Black Owned Greenhouse & Eatery

Imagine a black owned space with Caribbean vibes, yet celebrating the South. Vegan food, good music and beautiful plants for sale. Imagine a space that brought together the best of black culture combined with the healthiest local food around. Imagine a space that brought Black Joy to life. Welcome to Nourish Botanica.

Nourish Botanica is a greenhouse eatery slated to launch in 2021 in the South, and aims to be a space for sustainable green entertaining and gathering that supports the local food, art and agriculture ecosystem. The eatery will serve Caribbean and Southern deli-style vegan offerings by day and open in the evening for public and private events. It will also operate as a nursery, selling plants, flowers and herbs as well as offering gardening education and services through our farm partners. At our Botanica Bar, we will provide healing through art, flowers and plants grown in our greenhouse, food as medicine and herbal blends through teas, juices and mocktails. We will rent out our greenhouse and garden event space for local chef popups, intimate like-minded events, dinners, engagement parties, art shows, and of course, weddings.  We have a long-held passion for honoring and protecting culture through creating spaces to celebrate it and now we need your help in bringing our own space, Nourish Botanica, to life!

Who We Are and What We've Done

My name is Quianah Upton and I am an Atlanta based Caribbean and Southern food justice advocate, artist, creative entrepreneur, community planner and budding healer. Through my initiative, Nourish In Black (formerly known as #ChopItUpATL), I orchestrate beautiful, healing, dialogue-based gatherings. Through this platform, I seek to honor storytelling, art, and cultural foodways. The experiences I create focus on culture & story sharing through visual and oral dialogue at the intersection of art and cuisine. 

I have firsthand experience with food injustice, spending part of my childhood in a food insecure neighborhood in South Florida. After moving to Atlanta in 2007, I worked in corporate America for seven years in sales management. In 2014, I launched an art and retail business that evolved to include a food justice based event initiative, Nourish In Black. This initiative highlights Atlanta’s food justice organizations and the farm community. Using the artistry of floral and interior design, I began to create dinner parties and brunches under my brand, featuring panel-based dialogue surrounding art, gentrification, food sovereignty and justice issues. Artful healing through nourishment is central to every event I’ve ever created.

In the wake of current events and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Nourish In Black developed a feed the protestors program called Nourish The People. So far we have organized a fundraiser to reallocate funds to black owned food-based businesses by gathering thirty volunteers to feed at least 150 protestors per week as a five week pop-up initiative during the Summer of 2020.

We have also been featured in Creative Loafing , Melanin and Sustainable Style  and Politico Magazine.

A Black Owned Green Space Dedicated to Health + Wellness

Why This Space Is Important

“Food justice is racial justice. Food and agriculture, like everything in this country, are deeply intertwined with our nation’s entrenched history of slavery and structural racism. Our food system actively silences, marginalizes, and disproportionately impacts people of color, who are also being hardest hit by COVID-19.” - Civil Eats Editors

Also, while cities across the United States have been implementing environmental policies that have led to the rapid growth of green spaces—parks, community gardens, wilderness areas and urban agriculture—public spaces remain contested ground. Many green spaces are often as segregated as our cities, with the barriers keeping black and brown residents from accessing public space being both visible and invisible. As planners, business-people, city leaders, policymakers, and residents, how can we confront the legacies of violence and exclusion, support and empower those directly affected, and create safe and accessible places that offer social, economic, and recreational opportunities for all?

In the Atlanta metro area, a region of around 6 million people that covers 29 counties, access is significantly related to race. In a recent study published in Landscape and Urban Planning showed that the socioeconomic-green relationships are spatially heterogeneous and context-dependent, affected by a complex web of forces, including urban heritage, racial and lifestyle diversity, and natural landscape. Racial disparity is dominant in Atlanta when it comes to our green spaces.

There is both food disparity and disparity within our green spaces for our black community. We hope to become a destination that represents a beacon of change for both of these injustices through creating conversation, sharing stories, educational programming and providing a platform for leadership in the fight against these injustices. 

Community

Our community plan is intended as a cross pollinator that continues to invest in the community through a collective impact approach that includes growers, artists, policy makers and corporate partnerships. Nourish In Black in partnership with ThinkTable will create an incubator for growers, grassroots food justice organizers, food producers and creative entrepreneurs.

Nourish In Black has raised over $5,000 for grassroots food justice organizations through our dinner parties, and another $2,500 most recently to feed protestors by purchasing from black businesses, but it's not just about dollars, it's about important dialogue and visual representation. With a physical space we can continue into our eighth year by bringing even more people together for dinners, brunches and life changing conversation. We can continue education on food apartheid, fundraising for food justice organizations and decolonizing the food system by returning to our ancestral knowledge. We can welcome leaders to pass down information to the next generation to teach all children about reclaiming their knowledge of agriculture.

With our own space, we would finally be the owners of our own narrative while creating an amazing gathering space for our Atlanta community to assemble for change. Built into our business model, is the ability to donate the space to non-profit organizations and community members for like-minded events or gatherings by application on a monthly basis.

Every dollar you donate will be used for this black owned healing space. We were blessse enough to raise $75,000 through GofundMe and are now hoping to continue fundraising with iFundWomen. *Land donations and donations of property are greatly welcome! Support us by donating today and please share far and wide.