It’s a steamy July afternoon. The sun is blistering, and early evening storm clouds are bubbling on the horizon. Lupita Vazquez is on a ladder, plucking young shoots and tender leaves of chaya while inspecting for quality—is it yellow and chewed up? Or is it lush and verdant? She’s perched at the rear of a lush oasis behind the long, squat building of pastor Miguel Estrada’s Misión Peniel, an offshoot of Peace River Presbytery on Boston Avenue in Immokalee.
To get to where she’s working, you have to knee past reedy spires of lalo (Haitian jute leaves) and step over piles of ripe mangoes and purple sweet potatoes. Lupita, the community gardens and outreach manager for Cultivate Abundance, is wearing a wide-brimmed, straw hat and peers down at us between practiced snips of her clippers. She explains the nutrient-dense chaya, also known as Mayan tree spinach, has double the amount of iron as the common spinach we find at the grocery store—and, it’s only one of the Central American and Caribbean crops the nonprofit cultivates to mitigate food insecurity for the diverse community. Other heat-resistant superfoods in the garden include okra, which is richer in calcium, magnesium and vitamin B1 than broccoli; and protein- and vitamin C-packed amaranth leaves—or quelites—which show up in Mexican cuisine folded into dishes or sauteed as a side.
Every week, Cultivate Abundance doles out bags of fruits and vegetables gathered from their small garden and partnering growers, along with staple ingredients, such as canned beans and bags of dry rice. Often, Lupita is there to talk about the specialty crops harvested with the help of garden aide Maria Vazquez. Lupita grew up in Immokalee with farmworker parents and leverages her local connections to identify areas of need and bolster the garden. She’s a bit of a chaya ambassador, extolling the green’s many virtues.
Day in and day out, the crops need picking and the produce needs gathering from community partners, other churches and individual homeowners. (If you have a plot in your backyard, the group will show you how to grow food sources and help with the harvests. You keep what you wish from the bounty). A key partner is ECHO Global Farm in North Fort Myers. Cultivate Abundance program director Rick Burnette arrives from ECHO on this particular Thursday with a van full of mangoes. The volunteers all but jump to help unload, carrying thick paper bags at their hips.
Rick and his wife, Ellen, started Cultivate Abundance in 2017 after decades of work overseas as international agricultural and community development workers. For 19 years, the duo worked in northern Thailand as field personnel with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, offering agricultural and community development among tribal groups along the Thai-Myanmar border. They later established an international office for ECHO—which trains small-scale farmers in sustainable growing practices to mitigate hunger—before transitioning stateside to work at ECHO’s Fort Myers headquarters.
When they read the book Tomatoland, about the historic plight of Immokalee’s farmworkers, the Burnettes became inspired to bring the community culturally appropriate foods—a term that refers to the staple ingredients and cultural foods from people’s native countries. Immokalee needed familiar foods the migrant patchwork population would find accessible and nourishing in their new home. “We almost can’t help it,” Rick says of starting the nonprofit. “It’s a calling.”
True, food banks and distributions feed some of the 28 percent of people on record living below the federal poverty line in Immokalee. But getting thousands of pounds of perishables isn’t always effective when many families have no refrigeration or share small fridges. Ellen describes a major episode of food waste in Immokalee during the pandemic with truckloads of aid boxes donated by well-intentioned but uncoordinated nonprofits. She and Rick started to see boxes pile up around dumpsters with unopened milk cartons, cheese and hulking bags of meat. In a place like Fort Myers, where most people have cars, the 20-pound boxes get loaded into trunks and taken home as intended. But in Immokalee, where most people get around by foot or on bike, residents can’t carry the entire hauls. Or, they may not be interested in all the contents due to unfamiliarity, dislike or lack of space to store the goods. Half-full boxes littered the town, and people were still hungry.
The Burnettes became familiar with the idea of culturally appropriate foods while working as missionaries in the agriculture sector overseas. The couple wanted to help people cultivate familiar foods they would want to eat, and that fit neatly into the recipes and diets of their cultures. Food banks supply what’s available—often excess from supermarkets—and the nonprofit supplements the gaps in availability, with a focus on culturally appropriate foods. They know their recipients will benefit more from jute mallow that Haitians can make into hardy lalo stews over pantry ingredients, such as shelf-stable but highly processed peanut butter.
The nonprofit has distributed more than 150,000 pounds of food to date. Rick, Ellen, Lupita, Maria and dozens of volunteers regularly gather within Misión Peniel’s four walls and the green space beyond to drum up as much produce as they can between them and the more than 50 community partners from East Naples to Labelle and beyond.
On Mondays, Rick feels lost in the chaos. On Fridays, he feels validation. Cultivate Abundance sets their tables up in front of Misión Peniel, catty-corner from the farmers’ rights advocacy group Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ office, where volunteers run a co-op market, and directly across the street from Fiesta Food Market’s u-shaped driveway, where a procession of buses transports farmworkers to fields starting about 5 a.m. and drops them off in the afternoon and evening. From there, it’s a short walk to the tables Cultivate Abundance sets up for food distribution from 3:30-6:30 p.m. every Friday. Sometimes, more than 500 people show up. Rick estimates the bounty they grow and collect feeds more than 1,000 people weekly. “It’s a sacred time,” Rick says. “Our sense of calling is usually validated during that point.”
Rick doesn’t mince words when he talks about the power of the seed they planted. He and his team nurture their project, helping it grow and waiting for it to bear the fruits of their labor. On a Friday afternoon, however, it’s obvious that the nonprofit’s work has already reaped a bountiful harvest.
