Jackie Joyner-Kersee brings agriculture education to a metro-east food desert
The Jackie Joyner-Kersee Community Center is expanding its urban agriculture footprint in East St. Louis with a new facility for its Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition Innovation Center.
The space will equip students with two greenhouses, a garden, lab and kitchen spaces, and classrooms dedicated to STEM and agriculture education for its K-5 school, JJK Academy.
Joyner-Kersee said she hopes the facility gives East St. Louis kids resources to study agriculture so that they can bring more skills and job opportunities to the area as adults.
“We have always been told that nothing good comes from East St. Louis,” Joyner-Kersee said. “But when we thrive, St. Louis thrives. When we work together, we can all see a difference.”
East St. Louis is considered a food desert because most residents, many of whom are low income, do not live near grocery stores where they could buy fresh produce and healthy pantry staples.
So, in addition to investing in workforce development, science teacher Tiffany Brown said the program’s short-term goal is to bring fresh produce to East St. Louis and teach children how to grow it themselves.
“We gonna switch over the rhetoric a bit, teach you how to grow your own food and what food does to the body,” Brown said. “(We’ll) hopefully have better health and activity out of it, and it helps with learning and absorbing knowledge.”
The foundation’s Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition program started as a collaboration between The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, University of Illinois Extension and East St. Louis workforce development nonprofit Lansdowne UP.
The group has been invested in urban agriculture for a couple of years already and was growing collards at a greenhouse on site in 2024. But the new facility dramatically expands the center’s growing capacity and learning space to jump-start kids’ careers in STEM and agriculture.
Giles Oldroyd, the director of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said he hopes the booming agricultural industry in St. Louis benefits from future scientists exposed to agriculture by the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation.
“We don’t deliver a big vision by ignoring the local,” Oldroyd said. “We will not leave those future leaders of our food producing systems behind simply because they grew up in neighborhoods that lacked opportunity.”
Kim Kidwell, the associate chancellor for Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives at the University of Illinois, said the school’s extension program now has staff working out of the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Community Center full time.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever do anything more important than this,” Kidwell said. “It’s really an important thing for us to do things outside of Champaign-Urbana, and frankly, outside of Chicago. I’m sorry if I offended you, but the world is a little bit bigger than Chicago.”
Students involved in the agriculture program at the community center are already taking part in community events. Program director Amy Funk said the foundation is sending 12 students to present at the St. Clair County Fair this year.
Nineteen-year-old William Cosby has spent 14 years with the foundation: first as a scholar, now as an employee. He said the education he received and the connections he made in the center’s programs catapulted him into a career path in business.
“I have seen the program grow tremendously,” Cosby said. “It’s a great opportunity for youth not just in East St. Louis but from all over the area.”
Cosby studies business management at Xavier University of Louisiana, a top-ranked HBCU and high-performing school for social mobility. But he said he’s spending his summer working with the Jackie Joyner-Kersee center to give back and keep growing with the community.
Joyner-Kersee said she hopes many more of her students will do the same.
“If we deplete our community, then we won’t have a community to come back to,” Joyner-Kersee said. “So, it’s left up to us to say, ‘Don’t get out. Get in. Stay, so we can make a difference.’”