Karyn washington biography
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Karen Washington
Karen Washington has lived in New York City all her life, and has spent decades promoting urban farming as a way for all New Yorkers to access to fresh, locally grown food.
Washington has been a resident of the Bronx for over 26 years, although in 2015 she began living part time in Orange County, NY near the farm. Since 1985 Washington has been a community activist, striving to make New York City a better place to live. As a community gardener and board member of the New York Botanical Gardens, Washington worked with Bronx neighborhoods to turn empty lots into community gardens. As an advocate, she stood up and spoken out for garden protection and preservation. As a member of the La Familia Verde Community Garden Coalition, she helped launched a City Farms Market, bringing garden fresh vegetables to her neighbors. She also co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization of volunteers committed to building networks and community support for growers in both
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By 2012, when For Brown Girls was taking off, Karyn’s mother Jean had been battling cervical cancer for four years. She had been diagnosed Karyn’s junior year of high school.
“Her mother was probably one of the only people she really was comfortable talking to, family-wise,” John Griffin tells me. A friend and old crush of Karyn’s from high school, he speaks at a near whisper on an upper floor of MSU’s library and looks like Will Smith in his Fresh Prince days, with flattop hair and a black-and-gray diamond-patterned sweater. “She never really talked about a lot of people in her family, but she loved her mother.”
Griffin is the first of many to explain that Karyn and Rip, her father, had a particularly difficult relationship. Though he declined to be interviewed, Rip admitted in a Facebook message that Karyn “hated” him because he disagreed with some of her “behavior.” “I know she told me in high schoo
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Karen Washington
Political activist and community organizer
Karen Washington is a political activist and community organizer fighting for food justice.
Biography
[edit]Washington grew up in New York City, attended Hunter College and received her master's grad in occupational biomechanics and ergonomics from New York University in 1981.[1] In 1985, she moved from Harlem to the stadsdel i new york with her two children.[2] Washington studied organic gardening at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz in 2006.[1][2]
In 1988, after years of tending a garden in her backyard, Karen Washington helped found the Garden of Happiness in the Bronx.[3] A decade later this garden teamed up with other community gardens in New York City to launch a farmers marknad. In the late 1990s Mayor Giuliani attempted to sell many community garden properties at auctions. Using various tactics such as protests, civil disobedie