On the second and fourth Saturdays of the month through October, the Amicus Memorial Garden Collective hosts a Resilience Market, giving away free produce as part of a local environmental climate justice movement focused on resilience and neighborhood sustainability. The mission of the project is to create a low-barrier and accessible source of healthy local food in response to SNAP cuts, and an uptick in people asking for support. Eric Richardson, board president of Habitat for Humanity of Oregon, says that the purpose of the market is to spread “the idea that eating nutritiously and eating locally is a solution to many health issues.” He says that we should be utilizing the fertile lands of the Willamette Valley to prepare for the needs of our community. The Resilience Market is a product of the Annie Mims Community Garden, formed by the NAACP in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic and the fires that occurred throughout the year. The project has been renamed to the Amicus Memorial Garden to pay tribute to the city of Americus, Georgia, where an interracial community blossomed amid the segregationist South in 1942. This community, known as Koinonia Farm, was the first instance of volunteers coming together to build homes for those in need, leading to the creation of Habitat for Humanity. “Talking about Americus, Georgia, and the history of Habitat for Humanity coming out of that racial questioning in Georgia, really just keeps alive this idea that even here in Eugene, with the Across The Bridge community and some of the issues we have in Lane County around race,” Richardson says. “This keeps this issue alive without just pinpointing the Mims family or just the Reynolds family or others. It’s a bigger question, the national question, and it ties us to a more national issue.”

Amicus Memorial Garden Collective’s Resilience Market is 10 am to noon on Saturdays, August 9 and 23, Sept. 6 and 20, and Oct. 4, 18 and 25 at Amicus Garden, 255 Maxwell Road. Free to attend.