Nancy Mintie

Nancy Mintie

Founder and Executive Director of Uncommon Good

Interviewer: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Perhaps we could start with some information about your background and then we can go from there.

Nancy: My motivation was to try to address human suffering in my community. Not just suffering that’s unavoidable, like natural disasters or people eventually getting cancer, but specifically the suffering that arose from injustice because I thought that it is something we can change. Everybody eventually gets sick and dies, and you never know when the next earthquake is going to hit, but we do know what causes the kind of suffering that creates poverty and is the result of injustice. So I was very interested in how that could be changed. So that was the general reason I went to law school, because back in those days if you wanted to be an activists or to work for change in your community, a common way to do that was through the law. I think that has changed a lot now, and I would do it very differently if I were doing it again. But in those days, the law really seemed like a good basic tool to have for social change. When I graduated from law school, I wanted to make a contribution where no one else was. I wanted to help people who weren’t being helped at all.

The standard legal aid jobs really didn’t interest me that much because, first of all, I wasn’t wanted in those days because it was a time, rightfully so, of trying to do affirmative action in the legal profession. So they were looking for people who came from the communities they were going to serve. And that wasn’t me. And it was a very good goal. It’s wonderful to have people who come from communities that speak Spanish that can communicate. So they weren’t very interested in me and I wasn’t really very interested in them because I knew that if I didn’t take the job, there would be 100 people behind me who would step in and take that job and the work would get done. So what interested me was taking the law and justice to a community that had no access to justice or to advocacy at all at that point.

There was a community right in my hometown of Los Angeles that was extremely destitute. And that was Skid Row. There was no legal aid there at all, and the people there were being taken advantage of in every aspect of their lives. The ones who could work would go to work for these day labor agencies that would just send them out to some suburban community with big flyers to hand out and then they would ditch them out in those communities and not even bring them back to Skid Row where that might get a bowl of soup or a mission bed. And they wouldn’t pay them. So people were just really being exploited. Those who couldn’t work were being turned away from their county welfare offices for a variety of excuses. They wouldn’t have an ID or they couldn’t prove their residence. So they were people who had no help at all. The ones who lived in housing were living in horrific slums that were very unsafe and crawling with rats and vermin. So the housing was a mess. In every aspect of life, be it work or healthcare or housing or help for the disabled, there was nothing going on to help these people, leaving them completely abandoned.

So I approached a group down there called the Catholic Worker, which was a group started by a woman back in the 1930s. She was a radical anarchist protesting wars and injustice and going to jail for various causes, and then had a conversion experience to Christianity that fortunately did nothing to blunt her radicalism. She then integrated that into her political beliefs and started now what’s known as the Catholic Worker, which is communities of mostly young people who just go to places where the poorest people are and live with them and do whatever they can to help in those communities. There was a Catholic Worker community on Skid Row. There was a house there and community members would go down to the produce market in the morning, after all the supermarkets had come and bought what they were already going to buy, and take the discards and leftovers and bring them back and cook them in a big pot of stew for the neighborhood, sharing it with whoever was hungry on the street. There was one house on Skid Row and another a couple miles away in East Los Angeles in Boyle Heights. People would bring homeless back to these houses to help them get back on their feet. People would come and donate clothes and stuff and it would all be shared. Everybody involved in the community would live with everybody brought from the street.

I found that very attractive, so I approached them and asked if I could join their group and start a legal aid clinic. They agreed to it and that’s how it started. That became the Inner City Law Center, which was my first organization, and I ran that for about 20 years. What we did there was really interesting because, since I didn’t really know what the community needed or what the answers were, by living with them they would tell me what they needed and what the problems were. I could then work to fix those issues. I learned what communities wanted and needed and was able to respond to that. We joined the Catholic Worker in January of 1980, which was the year that Ronald Reagan got elected president. He started dismantling the social service safety net that formerly had kept poor people poor and in crappy housing in crappy neighborhoods, but nevertheless in some kind of housing with some kind of job. And all that was pulled out from under people. We started seeing the big accumulation of homeless people in Los Angeles that we now sort of take for granted, as if it was always there. But that’s not true. I was there and saw it start.

That was also the year that all heck broke loose in El Salvador. With the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Ramiro and the terrible civil war that broke out, there was terrible civil unrest and oppression in much of Latin America at that time. And the peso was crashing in Mexico, so we started seeing waves of young families coming to Skid Row. It had formerly been older, white alcoholic males and it started changing because of what was happening in these communities. The homeless demographic was becoming younger and consisted of more African Americans and Latinos because of what was happening to society and people in these communities. So we would see this. We would be on the tough-made streets of Skid Row and noticed more mothers with little children and little girls with ruffled pastel dresses coming into the neighborhood because this was the entry point for the refugees from Mexico and Central America. They started moving into this housing and their children started getting attacked by rats. They came and told us what was going on and we started representing them. The two big areas of focus when I was there were working with the homeless people and the families that were living in slum housing. With the homeless people, in the winter of 1984 we staged a tent sit-in on the lawn outside of city hall, with 300 homeless people living in the tents there. It made news all around the world- Rome, Paris, London, Tokyo- because nobody realized before then that Los Angeles, the sun and fun capital of the world, had a homeless problem. It was shocking news. We started a series of lawsuits against the county government and to a certain extent the state to try and force the county to provide social services for people who were on the street. The lawsuits were initially successful and I worked with some wonderful brilliant lawyers that were from underserved communities all around Los Angeles. We started gaining help for people on the street. But then, after about a decade, the counties got smart and went to the state and got the state to change the state constitution to say that the counties were no longer required to provide help for destitute people. That undercut all of our work of litigation for trying to get rights for these people, because they just changed the law and there was no longer a right to assistance. Another thing that was happening was the slum housing lawsuits started to become very successful. We were winning millions of dollars in cases for families in slums where there had often been an injury, or in some cases, a premature death. So we won a lot of money and I would give it to the families, wishing them to live happily ever after as I bid them farewell. But a couple of years later they’d be back telling me that they were in another slum and asking for my help. When I asked them what happened they told me that they had lived off of the money until it ran out, but when nobody in the family had the education to get a job to keep them above the poverty line, back down they went.  So I told them how we could fix this.  When we would win a case we would take part of the money and put it in college funds for the kids so that they could get an education to break that cycle. So we started doing that, and the kids started coming back when they were in their teens to get their college money. But by then they usually had two babies and a boyfriend in jail and they’d dropped out of high school, so it wasn’t college money it was diaper money. It was then that I realized that we have to start much younger with the kids if we want to influence them.

Also around that time, young people coming out of law school found that they could no longer afford to do the kind of work I was doing because they were coming out of school with too much debt. The cost of an education had gone through the roof and young people weren’t able to serve the way that I had. So those were some of the reasons that I started Uncommon Good. After working with the homeless for many years I realized that once a person becomes homeless, they are so beaten down that it takes a minor miracle to put them back together again and get them on their feet so that they can enter back into society. This is because there are often health issues, mental health issues, arrest records, and histories of substance abuse. These are all the things that happen to people when they are stripped of everything and discarded from society. They just melt down and there is so much harm done. I thought that if we could start working with kids who are at risk of becoming the next homeless generation, and stop that at the source, it would be a much better solution to get these kids on the right path so they wouldn’t fall off the edge of society and become homeless. Because of our experience with the families in the slum housing, I realized that we had to start with them young, so that was the impetus for our education program

I also wanted to do something to help young people who were coming out of law school and wanting to do legal aid work, so we started a debt relief program for young legal labor lawyers that ran for about 10 years. We also developed a doctor program to go along with it because the same thing was happening with young people coming out of medical school. They couldn’t go into underserved communities and work in the community clinics because they owed too much money. They couldn’t work for the lowest salaries in the profession because they would never pay off their loans. So those were the reasons we started Uncommon Good. When the economy collapsed in 2008, things were so bad for our families and I wondered what we could do. To make the long story short we got together with our families to brainstorm and developed the urban agriculture program. I never have the answers. Its’ always me just going to people and asking what will work for them, what they need, and how I can help. So that’s how the whole farm program started.

The building became a part of the whole story too. When we needed a new office and one of the girls in our program learned about the architect who was promoting this kind of building, we saw that as a way to really make a contribution to the world, to show how any community can create a safe, comfortable and attractive building for their needs with just the dirt under their feet and some sweat equity. It’s nice to be able to demonstrate this and help promote this in communities. We have had people go to Haiti and show people there how to build buildings like this because they deforested the whole country to build little stick frame houses that fell down every time an earthquake or a hurricane came through. And once they’d build them again, they’d get wiped out again. Thousands of people die, and that isn’t really necessary. There is also another young man who helped us build this who is going over to Niger in February to show the nomads how to build these out of sand, because they don’t have the trees, cement and machinery to build other structures. But you can build this out of sand. We’ve had people come from tornado alley and learn to build these out in tornado country. It’s nice to be able to tell people about this, the answers are right under your feet and you can build them with your own two hands. One doesn’t have to die in natural disasters

Interviewer: So your organization does a lot community involvement in terms of providing youth access to higher education, family support and assistance. Maybe you could talk a little more about some of the projects like the urban agriculture initiative.

Nancy: The education program is interesting because it has 100% success rate in getting kids to college who participate. Their socioeconomic peers are dropping out of high school at a rate of almost 50%. These are the kids who would be on track to become the next poor generation or even the next homeless generation because they’re dropping out of high school and not getting a high school degree. So it’s going to be rough for them. But our kids, coming from the same socioeconomic group, who are some of the poorest kids in the community, are all going to college. I think the biggest reason for that success is that we harness the power of relationship though the mentoring component of the program, where each child who comes into the program gets an individual mentor to become their friend and confidante to guide them towards the larger world of success in this culture. That bond of friendship, even love, is very powerful. We see it when we change the child’s outlook on themselves, what’s possible for them and what they can do to be successful. Interestingly, we see changes with the mentors too since each relationship is a two way street. Often there are dramatic changes in the lives or worldviews of the mentors as well. So we know it’s some really powerful stuff. With that we also have all the other components of the program: tutoring, academic enrichment and the writing workshops, hands on learning small business development skills, farm and science projects, and various things of that nature, in addition to intensive college counseling. So we do all the things that other programs do. But I think the real magic bullet of it all is the mentoring component and the power of relationship, which, if you can harness that, is the most powerful force that you can bring to bear. It’s the power of love.

The farm program I think is interesting because it’s aiming for an unprecedented quadruple bottom line. From the business side, most businesses only have one bottom line, which is to make money. The four bottom lines, which are really non-negotiable for us are, yeah, we do want to make some money. We want to sell some vegetables. But second, we’re going to treat our workers right. We’re going to pay them a fair wage and health benefits for their families and not work them to death. You may not have read the LA Times on Sunday, but the feature article had a reporter and a photographer who, for a year and a half, looked at the lives of farmworkers in Mexico who produce all of the produce that is then shipped up here to Walmart, Target, Subway and some grocery chains. I’ll never buy grown in Mexico again after reading that article because the workers are treated so horribly and sub humanly that it’s just heart breaking. And yet it reinforced just how corporate agriculture works. That’s why they can sell tomatoes real cheap. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to treat the workers with respect for the beautiful work that they do so they can decently support their families. That’s our second bottom-line. The third bottom line is what we give to the community by giving away food to families that can’t afford to buy it. We also have health and wellness programming at our farms with the parents. With the kids we do outdoor science projects and integrate them into the business end of the farm too, giving them real world experience and the confidence to help them be successful when they go off to college and beyond.

The fourth bottom line is the environment. Corporate agriculture is depleting the soil at unsustainable rates and depleting groundwater and groundwater supplies at unsustainable rates. It’s treating animals so badly that epidemics are spreading through livestock. We have the problem of animals being so heavily medicated with antibiotics that the antibiotics are losing their ability to cure. There’s also the way labor is treated in this country. When I was doing law work, I talked to people who had been farm laborers in the central valley. Many of them had neurological diseases because of the stuff that they spray onto strawberries. Never eat a strawberry that’s not organic because you’re eating neurotoxins. Basically with any fruit that isn’t organic, you’re eating neurotoxins. The farmers would be out there without any protective gear and they would just spray this stuff. They would develop neurological diseases and crippling and debilitating illnesses and then be kicked to the curb. After they’ve destroyed the lives and health of these people, the farms would then bring in the next group of desperate people.

So those are the four bottom lines. It’s crazy because at the present time, in this economy and in this culture, that’s not the way business is done. There’s usually just the ruthless cutting of corners and screwing anybody you have to in order to make a profit. But I think that’s changing. I think that people are starting to wake up and want something better for their world, for each other and for their food. Just the simple idea of pouring poison all over our food is so crazy that I think the light bulb is just going to have to go off with a few more people and then there’ll be a sea of change. When everyone realizes that we used to pour neurotoxins all over our food before eating it, they’ll wonder what we were thinking. I think things are changing and that we’re up front in are efforts to address it. We’re modeling something that’s new and unprecedented, but I don’t think we’re going to be alone in it for long. I think the world will catch up and, and hopefully in time to keep our effort going successfully.

Interviewer: It’s interesting how you highlighted the correlation between social justice and environmental sustainability, not only in relation to the labor conditions that workers are subjected to, but to the public health of consumers who are also exposed to toxins.

Nancy: It’s a big problem even in schools in the central valley because the wind drift gets swept into them. It’s not just the farm workers, but it’s the communities and kids who are being affected by all of this poison, especially small children who are still developing. It’s really dangerous and I think it’s unnecessary. People may think now that, in order to feed the world, we need Monsanto, GMOs, pesticides and everything else, but that actually doesn’t seem to be the case. Much of the world, population-wise, still consists mostly of farmers and small family farms. They farm their own food and they’ve been doing fine for centuries. When we come in is when a lot of the problems start. For example, in India our corporations sold many farmers on a GMO seed that was supposed to have bigger yields. However, the farmers would have to buy it new again every year since the seeds couldn’t reproduce themselves. As weeds and bugs continued to evolve to resist what was put in these plants, the crop yields would still die, putting the farmers deeper and deeper in debt. There’s hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides in India because of how we’ve “improved” their agriculture. But of course we really didn’t. I think that by using our heads and farming in a way that’s harmonious with the planet while also putting reasonable limits on population size, we could attain a future that isn’t as full of starvation, suffering, illness and environmental ruin.

Interviewer: I definitely agree. Our agriculture system is very industrialized, resulting in a detachment between people and where they get their food from. There’s also a lack of knowledge concerning the safety issues involved in our food production. Not only has this resulted in a loss of culture, but also a loss of life due to the countless people who have died relatively premature deaths as a result of these health hazards.

Nancy: Yes. And there’s great suffering that goes along with that too. If the last 20 years of someone’s life has been in crippling pain because of a diet related disease or a pollution related disease, what kind of life is that? I think it’s all so unnecessary. Since you’re around young people all the time, you must see that there seems to be a sizable minority of young people that have figured this out, realizing that its nuts and that we have to do things differently. Wouldn’t you say?

Interviewer: I would say so. Since a lot of my peers are in the same curriculum, centered mainly in environmental analysis, we see how unsustainable practices are being applied on the large scale. But a lot of people don’t think about these things and they view everything as normal. They think that if it works and if it’s cheap, there’s little chance our current practices could fail us. However, especially as we consider the effects of climate change, they must realize that the way we produce food is unsustainable. When more powerful storms and other unpredictable weather events happen as a result of climate change, our food security will be put at large risk. We won’t be able to keep making the best antibiotics to prevent the spread of bacteria in our food supply. We won’t be able to deal with major crop losses because of the method in which we grow all of our groups in one place. Oftentimes food has to travel miles and miles from where it’s grown, which also isn’t sustainable.

Nancy: Right. What our farmers are doing is really making a difference. Food can be full of life and health and energy, as opposed to food that has travelled 2000 miles and is dead by the time it reaches supermarkets. I’m pretty tired after I travel 2000 miles. I can only imagine how it affects our food.

Interviewer: How is that supposed to nourish people? You know?

Nancy: Exactly. It feels good to be able to have a program like this that not only helps our families, but helps the community.  It helps me. I buy all my food here now because I know this is the best possible food that I can provide for me and my family.

Interviewer: Yeah. Shifting gears now, what are challenges that uncommon good faces as an NGO in terms of implementing change on the local level?

Nancy: Our biggest challenge is always finding funding, especially now that we’re in a time of transition. I’m actually very excited to be able to be alive and work now because I think that change is starting to happen. The change I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I see it in you guys and a more general openness in talking about these ideas in our culture. And that’s new. It probably seems like normal to you because you’ve grown up with it, but for me it’s definitely not normal. It gives me a lot of hope to see this change beginning. But it hasn’t happened quite yet. It hasn’t transformed our economy yet and it hasn’t transformed the way we do good works in the community yet. All of this is lagging behind in our old dysfunctional model. We are trying to do new work within the structures of our old paradigms, and it hasn’t been a very good match. It’s a constant struggle looking for ways to support this and keep the work going. And getting enough money for it so that the world has a chance to catch up and people want to throw a lot of support behind these kinds of projects is hard when our society is lagging behind. So this lag time is also a major issue.

Interviewer: That’s a very valid concern. The programs here seem sustainable and forward thinking, but within the framework of our current institutions, which have been influenced a lot by corporatism, it seems like a big challenge to facilitate these kinds of community efforts in order to promote sustainability.

Nancy: Right. Well even the government has yet to appreciate out model. We applied for a grant from the USDA for our farm program and it was denied. They said they denied it because, firstly, we were paying our farmers too much. Maybe they had somebody from Idaho reviewing this grant, because what we are paying our farmers, while it is more than what anybody else would pay their farmers, isn’t really too much. But that’s because most farm labor is ruthlessly exploited. And while we made the case that our employees are people whose work deserves to be compensated at a decent level, they counted it as a strike against us that we were paying fair wages and benefits. Second, they said we were giving away too much food to the hungry. So the whole heart and soul of our program, where we wanted to do this to get a healthy diet to people that can’t afford a healthy diet in this culture, was held against us. Thirdly, they said that we weren’t sustainable since we didn’t own the land that we use. Well this is southern California. Buying a small plot of land here costs you a million dollars. We’re a small nonprofit. That doesn’t work in this economic region. Maybe if we were in Detroit, where they are essentially giving away land, that’d be a different story. But this is southern California and the land might as well be spun gold. We’ve come up with an innovative way where we’ve got our land partners, who give us a 10 year renewable lease on the land they’re not using. That’s a pretty good way to get free land leveraged into farming. But that wasn’t good enough for them. So it’s these kinds of old ideas holding back our newly emerging ethos.

Interviewer: Hopefully this can change over time. As you said, these changes are happening, especially with the generation turnover and as people again more knowledge of the larger problems associated with our current way of doing things.

Nancy: Yeah. It gives me hope that we’re seeing change in other issues though. Gay marriage, medical marijuana, and other issues where people thought we’d never see change, have now progressed to a point where people are now realizing why we would ever have wanted to keep things the same.

Interviewer: At the same time it’s rather troubling to see how behind we have been in realizing the severity of other issues. Like institutionalized racism, especially in law enforcement, which has demonstrated how not everyone has realized the same treatment under the law.

Nancy: Yes. Well for many years, I took that approach. When I was at the Inner City Law Center fighting the system, we would sue the government to try to make change happen at the systemic level. Then I realized after all those years that it wasn’t really a fair fight. Here we were, the little people going up against the system, and then our legal opponents figured out how to completely change the law. So I think very differently now. I think that the system itself, the economic and political system, is starting to unravel. The system is not admitting that it’s unraveling, but it slowly is. For example, in the paper this morning there was talk about the state of California, and how we’re underspending significantly on where we need to just to keep our infrastructure of bridges and roads maintained. So they’re crumbling underneath us. We pay the lowest of any rate in the nation for Medi-Cal to our doctors. So doctors aren’t taking Medi-Cal and there are people who cannot find doctors, even with ObamaCare. Our education spending, by some measures, is the lowest in the nation. So everything is disintegrating because it’s unsustainable on so many levels. We could fight it. We could go out in the streets and take on the police, but that only puts you at risk of finding yourself dead. I don’t think that’s necessary because it is going to collapse on its own weight. What we can do now as the little people is start building these new structures in the shadows of the old, quietly going about our business. We’re not a threat to anybody. Police officers, the president, political representatives… they don’t know what we’re doing and they don’t understand it. They don’t care. If they did then we might be in trouble. But I don’t think so because they’re so convinced that their power is never going to go away and that no one will ever be able to challenge the government, or the police, and so on. But we don’t have to. It’s like the way Eastern Europe collapsed. I call it the termite effect. We’re all just little termites, nibbling away at the foundation of this huge fortress. Eventually the termite is the most powerful creature in nature and the fortress collapses. Eastern European communism collapsed overnight because little people in little groups here and there had just been chipping away, creating a new reality, withdrawing their support and participation from the structure until the whole thing went down. So I believe, well I know, it’s going to happen here because no empire lasts forever. They all get to the point where they overreach and they overextend and then they collapse. And the United States is making that same mistake, so we’re going to have some times ahead of chaos and disorganization. But out of that then can emerge what we have been quietly building in the shadows all of these years. The new ways of doing things. For instance, when corporate agriculture collapses, we’ll have people in our communities that know how to grow food, and who have been honored for that and who can show the others. We have people who know how to build buildings with just some earth and some people working together. We’re supporting the young doctors who are figuring out how to provide decent preventative healthcare, like Barefoot doctors in low-income communities who could be needed when the hospitals are no longer available to us, as they aren’t for many people even now. So I think it’s terribly sad what’s going on politically. Whether that be with the government, the police, the military, or the rest of our old power dynamics and structures. But they’re not long for this world. What will remain will be the people and the peoples’ solutions to what they want next. So I try to focus on that instead of the really bad news, because of course a lot of it is out there and is happening. I know that’s not the final answer.

Interviewer: I think that’s an interesting assessment of the kind of work that’s being done here and in various other organizations like this one that focus on community efforts. Sustainable practices can be what we hope to fall back on.

Nancy: Exactly. I was asked in the fall to be on a panel at Pitzer College about rights, like the right to education. But I don’t see the conversation as being one of rights because, if something is a right, it sort of means that everything else is wrong and that one should carve out their little right, like a right to healthcare, a right to housing, and so on.  I always kind of wondered about that. When I first started working out on Skid Row, there were some well-meaning, civil libertarian groups who came down to Skid Row to teach the homeless guys their rights when they get stopped by the cops. They told them that when they get stopped by a cop, that they have a right to this, that and the other. I would tell these guys how that was only going to put them at risk of being killed, and that they should try to be as agreeable as possible. The truth was, and I litigated some of these cases, the cops would beat the crap out of people from the slightest provocation. It was going on even back then, and the way to get your head split open was to inform an officer that you had rights. That wasn’t the solution. The solution had to be at a whole different level because the power imbalance was just too great. You couldn’t take it head on. You couldn’t be the homeless guy taking on the cops by stating your rights. So I think we have to be smarter than that. We have to be smarter, cagier and more self-protective.

Interviewer: Yeah. And perhaps protesting and social organizing can make it clear what needs to be addressed in these communities as well. Well, it looks like we’ve approached the hour, and I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Thank you for the opportunity to conduct this interview.

Nancy: It’s my pleasure Rickie. I hope it’s been helpful. Good luck!