Angela Bannerman Ankoma wanted her mother to have peppers, yams, and other foods she missed from her native Ghana. A 30-year resident of the densely populated, culturally diverse West End in Providence, Rhode Island, the community where she grew up, Ankoma says she knew immigrants in her community who would travel as far as New Jersey to find or sell produce and specialty items that were native to their diet. And she felt for the people in her neighborhood who just needed access healthy food that was culturally responsive.
So, through the West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation, a NeighborWorks organization where Ankoma was a board member, she and several residents in the community started a project called the Sankofa Initiative, which started with a farmer’s market that would bring her community some of that produce and whole meals, along with music, art and a place to meet. The market opened in 2015, and often features local community groups who conduct voter registration drives and more. Her work on the Sankofa initiative, which means "go back and get it" in the Twi language, earned her a Dorothy Richardson Award for Resident Leadership in 2015.
The award was named for Dorothy Mae Richardson, who galvanized the residents of her marginalized Central Northside neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to fight for the resources they needed to save their homes and community. As we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month, recognizing the specific achievements women have made over the course of history and today, it makes sense to recognize women who do the work of empowering and lifting their communities, making them stronger. (In fact, a new online NeighborWorks training class, entitled "The Role of Women in Community Development," will be added to the curriculum soon.) Anokoma is someone who continues to work to empower her community.
She says her mother still goes to the farmer's market for fresh vegetables every week. "She was my inspiration," Anokoma says.
And the market was just the beginning. As member of West Elmwood’s board of directors and under the leadership of now retired Executive Director, Sharon Conard Wells, she worked on a project to bring a $13 million housing project to the West End as part of the initiative. Receiving the Dorothy Richardson award was helpful for the project, which was just breaking ground at the time. "We had a national organization outside of Rhode Island recognizing our efforts and how it centered resident voice in the process," she says. "We felt validated. It was challenging, at first, to get buy in for as incorporating urban gardening and housing development as it wasn’t the norm."
Most complexes had apartments and maybe some green space. This initiative included land for growing food, a green house, and a kitchen for food preparation. It has grown to include a WIC Center, providing supplemental nutrition for Women, Infants and Children. There were 50 units. When they finished construction and were ready to lease in 2016, they received more than a thousand applications, Ankoma says.
At the time she received the Dorothy Richardson award, named for the pioneer of community-based development, Ankoma worked for the state Department of Health, where she was chief of the Office of Minority Health. A survey for the department showed that there were two neighborhoods that had poor food access and higher rates of diabetes than the rest of Providence. "I was living in one of them," she says. After more than nine years at the health department, she moved to a position at United Way as executive vice president and director of community investment. In 2020, she joined the Rhode Island Foundation as vice president and director of the Equity Leadership Initiative. Her skill in leading grassroots-based public health projects coupled with the recognition from local and national awards such as Dorothy Richardson contributed to her professional success.
Ankoma says that often when she was invited to "a place at the table," when decisions were being made, she was the only person of color in the room. "I think the state, business and nonprofit organizations could benefit from leaders of color in leadership positions and also ensuring there are leaders of color at the decision-making table," she says.
Already armed with a master’s degree, Ankoma is hoping to begin work on a doctorate in public health in the near future. She says that often, people in the field of public health see the effects of their work in the answers to questions on a survey. She is able to walk through a community and see people, a market, and buildings – a physical representation of community building.
03/08/2021
