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ORAL HISTORY

Leo Gorman

Grow Dat Youth Farm

As a student at Tulane University, Leo Gorman attended his first political protest, a show of support for the community that lives along Louisiana’s so-called Cancer Alley, a petrochemical hub upriver from New Orleans. He became interested in environmental justice issues, locally and globally, and, after graduating, worked with Indigenous farmers in South America. He returned to New Orleans to study and eventually teach History. Being back in the Big Easy led to a position to help launch, in 2010, Grow Dat Youth Farm, a youth leadership non-profit that seeks to nurture the city’s next generation of young leaders through producing food on a working farm. Located in City Park, Grow Dat hires 15 to 21-year olds, paying them an equitable wage, to farm the land, growing produce for the organization’s CSA boxes. Along the way, these young people develop critical thinking and leadership skills, while exploring the history, politics, and economics of the systems, and the problems that emerge from those systems, that shape New Orleans and our world.