“SNAP is Great, But It’s Not Guaranteed” with Duron Chavis
Growers & Organizers Talk “Beyond SNAP”
Duron Chavis at the 2025 Happily Natural Festival in Richmond, Virginia.
What do you do when government safety nets that claim to support and protect you are snatched away in the middle of the night? This has been the reality for vulnerable communities in the United States since its founding. In our new series, Beyond SNAP, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance gathers practical lessons so organizers and growers can act now and build toward self-determination.
In this first episode, we sit down with Duron Chavis of Richmond, Virginia, founder of Happily Natural Day and a longtime organizer in food access and land stewardship. We talk about what the SNAP halt revealed on the ground, and how his team is preparing for the future. Duron names the risks of relying on a welfare state, and sketches a bold vision for a self-determined food economy that links Richmond to the wider African diaspora. Let’s get into it!
Transcript
Duron: My name is Duron Chavis. I'm the founder, director of Happily Natural Day. It’s a 501c3, based in Richmond, Virginia. We've been doing this work since 2003. We’re doing food access, food justice, food sovereignty work since 2008, and land stewardship since 2012. So, you know, what do we do? We steward land, across central Virginia, multiple farms and garden sites. We train, teach community members how to develop, farm sites, garden spaces, green spaces. And, we also work to acquire land so that folks, post-training, have space to actually start their farm experience or farm journey. We distribute, sell as well as, do mutual aid with food that we grow. And also we aggregate produce from Black farmers across our region.
The Sankofa Community Orchard is a five-acre green space consisting of over 100 fruit trees in the Southside of Richmond, Virginia. Image courtesy of Myles Black, The Richmond Seen
We've got a refrigerated box truck and cold storage on multiple farm locations, across our area that we're building out a, basically trying to build a distribution network. What else do we do? We do an annual festival celebration called Happily Natural Days, where the name is derived from.
It's basically a celebration of Blackness on the last weekend of August, where we bring together holistic health, wellness practitioners, activists, musicians, craftsmen. And we just get it in, you know? Black farm tours, dinners and, you know, music and live performances from nationally acclaimed acts and things like that. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that, we just try to stay alive, brother. Try to survive America.
NBFJA: So from your end where you are and from the work that you've done. I'm curious, once you started to hear the news about a SNAP halt coming, and how that was going to impact people, were there things that you and your organization had done up to that point that made you kind of feel prepared for the moment in some ways?
Duron: Oh, yeah. I mean, our work has been dedicated to building Black owned and controlled food systems.
So, like, we're we've we was like, yo, we just going to keep doing what we've been doing. I mean, it's not necessarily like I mean, it wasn't for me or for us. It wasn't like, “Oh my God, it's the end of the world.” It's like, this is an opportunity for us to, you know, just insert and keep keep, doing the work. Two things.
One, we were already doing mutual aid work. Right. So, you know, we accept SNAP and all that different type of stuff, and that's cool. The double bucks, and you know what I'm saying? The whole, like, you could pay half and you know, and then get, you know, double your money with the snap and all that. We already do that.
But on the other, on the other end, that's not the only thing we do. We also support food pantries of Black churches. So we're like, well, you know, we're just going to rev it up. You know what I'm saying? Just increase the amount of distribution that we're already doing. So we're going to be copping more produce from farmers in our community.
Image courtesy of Next City
What was kind of intriguing for us, though, is that, like, when this stuff came down, we were already, about to, launch, farm incubation, or the evolution of our farm incubation work.
So, there's like, 20 acres of land that we are in partnership with a local municipal government, Henrico County, which is, sister county or, you know, right next door to Richmond. And so we have a MoU with them to manage this 20 acres and to recruit farmers for the 20 acres. You know what I'm saying? So we are already in the middle of a training. And the groundbreaking for that, 20 acres is supposed to be, like, within the next week is actually supposed to be in the first in November, but they pushed it back to the 17th.
And so we, like I could add, just basically, if y'all are going, if the conversation is people need food, we buy to open up 20 acres. And if y'all really bout that life about, you know, Black self-determination, then you gonna fall in line and jump with us into this space. And you know you're going to take our training and we're going to support you in growing. The only costs associated with the access to the land is that you do 10% of your harvest to, you know, the, to the, to the, food bank. You know what I mean? And then we would, you know, we get that food over to the food bank, and that goes out as mutual aid to, you know, the community.
So, yeah, I mean, we was already in the, we was already doing aggregation and the distribution, and then this land is about to open up, you know, literally this month. And then we got another 60 acres that's going to open up at the top of 2026. So, I mean, the conversation for us is more like, well, if people are going to be hungry and they don't have the capacity to eat, we have land, we have seeds, we have greenhouses. You know, we already got new farmers that are coming up on to these properties and that are rocking out.
We can feed our community. It's not a this is not it's not like,” oh my God. Like nobody has any money.” Like, okay, now if there's no SNAP, then that means that we just have to increase the amount of distribution that we do in the mutual aid form, and that's cool, that's fine.
NBFJA: But it sounds like, you know, one of the lessons that you're offering here for us, in terms of thinking about the future is the more we organize and sort of concentrate our efforts, in that direction towards self-determination, the better off will be the next, the next time, the next crisis, the next thing. Right?
Duron: Yeah. Well, you know, you got to think back. I mean, we were, we survived the pandemic. So the pandemic was a critical moment, too. I mean, food stamps didn't shut down, but food systems did. So you think about people who… we pivoted. You know, we did work on distribution of food. You know, we also were giving away raised beds and training people, teaching people how to grow their own food.
Image courtesy of Myles Black, The Richmond Seen
So this moment for us was like heightening the contradictions. I was like, well, if SNAP, SNAP hasn't always existed, right? It's a program that came alive in, like the 60s. The 70s, actually. So if this program didn't always exist, how do we feed our community before there was a food stamp? Right. And that looks like we have benevolent societies, mutual aid in Black communities as where this shit comes from.
We know the Black Panther Party originated the Free Breakfast Programs. Right? And that the government created these safety net programs as a diversion from the very real work of us politicizing and using food as a tool for political education in our community.
I used to work at the social services, you know? I was the food stamp guy. So my perspective on this is not, like, from some aloofness. Like, I literally was the guy that would interview you for food stamps. You come in and I give you your EBT card, you know, I would you your, your card. There's already people that can't access benefits. There's people that have come home with drug related felonies, possession with intent to distribute, that they are already not on the rolls. There are people that are from immigrant communities that are ineligible for benefits already.
Like, this is like hunger is real. Like there's of course, a huge cross-section of our community that, you know, receives benefits. And there's also businesses that rely on, you know, the influx of cash that comes through that space. But, you know, this is not our system. This is not like… America, this is not ours. This shit doesn't belong to us. It wasn't built for us that the Constitution was written… we forced our way into this. So that was important for us to start thinking like this. It don't belong to us. And anything that comes out of it is by virtue of like, you know, electoral processes and all this type of shit. But none of that shit is like ironclad. So we have to have our, you know, mind screwed on to like, what does it look like for us to support ourselves?
I feel like in this moment, you know, people make a lot of excuses. But everything about this food sovereignty work is communal. So figuring out how we develop those systems, and getting more intuitive towards what it is going to take for us to not be reliant on these government welfare programs is critical. And I know I'm gonna probably get ate up by this. People probably ain't gonna like me saying this, but I'm telling you like SNAP is great, is is an amazing thing.
But as we see, it is not guaranteed. But, our people still gotta eat. So what does that looks like for me as teaching? As many of our community members had how to grow their own food and giving them access to land to do that.
NBFJA: And so I'm just curious for you, like in your wildest imagination, you know what I mean, like you can close your eyes and you can visualize what, self-determined sort of food economy looks like where you are? Paint that picture for me. In that future, when you've built toward all the things that you're building toward right now, what does that look like?
Image courtesy of Myles Black, The Richmond Seen
Duron: Yeah. Oh, man. I think that's, Yeah. So for me, I mean, in terms of, like, the biggest vision is like, yo, we are, we have all of our needs already met as a community, right? Like, as a global African diaspora, we don't have to be reliant on white folks for nothing. Like literally in this moment, like, not in the future. Tomorrow. Like, it’s here, you know what I'm saying?
From West Africa, Ghana to the Caribbean, Virgin Islands and Saint Croix, Costa Rica, you know, Guyana like we got all the food, bruh. I went to Costa Rica just last weekend and it's everywhere. Food is abundant. Seafood, fucking veggies, all the things. And it's all Black people saying you go to Ghana was Africa. It's the same thing.
It's all there. So how do we develop these supply chains and think bigger than, “Oh I'm just I'm in America.” Like the virus of Americanism got us self-isolating and thinking that we initiate by ourselves and it’s not real. It's a myth.
In my wildest imagination, we have a transcontinental supply chain across the African diaspora, where we're basically feeding ourselves. And we've gotten, we’ve created new systems that exist, that are waiting for us to manifest into existence now. But I know it's going to take time, but it will be in existence soon come.
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Learn more about Duron’s work with Happily Natural Day and the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons.