Sustenance Sovereignty Edition: Food Sovereignty and Honoring Black Legacies in Nubian Square with Nubian Markets

Boston Ujima Project
1 day ago
11 min read

Nubian Markets is food sovereignty in practice. As one of our latest additions to the Ujima Good Business Alliance (UGBA), the business ensures that local food producers and consumers have a place and space to meet one another, build relationships, and support an internally-facing economy. Their gathering room is a favorite for local events (including our own Ujima Cafe event series, and last year’s How to Play Spades event, co-hosted with Boston While Black), and their café serves delicious meals all-day, while their small but diverse selection of groceries serves Nubian Square’s needs for a grocer which stocks halal national and international Black cuisine staples. This fall, Nubian Markets will be opening a second location at 742 Columbus Avenue, in the former Underground Cafe and Lounge Space. Alula Hunsen, Ujima’s Editorial Manager, took some time to speak with co-founder Ismail Samad last winter, to better understand Nubian Markets’ philosophy and operations.

Alula Hunsen: How did Nubian markets come into being?

Ismail Samad: A lot of different things came together at the same time to make this happen. First, to think about Nubian Markets, you have to think about Nubian Square—and to think about Nubian Square, you have to think about the energy that it takes to keep legacy residents here, to preserve history.

There were people who, early on, recognized the impending investment which would be coming into the Square, and they began to organize around preserving Black history here—I’m thinking about Chris and Kai with Black Market, and other community organizers that championed the campaign to change the name of the Square in the first place [from Dudley to Nubian].

Around the time of the name change [in 2018], I was working with Commonwealth Kitchen to support food businesses and get ‘em scaled up; and we were looking not just at products, but at strategies to get them connected with some of the anchor institutions. The idea here was: if you have a food product, then you could get into, say, Boston Medical Center and scale up that way, by being at all of their hospital beds and being in their cafeteria. Through that work, I built a relationship with folks over at Boston Medical Center, because we were trying to figure out economic scaling opportunities for people of color who have product companies.

We were really trying to fight, within structures, the racism that exists within buying practices and food service companies that typically contract with institutions. Here we’re talking about how these big food management companies with institutional ties build up an exclusive buying power that prioritizes products that are already scaled, fitting within a system that was built to make certain stakeholders money. In this context, how many upstart Black-owned companies can actually be plugged into a system that was built for companies that are already at scale? It became very difficult to see a pathway; we did pilots and pilots, and I was like, “we can't pilot this stuff anymore. We either are going to invest in something that's different or we won't keep doing it, because we're just up against a wall.” It's okay if we're up against a wall, but then we need to say, “it just can't happen.”

But we want to see what we can change when we're inside, dealing with all of the complexities that have resulted from us being shipped over here, dealing with the ramifications of the world we built and being a part of the futures we would like to see.

Anyway, all of that led to relationships with deeper alignment with folks, who we ended up leading this project with. And as this space came available on Washington Street, we made some pretty hard demands [of funders] based on that premise. Like, if it's not gonna be transformative, we didn’t want to really be involved. If it's reformative work, there's other people who are willing to do some reformation work. We want something that's transformational. And what's going to be transformational, with development in habitually excluded neighborhoods, would be an opportunity for ownership of the space, in order for us to prioritize legacy residents and small businesses that are intentionally being excluded from economic possibilities, from the marketplace.

We had a lead funder with Boston Medical Center who got it, and a group of folks at Mass Housing Investment Corporation (MHIC) who were willing to shift capital in more equitable ways; they understood it. We got non-extractive money from them, an integrated capital stack made up of a zero-interest loan and grants; and we worked with the LEAF Fund, the Wagner Foundation, a lot of different folks joined the capital stack in transformative ways to be sure the community was honored. We had some very hard asks in the beginning—and this was during COVID… had it not been for some of the promises that people were making during COVID and some of the realities around social unrest, we might not have been able to make those demands.

We saw we had the relationships in order to make the hard asks, we were willing to say no, and we had leverage in the moment—and, there were people inside of these organizations that also really believed that this was a moment to do something different around ownership, around moving capital and trying to prioritize legacy residents to create a market that was not going to just provide access to food, but also create a space of conviviality, a space that engenders dignity, a space that can actually prioritize community wealth building for as many Black and Brown businesses as could get space on our shelves. And so that's how it happened. We wanted to provide food for the community in a way that the community stated that it would like for it to receive food.

So it's dignified, it's prideful, it's inclusive of entrepreneurial efforts. And it's open and it's a space that people can be. They're having good conversations. They're meeting with folks, and I hear them dreaming about what's possible.

Talk to me a bit about how Nubian Markets arrived at a marketplace approach to support Black and Brown food vendors; how is this connected to your previous mission of scale?

The key is control: if you have control over markets, you can dictate what you want on your shelf, and you don't have to adhere to the rules that are in place. For instance, if you’ve got some sauces, or honey, some product: you'd have to go through all of these steps to get on the shelf at a Whole Foods, to scale up. But you probably just need an opportunity, to get some momentum and show that you are connected to a community, that you’re at a store. At Nubian Markets, we can provide a local food vendor with that kind of momentum, and we make it very easy to get on the shelf and to get placed well on our shelves. Elsewhere, a product like Kamal’s wonderful Hillside Harvest hot sauce, might get placed two shelves below eyesight.

That’s an algorithm: the system wants us to shop a certain way because it prioritizes big food, and there's a whole psychology around putting shelves together, making a planogram. Recently there was an article about how Snoop [Dogg] and Master P put out a cereal brand, and it wasn’t on the shelf anywhere. The system bought his stuff. They just wouldn’t put it on the shelf. They had control over the market, and they don’t want to support just anybody—because if a product starts selling and catches velocity, it might threaten the market’s status quo: which of course is attached to big land owners and big corporations and big marketing campaigns that are of course inherently related to the slave trade.

So having control of a market, of the shelf and the placement, is extremely powerful. We're trying to tear down some of those barriers and work with folks and connect them to consumers. We still have a lot of work to do and have definitely had our challenges to fully execute our mission, but the infrastructure being held and the intention being set is key.

Before we started recording, you’d mentioned food access within a broader context of a “food sovereignty framework” — what is this framework, and how can we build from access to sovereignty?

Sure. So food access is just that: providing people access to food. If we stay there, then we're looking at mechanisms to just get food to people: for instance, how we get food to people outside of our country, sometimes by flying a plane over an area and dropping pallets of food. Individually, we all want people to eat; and it's a needed mechanism that will happen whether you fund it or not. We all have enough food to feed each other, and if we were close enough to the problems of our neighbors, I believe that humans would just feed each other.

Still, a nonprofit structure should not just rest its laurels on, “hey, we got food into communities,” and we shouldn’t just look at the metrics of how much food is available. For-profit structures create an adjacent nonprofit ecosystem making up for the exclusion and lack that comes with them; in the current capitalist economy, you make money, donate some of it to pay less taxes, and feel better about yourself. At the same time, big corporations are incentivized via government subsidies to grow, distribute, sell, and stock food at a surplus–so we waste so much food, and we can donate some of that food directly, and get another tax write-off. We live in this complex of creating food surplus, while still needing food access, operating in a “state of abundance” and a hunger system all at once. There’s a book called Big Hunger by Andy Fisher that breaks down the nonprofit industrial complex as it relates to food.

At the same time all this is happening: it can be very difficult to stand up a sustainable, paying market for our communities when all that’s being done is food access. How can you stand up a paying market when you're putting free food into communities? It actually cannibalizes more sustainable, longer term efforts: if a majority of the people in your community are getting free food, or are on some sort of subsidized food, how can you have a sovereign food system that stands on its own, outside of the hunger system and nonprofits? That's not to say we shouldn’t put funding into food access movements, because we need to ensure that communities eat. But if you prioritize that over a sovereignty framework, or over food justice, then you aren't really doing the necessary deep work to ensure that sovereignty exists.

Food justice is also important: taking a look at policies, lobbying for change, talking about education around food and markets, thinking about the “food apartheid” we live in. And trust me, it's not all just food. Some of the things that ensure our communities’ lack of access to nutritious foods and wealth-building opportunities are attached to housing and space: and wealthier communities in this country are healthier communities. So if you create a pathway towards wealth, you can pretty much guarantee that you're gonna have a healthier community. Here comes food sovereignty: what are the assets that we have within our communities to build with the world that we would like to see? With investment in each other, we can create a healthier community.

It sounds like a lot of the problems we’re facing come in part from alienation from one another, and in part from needing a more systems-based approach vis a vis food.

Yeah, we need to remember, it is the system. I mean, systems are designed to do exactly what they do. So when you talk about a food system that's not owned by us and is owned by folks who are inherently capitalist and extractive and oppressive, why in the world would they care deeply about community? That’s why sovereignty's important, why transformative efforts are important. If you only stay in the space of reformation, you are just reforming a system that was literally built to break Black people, that was built to enslave, built to keep the top 1 to 10% in power. And that's not a conspiracy, <laughs>, that is what capitalism is based upon: scale, buying low and selling high, competitive markets and competitive advantages.

It's a slave economy. And it relies on bots and bullies.

Bots and bullies, <laughs>. That's something I’m definitely going to take with me—It relies on bots…

And bullies. Yeah. Doesn't it?

Coming back to this point on alienation: Nubian Markets is more than just a market place. It also has a cafe, a butchery, and a gathering space, as a full-service grocery store. Why did you all attempt such an integrated approach? And how do you hope to bring people together (producers and consumers, but also members of the community)?

Well…we need so much in our communities, right? If we were to just plop a grocery store in here, or a cafe, or just a butcher shop, or just a gathering space, number one, the numbers just won't work. We're not at the scale that we need to be at, and the margin on food is so slim. So we thought, “what are the different types of businesses and different types of community benefits that a grocery store could have?” And one of our ideas was to have a gathering space for people to come in, to be connected to the vibe and the culture that we're trying to build; a customer can come here and meet a maker, for instance (and we’ve had some Meet the Maker events, some tastings). But community folks and organizations can also just use the space.

In our cafe, we’ll often highlight different products that are on our shelves in the food we serve; when you book the gathering space, you can order from the cafe, which is buying from local vendors on our shelves like Hapi African Gourmet who we serve chickpea sauce from (a Cameroonian dish made by Paulette) and manufactured in Boston.

So we’re building up a circular economy where everybody’s connected to each other; there’s also less than 10 full service grocery stores that are Black-owned in this country, so when you come here you’re supporting something special.

To sustain something so special can be difficult: you have to be more than just a spot, we need to be a space that engenders dignity. And: I love to go to hole-in-the-wall spots, but I think there’s a standard we can aspire towards, beyond sticky floors and funky corner stores. So we wanted to create a space that people felt they had to check out.

I'm curious how Nubian Markets understands itself within Roxbury's shifting economic development narrative; how is it geared not just towards what is, but towards what’s coming?

Well… one of the big questions we asked ourselves, with ownership of the space, is: what if the grocery store doesn't work?

That's a real possibility. I think 50 to 60% of food businesses close within the first three years. Black-owned businesses suffer even more risk there. And there’s active developments up and down the block. But, since we intend to have ownership of the space, we can pivot if need be; still, we have a shared understanding with the Black community here that we all are in this thing trying to fight against gentrification by investing in ourselves and in our communities, and by addressing community needs based upon the leakage that exists. So we can take part in the economic development and the economic movement that is naturally going to happen in a neighborhood like [Nubian] Square, a neighborhood like Roxbury. Nubian Markets is really just proud to be working with other folks on an ecosystem approach where the volatility and risk are shared by a collective of folks who are trying to make Nubian Square what we envision it to be.

I keep bringing up a place like Chris and Kai’s Black Market because they deserve their building. If dollars don't go to support institutions like that, that are Black-led that have power and influence, but not capital, then that's a problem. We have to identify and support the critical pieces that create the realities that we talk about all the time—that's kind of what happened with this grocery store. We need to have physical manifestations of what we dream about, whether that’s a grocery store, or a jazz club like Jazz Urbane which is coming soon. We need to sustain these things not just with talks, but with capital; and not just with investment capital, but also with our own pockets. It’s about preserving the legacy that's here, and also investing in a future that can be shared with legacy residents and other folks.

Ismail Samad (he/him) is a social entrepreneur and closed loop food systems expert with a focus on economic, environmental, and spatial justice. He has held key positions in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations and has founded several successful enterprises. Ismail has worked with various initiatives, including Farm to Institution New England (FINE), Island Grown Initiative, and the EPA’s Web Academy Webinar Series on Sustainable Materials Management. He has also been a Common Future Fellow and former Board President of Boston Area Gleaners. Ismail’s latest venture is Loiter, an ecosystem of enterprises that addresses systemic issues. His work has focused on addressing food insecurity, wasted/surplus food, and providing equitable healthy and community-relevant destinations for underserved communities.

Ismail is dedicated to building a new economy. This new economy is one that is inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. The short name for this is an emancipated future. In an emancipated future, we have a world where everyone belongs in the most robust sense, and where our systems and structures support health and well-being for all, and do not prop up unjust, unhealthy, oppressive systems.