The African Alliance of Rhode Island (AARI) was founded in 2006. According to its website, the organization was driven by “a vision of a vibrant, self-sustaining African community in Rhode Island,” especially in the Southside neighborhood of Providence.
The AARI has launched numerous initiatives to help the African and Caribbean communities in the state. The organization works to improve access to resources, enhance cultural representation and build a stronger, more inclusive Rhode Island.
Through the years, the AARI has launched community gardens, health and wellness programs and cultural events. The organization also created a 6.5-acre farm in Johnston.
In this episode of “Generation Rising,” host Anaridis Rodriguez speaks with Julius Kolawole, AARI’s co-founder and current executive director, about the organization’s past, its current work and vision for the future.
The full interview can be found here.
What an immigrant misses
Julius Kolawole, the executive director of the African Alliance of Rhode Island, said that approximately 85,000 people from 40 different African countries live in Rhode Island. The AARI was originally started to help immigrants adjust to life in the United States.
Kolawole knew about the hardships immigrants had in adjusting to a new culture and wanted to ease the transition.
“AARI was created in the sense of when an African arrives in this state (there) is still an aspiration to make one phone call and be able to know where to find plantain and know where to find bananas and yuca … and yam, and things like that,” he said. “Because an immigrant misses mostly two things, the food and the family.
“And that’s how African Alliance was born.”
Kolawole, who worked for several decades as an electrical engineer and taught statistics at Bristol Community College, said that the farming he does through the AARI is personal. It happened after the COVID-19 pandemic settled into the U.S.
“So, I kind of withdrew out of (teaching) and focused solely on growing,” he said. “What led to this particular project has to do with a large population of African women who are refugees in this state.
“I go to meetings and I hear that everybody talk about their mental agony and things like that. And it dawned on me: Many of us Africans grew up in a small town where everybody knows everybody.
“You can go to (your) next-door neighbor. If they don’t see you, they come knock on your door.”
The situation was different when immigrants moved from their countries, Kolawole said.
“You arrive in U.S. and you’re given the key to your apartment. You cannot go to the next-door neighbor,” he said. “You find the next-door neighbor look(s) at you as if you have 10 heads, OK?
“Therefore, the psychological impact of being alone is what I believe the health professionals are observing in these refugees. So we decided to create a community garden for them.”
Enthusiasm for gardens grows
In 2009, Kolawole established an urban community garden for AARI. He currently runs six of them in South Providence.
The first lot, provided by West Elmwood Housing, “was beautiful,” he said. Fourteen women came on that Saturday.
“We cleaned the space, we built (a) raised bed, we put soil in it, we put some seedlings planted in it, and we called for pizza,” Kolawole said. “(The) pizza came, they ate some, and all of them started to dance.
“And I said, ‘Yes, this is a start.’ That was our beginning.”
Most of what people grow in the urban gardens is for personal consumption, Kolawole said.
“And in the evening, they get out of their apartment. You can see them there, have a few jokes, sing a song,” he said. “Fellowship is a therapy.”
In 2012, Kolawole decided to bring what was grown at the gardens to the Farm Fresh Armory Farmers Market.
If people did not show up within 90 minutes of the market’s opening, all of the produce from the urban garden was gone — sold out, Kolawole said.
“That initial group of women started talking to other women, and more women started showing up,” he added.
Of the six urban garden lots, the AARI owns two of them. They also started a pop-up market six years ago, and four locations have grown to eight.
The Grow Your Own Food Initiative started by the AARI — where a person is given a soil bed in a community garden to grow food — became so popular that the organization leased a 6.5-acre farm to handle the demand. Eleven farmers work at the site.
According to the American Immigration Council, Rhode Island has a sizable immigrant population. Approximately 14.5% percent of the Ocean State’s residents are foreign-born, with about half of them living with at least one immigrant parent.
Kolawole said the gardens provide an outlet for immigrants to grow a new mental outlook. There is no cost involved.
“When you put a smile on a woman’s face, when we say, ‘I grew this, this is from my (garden), OK, you begin to hear that psychological impact,” he said. “’I did this. I grew this.’ It’s a different mental thinking.
Even children can see the difference.
Kolawole told the story of a woman whose grandchildren thought she was “useless.”
And then she started growing plants in the garden and sold them.
“(The woman said) ‘Then I made some money. I bought ice cream,” Kolawol said. “They think I’m the best.”
Focusing on the ‘future-ready’
Kolawole called that change of perception “very powerful.”
“Many of these people can neither read nor write,” he said. “All of a sudden this therapy is working.
They make money, they’re happy, the children are happy.”
With the AARI’s string of successes, Kolawole said he now is focusing on “future-ready.”
“I sound like a preacher, but I’m not … we are not charity. No. God is good to us. He gave us the brain,” Kolawole said. “Allow us to venture, allow us to learn, allow us to do.
“We are not charity. No. But the system is so set up that don’t allow you to venture, to acquire skills, to do on your own, OK? And people tend to focus on failure. Failure or mistakes,” he added. “I don’t. I call it learning.
“The moment you recognize you can do better, that’s progress. And that exists in this community.”
