Who We Serve

Harrisonburg, Virginia is known as the Friendly City in part because we welcome people from all over the world to make this place their home. Yet people of color and people who lack U.S. citizenship face massive barriers to wealth and land ownership that maintain an inequality in power, representation, and access that prevents the sense of safety and provision that a true sense of home requires.

The Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center responds to this disparity by focusing our resources on those who have been excluded from accessing what they need to sustain themselves and their families: low-wage workers, immigrants, single mothers, people with criminal records, the unhoused, and those who lack access to higher education

1. Black Women

The Women’s Afro-tourism Center will center and celebrate Black Women. This will be a space where the work and well being of Black Women will be valued in a culture that constantly treats them as expendable.

2. Black Poultry Workers

Loss of work due to injury is a perpetual obstacle for poultry workers. Many employees of the Shenandoah Valley’s poultry processing factories earn low wages and are not provided with health insurance or paid leave if they are injured on the job. Injury is common due to the repetitive motion and danger associated with operating machinery in an assembly line order. Therefore, the Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center will reserve paid positions for Black women in the poultry processing workforce that have lost their ability to work. Alongside a loving community, there are many tasks that can accommodate injury-including harvesting produce, seeding, and vending at the market.

3. Black Entrepreneurs

It is crucial to empower Black and historically underserved women with the skills and resources to lead as business owners, cultural workers, and creatives. Harrisonburg lacks spaces to highlight the culturally diverse and nurturing enterprises that the Women’s Afro-Tourism Center will uplift and share. One of our pilot programs will be an Afro-chic hair and beauty salon designed to uplift African beauty, style, and culture-weaving genius while giving young Black women an opportunity to rise as entrepreneurs.

4. People Without a Home

Homelessness is a policy issue, not a poverty issue. Here at the Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center, our policy is to extend our hospitality and care to our community members who live without permanent housing, as we recognize that our collective healing is tied to the healing of our brothers and sisters most in need. Thanks to our long partnership with Our Community Place, the Young Jupiter Market Garden is a natural extension of community support structures that help fill the gap left by city and national policy that allows so many hundreds of our community members to remain unhoused in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

5. People With a Criminal Record

Having a criminal record is a major obstacle to finding work, housing, and a place in the community. As these community members who in the next six months will be released out into our communities, they too are in need of a centering space where no shame, no blame, and no guilt hover over their desire of seeking a better new beginning. The Young Jupiter Market Garden is committed to building relationships with people nearing the end of nonviolent jail sentences to create a safe space for reentry. Read more about our Incarcerated People’s Work Program on our Market Garden page.

 A long history of discrimination, intimidation and violence has led to the dramatic decline of self-determined Black agriculture in the United States in the last 100 years from 14% in 1920 to less than 2% today. (1) At the same time, Black communities suffer adverse health conditions as a consequence of the systemic removal of access to healthy food and safe communities. (2) Black land ownership is an enormously powerful pathway to greater self-sufficiency and wellness for Black communities surviving centuries of uninterrupted oppression in the United States, and yet discriminatory lending, historic redlining, and wealth disparity have created extraordinary obstacles to attaining land as a Black person in the United States. 

The Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center responds to the ongoing food apartheid (1) of Black communities by creating the structure to feed the ones who have and will continue to shape us most: Black women. Our model takes a broad view of the hunger of Afro-descendant communities to reclaim their self-determination and liberation, and responds with a localized, focused set of programs that will empower our women to know themselves as leaders and act out that leadership by cultivating nourishing food for our bodies, minds, and spirits.