By Nick Patterson | npatterson@al.com
In 2025, AL.com’s “Beyond the Violence” project, in partnership with The Birmingham Times, examines whether Birmingham can grow beyond its crime problem and become safer, healthier and happier.
As the grandson of iconic civil rights activist Calvin Woods, Birmingham City Councilor Clinton Woods has seen Birmingham’s history play out, and is right in the middle of dealing with its current problems.
Woods has spearheaded city council initiatives aimed at building stronger families, like the annual Man Up Breakfast; strengthening neighborhoods, cleaning them up and making them more sustainable, such as the Power of One; and addressing food insecurity by pushing forward a pilot program to install a grocery store in Huffman Middle School.
All those initiatives target problems in Birmingham. Those challenges are stark, but Woods says he has hope for the city’s future.
“Being from Birmingham, and especially with my family’s history, it’s afforded me a unique perspective on the long-running, underlying fight for opportunity here,” said Woods, a Roebuck native now representing that area in the city’s District 1. His uncle Rev. Abraham Woods Sr. was on the front lines of the civil rights movement along with his father. “It’s a fight for what Birmingham could be, and that resolve has been passed down through the generations in my family.”
It’s undeniable that Birmingham faces challenges today — from rampant gun violence, to economic inequity, to health disparities, to well-documented educational deficits.
Can Birmingham become a better city — a safer one — the safest city in America, as envisioned recently by the Birmingham Crime Commission?
Can Birmingham become a better city across multiple metrics – education, economic prosperity, health outcomes and equity? Can it remove or at least diminish the barriers that have let the city fall behind other southern states, other cities in Alabama, even?
The obvious answer is yes.
“Of course, it could be better,” said David Fleming, executive director of REV Birmingham, the downtown revitalization organization working to improve the city center, and increasingly, the eastern Birmingham community of Woodlawn.
“Birmingham is a city that has a lot going for it that other communities would actually love to have going for it. And so, despite the fact that we have some very specific and serious and very real things and challenges to take on, we do have a lot going for us.”
“100% it can be better,” said Steve Ammons, president and CEO of the Birmingham Business Alliance. “And I think everybody really has to understand that it’s not just one thing or one entity or one person that has to be responsible for making it better. Everybody is responsible. We all have that flag to carry.
“I think there are so many things that we all have to work on from an economic development perspective, crime, education or our ability to attract new industry here or even help some of our small businesses scale and become bigger, educating as many people as we can.”
A number of local movers and shakers are talking about how to transform Birmingham. What would it take?
“It’s actually a question a lot of folks are asking right now,” said Tom Spencer of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. “There are certainly willing players and people know things need to be done on various fronts. Yeah, Birmingham can improve. Sure. We can always improve. And it’s, you know, the old saw about Birmingham is it’s the City of Perpetual Promise.”
How do you go about transforming a city? Birmingham needs:
- Less violent crime
- Better educational outcomes
- More economic equity – more prosperity and less poverty
- More jobs and less brain-drain
- More regional cooperation
- Less food insecurity
- Less blight
Right now there are a number of agencies and motivated individuals working to make Birmingham better on all those fronts.
Many of them are nonprofit organizations working, often, in cooperation with governmental entities including the city of Birmingham and Jefferson County.
The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham continually looks for big ideas to move the city forward, said the Foundation’s Executive Director Chris Nanni.
“We have a fund at the Community Foundation called the Catalyst Fund, which is for those big ideas,” Nanni said. That fund is “always kind of probing and looking for these kind of big ideas type of things to be transformational and catalytic. It’s tough. It takes a lot of time to really kind of cultivate that. But there are people thinking about it and trying to do it.”
And a number of organizations have track records showing that they know how to move the needle. Here’s one example.
A big idea for Birmingham: Young urban farmers
Headquartered in downtown Birmingham, Jones Valley Teaching Farm has, in the past decade, offered a test case for ways to do several things local leaders say they want: Address food insecurity and teach valuable skills to young adults.
Jones Valley now includes eight teaching farms on elementary, middle and high school campuses in the city. And it has developed a track record of successfully turning Birmingham kids into skilled urban farmers.
Destiny Nelson-Miles grew up in Birmingham’s Woodlawn community. Woodlawn has been recognized as a “food desert” — an area where residents with limited transportation have little or no easy access to affordable healthy food. Nelson-Miles said she didn’t know what she was missing in her neighborhood until she began learning and working with JVTF.
She was with the program from her junior year in high school until she was in college.
“Learning how to grow vegetables and giving the produce that I grow to the community, I felt that was very impactful for me,” she said. “Just understanding the community that I live in and the greater scope of things… You know, now I know how to run a farm, honestly, even though it’s not in my career interest to run a farm.”
Nelson-Miles now works in finance, but she said the time she spent with JVTF learning horticulture and agriculture, raising vegetables and budgeting gave her work experience, discipline and “really, anything pertaining to how to be a young adult, I would say.”
She’s just one example of how JVTF impacts the lives of Birmingham students. Last year Jones Valley hosted 13 paid apprentices and high school interns. About a quarter of the farm’s full-time staff are graduates of their program.
Jones Valley Executive Director Amanda Storey envisions a future powered in large part by today’s children.
“I’ll go to, like, education conferences, food insecurity conferences, roundtables on how to make Birmingham better, whatever those things are. And oftentimes it’s a bunch of adults sitting around talking about ideas. And really, in my opinion, what has worked at Jones Valley well, has been leveraging the voices of young people as we do the work in concert with those of us who have been through the world a little bit longer,” Storey said.
“If we’re going to talk about the future for young people, their voices have to count in that conversation. And it may not be what we want to hear sometimes, and it may be hopeful in a way that you think that’ll never work. But oftentimes what’s happened for us is that it opens up brand new ways to see our work, and it’s made us so much better.”
Kids raising vegetables, getting their hands dirty in good work, reconnecting to the earth and the fresh air and the sunshine is a feel-good story. But at JVTF, it’s been a way of transforming Birmingham in ways few may realize.
“Food-based education can shift and change the way we see ourselves in the world,” Storey said.
For proof consider this: In each of the past 10 years, Jones Valley Teaching Farm has directly impacted the lives of 5,000 Birmingham City Schools student participants.
“Even though we’re able to reach folks through field trips, our primary goal is to really focus in on Birmingham city schools,” Storey said. “There’s 20,000 kids that go to Birmingham city schools now. And we want hopefully in the next 10 years, to be able to have food-based education attached to the learning … every kid gets that in Birmingham city schools. That’s our goal. And we’re well on our way there.”
Those kids on average raise and distribute for free 25,000 pounds of food per year. That food goes to individuals at a farm stands and many more people through partner feeding agencies.
In the years from COVID forward, the farm’s young growers have produced an increasing number of vegetable seedlings which are given – free – to more than 40 community gardens around the Birmingham metro area. Last year, according to JVTF’s impact report, the young urban farmers grew nearly 83,000 seedlings.
The farm’s hands-on educational programming includes field trips for students from multiple city schools and schools from across the state, to JVTF’s Center for Food Education downtown, and they’re expanding this year.
It takes a lot, but transformative ideas can move forward, Storey said. “You have to have organizations and people willing to say that ‘It is possible and we can do it.’ And even if the numbers are big, right?”
Storey believes in the importance of young people in any future success for Birmingham. It’s especially important to make sure Birmingham’s students have a seat at the table, she said.
“It points directly to how we value children,” she said. “I would love to see us changing the way that we see our communities, to where young people can thrive in so many different ways, so many different areas where their communities are nourished, right? That we’re nourishing communities and young minds.
“And I know that you do that through a variety of different ways, but fresh food is a piece of that. We use that as like a foundation at Jones Valley to do that. But really, it’s to open up the possibilities for wonder and for young people to… see a future for themselves and for each other.”
