A TED Talk Put Ron Finley on the Map. 10 Years Later, the ‘Gangsta Gardener’ Is Going Strong.
Finley has grown comfortable with his role as spokesperson for gardening as a solution to food apartheid.
By Stephanie Toone
Civil Eats
January 9, 2024
Excerpt:
It has been 10 years since Ron Finley, the self-proclaimed “Gangsta Gardener,” changed the trajectory of his life with a TED Talk about food apartheid in his community, South Central Los Angeles. The talk has been viewed nearly 5 million times since then, and one of its most memorable lines—“Growing your own food is like printing your own money”—has since become the seed of Finley’s burgeoning philanthropic work.
Finley has become famous for planting avocados, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane in and behind his house in a spot where there was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool and making it available to community members for free.
He organized against regulation that prevented Angelenos from curbside gardening, and went on to launch a nonprofit, the Ron Finley Project. And yet he says he’s still amazed by the impact of the TED Talk and the number of doors it has opened for him and his work.
In recent years, Finley has become one of the most popular teachers in the online education series MasterClass, and he has been invited to speak in a wide range of far-flung places including Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. And in 2024, Finley and his staff will curate an art show called “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
