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Nourishing A Dream
Artist & advocate Quianah Upton raising funds for black-owned greenhouse cafe
By Donna Williams Lewis
One year after its launch, a crowdfunding
effort to build a black-owned greenhouse
eatery with a social mission continues forging
ahead.
Artist, event producer and social justice
advocate Quianah Upton is raising money to
build Nourish Botanica, a lush dining cafe
inside a greenhouse.
Plans are to serve Caribbean and
Southern plant-based foods and beverages
created from blends of flowers and herbs
grown on site. The greenhouse will also
operate as a nursery, with plants and flowers
for sale.
“We want to provide access to fresh,
healthy food and that is our way of [fighting]
food injustice and food in-access,” Upton
said.
She said the eatery will provide a physical
platform for herself and other advocates
to “continue education on food apartheid,
fundraising for food justice organizations and
decolonizing the food system by returning to
our ancestral knowledge.”
Over the past eight years, the social
entrepreneur has held more than 20 food
justice-based dinner parties through her
Nourish in Black initiative, which features
panel-based dialogue around art, storytelling,
gentrification, food sovereignty and justice
issues.
Now, supporters are working in a variety
of ways to help Upton achieve her dream.
Nourish Botanica’s Go Fund Me
campaign raised $60,000 within 86 days of
its July 2020 launch.
To date, the campaign has raised $70,000
of its $200,000 goal from more than 1,100
individual donations, and Upton has
assembled an all-women, pro bono collective
of architects and designers for the
project.
She used some of the money
raised to hire a grant writer to seek
additional money, with a goal of
buying land for the cafe by winter
2021 and breaking ground in
summer 2022.
In the meantime, the Decatur
resident has renewed her public
awareness campaign to remind the
community that she’s still relying on
its support.
“The reason I went the
crowdfunding route is I really didn’t
have any other choice,” Upton said.
“I’m just like the standard black
entrepreneur. ... I don’t have access
to loans and I didn’t have tons of
money that I could just invest in
taking this risk. I don’t have access to
networks where I could get funding
or investors or anything like that,
so I just sort of reached out to my
community.”
Independent creative strategist Cicely
Garrett is one of Upton’s advisors.
“I thought it was a really cool mesh of
retail, food, community, arts and culture in
a different way than all of those things had
been brought together in the past,” Garrett
said.
As for Upton’s crowdfunding approach,
“We have networks but it’s not the same if
you’re not coming from wealth or access that
comes from traditional affluent networks
of friends and family,” Garrett said. “So, I
think she’s just expanding her network and
redefining what is ‘friends and family for her
first rounds of seed capital.”
To support herself in the meantime,
Upton is doing virtual events and used some
of the money raised through Go Fund Me
to buy a trailer she uses in her pop-up floral
business. She sells fresh floral arrangements
on “Flower Fridays” at local shops including
Con Leche, The Little Tart Bakeshop,
FFodgepodge Coffeehouse and Flora/Fauna
ATL.
Sagdrina Jalal, senior director of
community innovation with Atlanta’s Center
for Civic Innovation (CCI), has gotten to
know Upton through her involvement with
CCI. She said she’s excited to watch Upton
go after her dream.
“Right now, you’re really building
both the interest and the anticipation over
time,” Jalal said, of Upton. “I think it’s
probably worked particularly well during
the pandemic to be able to have this
conversation and to give people something to
look forward to.”
Nourish Botanica has its roots in her
childhood, as Upton tells readers on her Go
Fund Me page.
“I acknowledge my relation to this work
began as a girl of 11, in Stanley Terrace
Projects. I am originally from the Virgin
Islands by way of those projects in South
Florida and I watched my mother struggle
daily to put food on our plates,” she wrote.
Buoyed by her supporters, Upton is
relentlessly pursuing her goal.
“There’s no way I’m going to let down all
of those 1,100 people,” she said. “I’m going
to figure this out.”
Learn more at nourishbotanica.cafe. m
Dine-in
Or Take-out
Mexican Restaurant
2895 North Decatur Rd
Decatur, GA 30033
Hours: 11am to 10:30pm
Buy any two
fajita dinners, get
$7 OFF
or ;
Buy any
two combination
dinners with two
drinks, get
FREE 1
Dinner ]
Not valid with any other I
I combination offer. ■
Expires 7/31/21 I
Id?
AtlantalntownPaper.com
July 2021 | INT0WN 37