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NMH Magazine : Spring 2004

The Roots of All Good

by Fred Contrada

Daniel Ross ’90 knows that the mention of Holyoke, Massachusetts, conjures up images of a city abandoned. Apartment buildings that once teemed with hopeful immigrants getting a start on the American dream have deteriorated into slums where Latinos, most from Puerto Rico, are struggling to find opportunities that have largely disappeared. Factories have closed. Vacant lots lie in rubble. Pitfalls of street life include gangs and drug-dealing.

But there’s another vision of Holyoke, and it looks something like this: Older men sit on benches in the middle of a garden, telling stories. Teenagers dig their hands into the soil, excited by the thought of what will grow there. People harvest the fruit of their labors to sell at a farmers market or to can for sale.

As executive director of the nonprofit organization Nuestras Raices, Ross has seen this vision unfold. Moreover, he’s been a driving force behind it. Never mind that at the tender age of 31 he’s only a decade removed from Oberlin College and another four years from NMH. This is Ross’s eighth year at the helm of the agency, and he feels he’s just getting started.

Spanish for “our roots,” Nuestras Raices is literally an oasis in the concrete expanse of Holyoke. The jewels in its crown are the large community gardens it’s hacked and harrowed out of neglected plots of land. From these have sprung other enterprises like a youth group and a bakery, along with for-profit spin-offs such as a catering business and a sofrito sauce company.

When Ross became director in 1995, Nuestras Raices was in dire straits. There were charges that a former board member had stolen thousands of dollars, leaving the agency’s future in jeopardy.

Members of the Holyoke community were committed to Nuestras Raices’s survival, however, and they strategized how to keep it going. Top on their wish list was a director with a gift for fostering community.

If anyone was up to the job, it was Ross. Growing up in Franklin County, he’d worked on a farm during the summers and been nurtured on a steady diet of social consciousness. His father, Allen Ross, was a doctor with a family practice; Ruth Charney, Ross’s mother, was always looking for new ways to improve education. She helped start an innovative school in Greenfield and cofounded the New England Foundation for Children, which publishes books on teaching methodologies and does teacher trainings throughout the country. 

Ross traces his love for grassroots work back to his maternal grandfather. George Charney was a labor organizer who united New York City factory workers and, for a while, was a member of the Communist Party. Ross inherited his entrepreneurial sense from his father’s father, who ran a wholesale business.

Because Ross’s parents felt a good education was of the utmost importance, they sent him and his three sisters to NMH. He credits his Spanish teacher there, Elana Eguia, with inspiring him to relearn the Spanish language he’d known from his childhood in New York City.

“Northfield Mount Hermon certainly gave me the academic preparation that has helped me throughout my life,” he says.

But his real education was yet to come. After he graduated from Oberlin, Ross’s classrooms became the migrant camps of the Atlantic seaboard, where Mexicans, Jamaicans, and other farm workers from impoverished countries toiled from sunrise to sunset to earn money to support their families in their native lands. As a member of the East Coast Migrant Health Project, Ross helped them get access to health care and to know and secure their rights. He also served as a translator when one was needed. 

During that time, Ross saw some farmers and crew leaders work their pickers to the point of abuse. Field hands suffered a host of ailments from exposure to chemicals. Bathrooms at the camps were often scarce or unsanitary. All this stoked the fires of Ross’s social conscience.

By 1995, Ross had transferred to western Massachusetts 
to help start a migrant outreach program. Nuestras Raices approached his supervisor about becoming the agency’s director, but Ross’s boss recommended him instead. The opportunity came at the right time.

“I was tired of moving up and down the East Coast,” he says. “And I was looking to do something that got more at the roots of these issues.”

Ross wanted to help people help themselves, and Nuestras Raices was all about empowerment. Here, at last, was a chance to help people to plant and reap their own crops and to parlay their labors into self-supporting businesses.

In the beginning, Ross had his work cut out for him. “We had minimal funds, no credibility in the community, less credibility with city officials, and even less credibility with funders.” The organization had one garden and one staff member: himself.

He set about his work the way he’d seen countless migrant farm workers do: deliberately and tirelessly. He worked with community members to build Nuestras Raices from the ground up. Together they created a strong membership, made new gardens, and rebuilt the agency’s financial credibility.

One day Ross went to Jarvis Heights, an apartment pro-ject in Holyoke, to negotiate with the property manager. The community garden there needed a fence built around it, and Ross wanted the landlord to help foot the bill. The project manager’s name was Elizabeth Rodriguez.

“She was very tough, but I could tell she cared about her tenants and the community,” he says.

Negotiations led to respect and then to love, and Ross and Rodriguez got married. They have a son, Moses, and two daughters, Natasha and Karina.

The core of Nuestras Raices is the Centro Agricola, an agricultural center on Main Street in Holyoke that includes a restaurant, a community kitchen, and a greenhouse where gardeners are able to continue their work year round. The kitchen is an incubator for new enterprises. It presently serves four microbusinesses, including El Jardin Bakery, which employs three community members and produces five kinds of organic bread. The center also has a library that holds bilingual resource materials on farming, gardening, environmental topics, and community organizing. 

Today about a hundred Holyoke families till their own plots in the Nuestras Raices complex, composed of seven community gardens and two youth gardens. Each family harvests more than $1,000 in produce per year. The gardens have names like “Girasol” (sunflower) and “La Piedra” (the stone). Every garden has two elected supervisors who make sure the plots are properly tended.

Teenagers hired by the organization sell surplus crops at a farmers market in Holyoke. Some of these youths make up Protectores de la Tierra, a Nuestras Raices-sponsored youth group that mobilizes teens to protect the environment. Its members also tend the greenhouse, help other students with homework, take part in city planning, and educate their peers about sexually transmitted diseases and substance abuse.

Perhaps the choicest product from the community gardens is a sweet pepper called aji dulce. A staple of Puerto Rican cuisine, ajies dulces had been difficult 
to grow in the climate of Massachusetts. Nuestras Raices, working with plant and soil scientists at the University of Massachusetts, was able to develop seed sources and techniques to grow the pepper successfully.

Ajies dulces are a hot item at the Holyoke farmers market and have sparked a local business, which uses them in the sofrito sauce it cans and sells. One of its clients is Mi Plaza Restaurant, a Spanish-American eatery that started up in the Nuestras Raices complex. Compost from the restaurant goes back to the community gardens, which use it to grow more ajies dulces.

Meanwhile, Ross is busy grant writing and networking. In his first few years at Nuestras Raices, he was able to bring in more than $250,000 in government funding and private donations. The Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture are just some of the organizations sufficiently impressed by Nuestras Raices to write the organization a check. The organization’s budget is now up to $550,000, and its staff numbers seven full-time and three part-time employees.

In 2000, Ross was honored for his work with a BRICK award from Do Something, a New York-based organization that promotes community activism. Candidates had to besrty under 30 to be eligible. There were more than 500 from across the country, and Ross was one of ten chosen for the award. He was a bit embarrassed when the panel called him “the Michael Jordan of community services.”

“It was kind of corny,” he says, “but it raised the profile of the organization and has helped me to get more grants.”

For Nuestras Raices to continue flourishing, Ross will have to keep pushing and lobbying. He has less time now to work directly with farmers and teenage protégés, and he misses digging his hands in the dirt. But many hands make up Nuestras Raices—community members, staff, the board of directors—and together they’re reaping an unbeatable harvest of pride and renewal.

Dan Ross (second from left) with Nuestras Raices staff