At a recent panel hosted at Wolves Lane Centre in Haringey, three people with answers to that question sat down to share them. Paulette Henry OBE and Pamela Shor, co-founders and core members of Black Rootz (the UK’s first multigenerational Black-led growing collective), were joined by Connor Newson, Co-Director of Community Action for Land Liberation (CALL), for a wide-ranging conversation that moved from soil science to seed banks, from the Right to Grow campaign to the importance of rest, from Haringey’s history of resistance to the fragility of the UK food system.

Community Resilience

Speakers

Paulette Henry OBE – Black Rootz – Co-founder; advocate for community resilience, land justice & food sovereignty

Pamela Shor – Black Rootz – Core member, head grower; community empowerment & intergenerational growing

Connor Newson Community Action for Land Liberation (CALL) – Co-Director; grassroots organiser, land justice & popular education

Venue: wolveslane.org

Key Themes

Food sovereignty and seed sovereignty
Land justice and community land access
Intergenerational knowledge transfer
Decolonial and popular education
Internationalism and global knowledge networks
The Right to Grow campaign in Haringey
Community organising and collective decision-making
Mental health, wellbeing and community care

Q1: What does community resilience actually look like?

Paulette Henry | Black Rootz

Black Rootz was founded in 2019 by community elders responding to a direct need: distributing food across Haringey during Covid as a hub for food banks and home deliveries.
Resilience means acting independently of outside systems: having skills in-house: carpenters, bread-makers, doctors, social workers, mental health first-aiders all within one community space.
References “Black Wall Street” as a model of self-reliance: when communities do things for themselves they don’t rely on external systems.
Haringey’s history of resistance, Broadwater Farm, Brixton, as examples of communities standing together against systems that don’t serve them.
The Edmonton incinerator as a live example of environmental injustice: “Would that have been put in Chelsea?”

Pamela Shor | Black Rootz

Resilience starts from a clear intention, Black Rootz began because Pam wanted to grow beetroot, which grew into advocacy, mayoral meetings and understanding pollinator collapse.
Community holds the skills to get things done, red tape is what slows progress, not capacity.
No one person needs to hold all knowledge; passing on responsibility and skill is itself a community act.
Language as a tool of control: English etymology traced to ‘humus’ (soil) and ‘humanus’ (living soil), we are living soil beings; reclaiming etymology is part of reclaiming identity.
The current education system divides people from the natural order of life; Black Rootz trains facilitators to pass the baton intergenerationally.

“Rest is resistance and rest is resilience: because being able to refine the language that we’ve been told we have to keep doing until pensionable age is not something we stand for.” , Pamela Shor

Connor Newson | Community Action for Land Liberation

Resilience = anticipating challenges + organising collectively + responding effectively. Not reactive, proactive capacity-building before hardship hits.
Communities with strong organisational capacity consistently respond better to both natural and human-manufactured disasters.
Thousands of community spaces and youth hubs have been lost across London, a direct reduction in resilience infrastructure.
Disrepair must be identified before it can be repaired: understanding where injustice sits is the prerequisite to organising around it.

Q2: Where are the biggest opportunities to build community resilience?

Paulette Henry | Black Rootz

Land ownership is the root problem: a tiny elite own the majority of UK land (see fact-check section for verified figures).
Access to space to grow is therefore the primary barrier, innovation is needed: Broadwater Farm rooftop gardens, Eatwood Green compact growing (microgreens, sprouting, container growing).
Policy work runs alongside grassroots: Black Rootz contributed to the Roots into Food Growing report, advocating at government level for what communities actually need.
Curriculum change needed, agri-ology should be embedded in education so children understand food systems.
Fungi/funga: not yet protected under Linnaean classification systems unlike flora/fauna, a policy gap that affects community food resilience.
Farmers are currently incentivised to use pesticides and continue destructive practices; regenerative approaches need equivalent funding.

Pamela Shor | Black Rootz

Start with the intention, everything follows from there.
Community knowledge networks are undervalued: herbalists, water filtration, natural building techniques, traditional growing calendars, all available within existing community if asked.
Lunar and seasonal growing calendars and indigenous timekeeping (13-month systems, star-based planting) as practical knowledge being reclaimed.
Plant communication as real science: stress responses between plants, measurable empathic responses in growers, this knowledge validates a reciprocal relationship with land.
Seed sovereignty as a community act: London Freedom Seed Bank stores its seeds under a bed, it doesn’t require infrastructure, just intention and network.
International seed partnerships, Black Rootz has seed knowledge relationships with Greece, Kenya, Ghana.

Connor Newson | Community Action for Land Liberation

Education is the strongest immediate lever: specifically sharing knowledge, upskilling, and creating spaces for skill exchange.
CALL has developed a decolonial curriculum centred on land justice, delivered through popular education circles: non-hierarchical, facilitated, experiential.
Internationalism is critical: communities in the Global South have survived and resisted dispossession for far longer; their knowledge is a resource, e.g. community-developed organic fertilisers in Cali, Colombia.
The UK food system is fragile: around 46–48% of food consumed is imported; 84% of fruit and nearly half of all vegetables are imported (see fact-check section).
Alternatives must be built proactively, not as a response to collapse but to prevent dependence on a system vulnerable to disruption.

“All of these things exist. We just need to be building relationships with people and sharing that knowledge. We don’t need to be starting from ground zero.” , Connor Newson

Q3: The Right to Grow Campaign in Haringey

Connor Newson | Community Action for Land Liberation

Campaign born from 3–4 years of grassroots organising by CALL through land justice education sessions, film screenings, and community assemblies.
Two-strand structure: (1) direct action: identify unused public land and start growing; (2) policy push, secure legal and planning permission so sites can’t be shut down or sold off.
Risk without policy: a site with years of community effort can be shut down the moment a council finds a more profitable use; demoralisation is a real organising cost.
The practice of collective decision-making is itself part of the campaign: relearning how to make decisions together after decades of disconnection from communal land use.
Campaign still in early stages at time of recording; strategy day planned to formalise launch.

Paulette Henry | Black Rootz

Walthamstow Right to Grow cited as a parallel initiative.
Contaminated land is a major risk: many potential growing sites in London boroughs have histories as fly-tipping grounds, asbestos burial sites, or sites with heavy metal contamination.
Black Rootz waited two years for soil testing on a granted site: lead was found; 10 tonnes of soil had to be removed. “We are not going to poison people’s children.”
Right to Grow funding must include soil testing costs and the cost of importing clean compost or topsoil where needed: this must be built into any grant or permission framework.
Phyto/micro-remediation techniques taught for sites where excavation isn’t possible, healing soils without removal.
Some ‘secret gardens’ have existed for 7+ years without council knowledge: community pragmatism where formal permission is not forthcoming.

Q4: Intergenerational Engagement and Growing New Leaders

Paulette Henry | Black Rootz

Young Entrepreneurs programme: ages 8–20, turning personal passions into businesses: participants learn USP, money management, grants vs philanthropy vs investment, labelling and customer service.
Tottenham Flower and Produce Show: 1,500+ attendees; one young person made £250 in 3–4 hours selling succulent pots.
13-year-olds running workshops on Yakon for adults, young people teaching up.
Hip-hop gardener model: using music as an entry point for teenage engagement with growing.
Over 1,000 children engaged in a single year; plants given to children create ongoing responsibility and connection to parks and park rangers.
Windrush tea parties as intergenerational exchange: younger members cook for and serve elders; elders share cultural knowledge and dance.
Seasonal wellbeing built into programming: growers who disengage in October (seasonal depression) stay connected via WhatsApp; mutual aid continues through winter.

Pamela Shor | Black Rootz

‘Grow your own people’: the London Rangers Network has grown its own activists the same way Black Rootz grows growers: training from seed sovereignty to mental health first aid.
Relinquishing control is part of leadership: giving community members ownership of specific areas (herbs, mushrooms, dye gardens) so they thrive and lead.
Pam’s model with older allotment holders: offering help to elders who could no longer manage full plots in exchange for growing knowledge: mutual benefit, no waiting list required.
Introduces the concept of minga/round robbing (communal labour exchange): rotating between members’ plots, all cook, all work, building reciprocal systems that mirror traditional indigenous practices.

“We have to listen to what the community wants. Governments and organisations from the top down like to tell people what’s best for them. How do we know what the community wants? We asked them.” , Pamela Shor

Specific Projects and Initiatives Mentioned

Black Rootz community seed bank: in development; partnering with London Freedom Seed Bank, OmVed Gardens, and the Millennium Seed Bank.
Mycelium Mines: Pam’s mushroom growing project; equipment acquired through sharing free knowledge and community reciprocity.
Eastwood Green: demonstrates compact growing methods for urban communities without large land access.
Broadwater Farm rooftop gardens: community food growing in high-density housing.
Community building with natural materials: hemp and clay construction; walls at Wolves Lane contain handprints of community builders; designed for two-person hand-tool construction.
Eat With Green project: planned SAD lamp corner in garden for winter wellbeing; community space designed around mental health as much as growing.
Roots into Food Growing report: policy document delivered with partner organisations advocating community food growing needs at government level.
CALL land justice popular education circles: dozens of sessions on themes of land justice; non-hierarchical facilitation model.

Fact-Check: Statistics Cited in the Panel

The statistics below were verified against published sources after the panel.

Stat as stated	Verdict	More accurate figure / notes
0.8–1.2% of land is owned by the wider community	Needs revision	Not well-sourced. The public sector owns ~8.5% of English land. The community/voluntary sector holds a much smaller share but a specific verified figure is not readily available.
98%+ of land owned by the 1%	Overstated	Direction is correct but figure is too high. Best available research (Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England?) finds ~50% of England owned by ~25,000 people (roughly 0.04% of population). Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain puts 70% of UK land owned by under 1% of the population. Neither source supports 98%.
40–50% of food consumed in the UK is imported	Accurate	Confirmed. UK imports approximately 46–48% of food consumed (AHDB; UK Food Security Report 2024; Global Food Security programme). Self-sufficiency has declined from ~75% in the 1980s to ~65% today.
80–95% of fruit and vegetables is imported	Partially accurate	Accurate for fruit (84% imported; UK produces only 16% of fruit consumed). Overstated for vegetables (UK produces ~53% of fresh vegetables consumed; ~47–50% is imported). The combined 80–95% range is misleading if applied to both categories together.

Sources: Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England? (2019); Kevin Cahill, Who Owns Britain (2001); UK Food Security Report 2024 (Defra); AHDB Food Security analysis; Global Food Security programme.