Refugee farmers and the social enterprise model in the American southwest

Abstract

In recent years refugee resettlement agencies in various parts of the United States have sought to foster sustainable farming projects aimed at empowering refugees. This paper presents the first known case study of a U.S. based marketing cooperative formed by refugees from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Founded in 2011 by the Phoenix International Refugee Committee (IRC), Gila Farm Cooperative (GFC) has 22 members from four different countries of origin who work to support the organizations' newly formed Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in central Arizona. In the context of a university-community partnership established through Social Economy Arizona (SEAZ), a project affiliated with Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation, the research team worked closely with key cooperative stake-holders to undertake a three month study of GFC in spring 2012. Focusing on the intersection between urban agriculture, social enterprise development and refugee resettlement, our study investigates Gila Farm Cooperative as an experiment in building a new model collective entrepreneurship among refugee farmers from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. We utilize a social enterprise framework to provide a descriptive analysis of GFC's structure and operational processes based on data collected primarily through participatory observation and in-depth interviews with IRC staff and board members representing different refugee communities. Linking this organizational analysis to board members' perspectives of the social and economic value generated by the cooperative, we explore the prospects for reinforcing the GFC's role in empowering refugees through the adaptation of a more deliberative, solidarity based model of collective entrepreneurship.