justice?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. I mean, I think food access, like food insecurity, it's easier to talk about separated from those things. I think, oftentimes, in having that separation makes it feel better. For example, a lot of times throughout history and even now in a lot of spaces, a term that's used to define a space is a food desert. But there's not really such thing as a food desert. We have these places where food access is low, but it didn't just happen that way. It's not naturally the way that things are.
David Fair: Yeah, it's kind of redlined and towards marginalized portions of our community.
Julius Buzzard: Yep. So, the language we use is "food apartheid" because of the things that you said. We built our communities the way that they are. We corralled people into different neighborhoods and have made food more or less accessible through those processes.
David Fair: As we sit here and talk about these issues, it occurs to me that, sometimes perhaps, it's listening that provides one of the best avenues to both solution and resolution. Who do you and Growing Hope listen to?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. I mean, as I think about me and Growing Hope, I think it's most important to listen to the community in spaces where we can hear what the needs are, even more so than what the needs are, but where are there places of joy? Where are there voices of passion? How can we tap into what's already occurring in our community? And just highlight those things and give them the resources to go even further.
David Fair: Our Washtenaw United conversation with Julius Buzzard continues on 89.1 WEMU. He serves as Executive Director of Growing Hope. To go back to when the federal government went into shutdown and the SNAP program was put on pause as we talk about listening, did the message you were getting from the community change at all?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. I mean, when the pause went into effect, or there was word that it was going to go into effect in late October, I think it was just there was a sense of "What now?" What do we do when this thing that has been so woven into our social safety net is gone? And so, as an organization, our primary response was the creation of the Ypsi SNAP Gap. So, that was here in Ypsilanti through the month of November and continues throughout December. Anybody here in Ypsi could still get $40 a week in November and then will be $20 a week in December. And it came from a a mix of some foresight we had early in the year, late last year, of....I can't say we knew something was going to happen, but had a feeling there was gonna be something that we needed to be able to act on really quickly. So, we had some funding set aside for that. But I think that also goes back to what I was sharing earlier about the way that community just came together. We've had a number of people, individuals, businesses, foundations who saw what we were doing, who even before we had announced what we were doing came to us and said, "We want to support. We want to be a part of making sure that people in our community continue to have access to the food that they need to survive."
David Fair: Throughout our conversation, Julius, you have both directly and indirectly indicated that while we have certainly had important conversations and there is good work going on in our community, we can do a better job of taking care of one another. A new year is a time of renewal and a time for new resolutions. What would you like us to resolve here in Washtenaw County for 2026?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. In 2026, in Washtenaw County, I think it comes back to even as you were asking the question, is community coming together. I'd love to see more. I'd just love to see more of that, whether it be the way that we work together sort of in the nonprofit space and creating this social safety net, how we come together around the listening and engaging and having meaningful deep relationships with the people who we exist to serve. And I'd say even with the ways that we have those relationships and community with different levels of local government and policymakers as we continue to move forward and create not just the one-time types of support but actually think about like how do we remold a system to create a system of care for everybody.
David Fair: Thank you so much for the time and the conversation today, Julius! I greatly appreciate it!
Julius Buzzard: Absolutely! Thank you so much!
David Fair: That is Julius Buzzard. He's the Executive Director of Growing Hope in Ypsilanti and our guest on Washtenaw United. For more information on Growing Hope, stop by our website at WEMU.org. We'll have all the links to take you everywhere you want to go. Washtenaw United is produced in partnership with the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, and you hear it every Monday. I'm David Fair, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti. Celebrating 60 years of broadcasting from the campus of Eastern Michigan University!
WEMU has partnered with the United Way for Southeastern Michigan to explore the people, organizations, and institutions creating opportunity and equity in our area. And, as part of this ongoing series, you’ll also hear from the people benefiting and growing from the investments being made in the areas of our community where there are gaps in available services. It is a community voice. It is 'Washtenaw United.'
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