A Chicago Peace Fellow, Annamaria Leon, worked with her colleagues in the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council to successfully provide food to neighbors in need as COVID-19 soars. The project, Soup for the Soul, tries to achieve more than just food provision. Instead, the project seeks to gather more people to expand interpersonal connections and resource sharing opportunities for different needs.
“If we didn't have COVID, we would gather people at big farm tables to have soup and interact with each other. Because that's how you impact violence, it is through one-on-one relations.” -- Annamaria Leon, Chicago Peace Fellow
The project has raised more than half of the goal amount required and is already benefiting hundreds of neighbors in need.
Annamaria co-founded Homan Grown to follow her passion in gardening, a chance she had seized after being laid off from work. To reinvent herself after losing her job, Annamaria studied sustainable horticulture, agriculture and earned certification in permaculture. She also worked for a landscaping company prior to collaborating with her husband in forming Homan Grown.
As part of the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council, Annamaria brings to the table holistic permaculture principles to design community driven social change. Fair share, people care, and earth care, are among the permaculture principles that inspire Annamaria’s paradigm.
As Annamaria explained in our recent call, “The first step we do when taking on any project is to alter how people see the world. People act in accordance with how the world occurs to them. If your reality is that there is not enough and it is dangerous, people will start acting to protect themselves and to complain that they don't have what they need. When you can alter how the world occurs to them, there is abundance, there is community, there is connection. All of a sudden, I can look at you and not be afraid of you. I can ask you for what I need and even start sharing with you. The first thing is to begin that communication, and to begin altering the way the world occurs for one another.”
