Daron Babcock of Bonton Farms

The name “Bonton Farms” is derivative of its location: a neighborhood nicknamed “bomb-town” because of the extreme racial terrorism it experienced in the mid 20th century. Daron Babcock is the executive director of the remarkable urban garden built in and for this community along the Trinity River.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and it's a great privilege to welcome to Good God today. Daron Babcock. Daron is the executive director of Bonton Farms in Dallas, Texas, and it's a remarkable program, an urban garden and community development group that he started, and it has been flourishing in a beautiful way in the community, the neighborhood, called Bonton first of all, Daron, welcome to Good God.

Daron Babcock:
Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

George Mason:
Terrific. So there's so much background to cover, but this is a remarkable venture. Bonton, let's talk about the community itself. The name Bonton is a derivative of bomb town, right? Which is a product of red lining and racial terrorism, bomb town, because there was frequent terrorists activities back in the middle part of the 20th century, right?

Daron Babcock:
Yeah, I think early 30s and 40s, even into the 50s, as Dallas started to form as a city a lot of freedman's communities after emancipation proclamation, a lot of people, Black people, trying to establish families in communities where they wouldn't be harassed, or bombed, or burned established along the Trinity River.

Daron Babcock:
And so, as Dallas started forming people started trying to build encampments is a little closer to downtown and it was just not allowed at the time, and so they bombed those. And for a while, people just referred to this part of town as bomb town as a result.

George Mason:
Right. Right. So you came and found this community and found yourself drawn to it. Tell us how that happened.

Daron Babcock:
Well, God's got an interesting sense of humor. I think the short story is that in my own faith journey or journey to understand who I am and who created me and what does that mean, I went through some things on my own that led me to a place where I had lost hope and relied on all kinds of things to try to make me feel better, including self-medicating, which led me to an addiction, which I'm celebrating 18 years sober today.

George Mason:
Wow.

Daron Babcock:
But it was at that point in my life where I had given up hope, but I had family and friends that didn't. They would not let me bow out. And I'm here today as a result of their intervention in my life, and then the reconciliation of understanding who I am and who God created to me, those two things together saved me, right?

Daron Babcock:
And so, years later, as my life had been restored and looked relatively normal, a friend of mine introduced me to this neighborhood. He was meeting with a group of guys from Bonton that were, most of whom, formerly incarcerated and were trying not to go back. And those men changed my life.

Daron Babcock:
I met men that were similar to me, in a way, and they were a place that felt hopeless, but they were still fighting. The resiliency of the people here drew me, and also I felt like the obligation of God doesn't waste things, right? So I went through that, not for any other reason but to be a part of allowing him to redeem it.

Daron Babcock:
And part of that redemption invites me to use those tragic experiences in my life to invest in other people, and so I found that connection in the Bonton community with those men. Mine was addiction through pain and loss, and then theirs was a result of incarceration for multiple different reasons and scenarios based on everybody's life, but it was a place God connected me to redeem what he allowed to happen in my life.

George Mason:
So we're going to get into a little more about the farm in a moment and all the enterprises that come off of it. But this podcast is part of a series on poverty that we're looking at. And I think you talked about addiction for you. You also talked about incarceration.

George Mason:
And so, there are so many tentacles to poverty, but you've encountered them in your community in significant ways. Let's talk about what you have identified in your experience at Bonton as being contributing factors to ongoing cycles of poverty that can be broken, but that are really debilitating to people in our community.

Daron Babcock:
Yeah. Do you mind if I regress and tell you a story that may make sense for everybody that may not understand it? I've been immersed in an impoverished community for nine years and I want to help people truly understand in a way that can change things, but I learned this.

Daron Babcock:
One of my nicknames, if you're embraced by this community, nobody calls you by your first name, if you're called by your first name for very long down here, you've got a problem. When they start giving you nicknames, then you know that they have embraced you a bit. And so, one of the things they tease me about is the no way guy, because they would teach me things about how things are here, how regressed things still are here. And I would always just say, "No way, I don't believe it."

Daron Babcock:
I don't believe it's possible that in one of the richest cities in the history of the world, there's people that don't have access to food. I refuse to believe that.

George Mason:
Yeah.

Daron Babcock:
But it was one day at the farm. It had rained for a couple of days and I had just previously had a couple of tractor trailer loads of compost delivered. And we were going to have to do the hard job of taking that smelly and now heavy compost and put it in the garden.

Daron Babcock:
And I didn't want our team having to do that without knowing why. So I gathered everybody around and I handed out packets of seeds and I said, "Look, all that food we grew takes things from the soil and if we don't replace it, we're going to wind up bankrupt. You can't just withdraw, and withdraw, and withdraw. 

Daron Babcock:
"But once we restore that soil with this compost, we can take those seeds that you have, and we're going to put them in that restored soil, and if you position it where the sun passes overhead, and if you give it the right amount of water, that seed will almost assuredly become what it was created to be."

Daron Babcock:
And she looked at me with tears in her eyes and started crying and I have no idea. I think we're still talking about dirt. I'm said, "I'm sorry. Is it something I said?", and she said, "No, it's just that we're just like those seeds." Right? I don't understand. I said, "Can you explain?" And she said, "Well, we grew up here. What was our sun, soil, and water? What was I supposed to use to build a life with?"

Daron Babcock:
And it was the first time that we started a proactive conversation to understand, how did God create us? And in that creation, are there certain things that when those things are absent, our lives become something smaller and more perverted than what they could be?

Daron Babcock:
And it turns out that, to talk about poverty now, how this relates to poverty is we live in a city where 95% of the jobs are North of I30. 45% of the people live South of I30, but 95% of the jobs are North of I30, so opportunity for work is not available in places like Bonton.

Daron Babcock:
God created us to work. So when work is absent, our life looks, something smaller than what it should. He created us to be in community. And when you live in a place where there's not enough to go around, we kill each other over walking on my street corner. Instead of being community and sharing, we live in an environment of scarcity where we have to fight one another for the crumbs that are here.

Daron Babcock:
So we're redeeming and building in community. He created us to need to nourish our mind, body, and spirit and part of the way we nourish our body is through the food we take. But this is also a food desert. So when you don't have access to healthy food, what that looks like in our neighborhood is we suffered for more than double the rate of cancer, and stroke, and heart disease, and diabetes, and childhood obesity than the county we're in, he created us to learn and to have opportunities for education, and a lot of those resources are not present.

Daron Babcock:
And so basically, those are major things that most communities like Bonton don't have, have they're known as deserts of sorts because they're missing those critical aspects of the human life that we all need to have access to to flourish.

George Mason:
Well, so you've mentioned location. You've mentioned jobs, you've mentioned incarceration, you've mentioned healthy food. You've mentioned encouragement, and faith, and community. All of these things are components now that not only in their absence drained life, but now in their presence are giving life.

George Mason:
I know you have a phrase about how if you invest in the soil, then healthy plants result and flourish. And if you invest in the soul, healthy people flourish.

Daron Babcock:
Yes, sir.

George Mason:
And both of those things are happening in Bonton. So let's be specific about the garden to begin with and how the garden then became more than that, in terms of neighbors becoming part of that project.

Daron Babcock:
Yeah. The garden came about because when I met those men that I referred to earlier, those men that were looking to build a life and not return back to the prison system, they all told me that if we're not given an opportunity to work, we're going to have to go back and do what we did that led us there in the first place.

Daron Babcock:
So we started working together and almost immediately, some of my friends started calling in sick, right? And so. I'm like, "You can't do that. If you want to work, you're going to have to show up every day." And I learned they weren't calling in sick, like what I was accustomed to. This wasn't a cold or flu type thing. This was chronic illnesses.

Daron Babcock:
In fact, my friend Darius that taught me so much about all this, and there's really our relationship is God has used our friendship and relationship to birth a lot of what you see in Bonton, him teaching me what this is. But he's like, "I want to participate, but I have dialysis three times a week. I'll never be able to come."

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
I hadn't even heard of what dialysis was before, so part of our work, we decided to plant a garden so that we could take control over our own destiny, and in doing so learned that not only does it create work and produce food, but gardens are cathartic, they're healing. I think there's a reason why we were, we started this journey in a garden.

George Mason:
So you produce fruits and vegetables, and now you have chickens, and goats, and bees, and turkeys, and oh my goodness. It's quite an operation, and all of that then now feeds a farmer's market where people can come and buy the produce, and whatnot, and eggs and the like, and then also a market where I've had lunch many times.

Daron Babcock:
Thank you.

George Mason:
And dinner, too. So it's quite an integrated, growing venture that's changing that whole community, isn't it?

Daron Babcock:
Yeah. I think the beautiful thing is that this is our work together. This is something that I didn't come down and do. I want to make sure that's clear that I got invited here. I got accepted to here, and being here got invited into part of our vision for making all things new in our community and aligning that with how God created us. And he created us to work, and he created us to nourish our bodies, and he created us to need shelter. We don't have fur so on a day like today, it's important we have roofs over our head, right?

Daron Babcock:
And so, these are things that in 2020, still in our country, communities like Bonton are just left behind and don't have, I think the encouraging thing is that it's not necessary and it's possible to heal these things. We created this from the broken way that our country was formed and how we never lived up to our statement in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, where we said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights."

Daron Babcock:
And so, we're doing reconciliation work in Bonton that I think is starting to honor that lofty aspiration and that our forefathers set out for us and we've just failed to step to live into so far.

George Mason:
Well. And I think you said it earlier in talking about how you are integrated, you've been welcomed into the community. You are not a White savior in a Black neighborhood.

Daron Babcock:
That's a can't do.

George Mason:
Yeah, you can't do that.

Daron Babcock:
If you want to learn the beautiful work that God's doing here is have somebody other than him in the neighborhood of the people that actually do all the hard work in Bonton to take credit for it.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
It's just not true, and it's dangerous on top of that.

George Mason:
Well, I was recently there, one of many times I've been to Bonton Farms, and a woman grabbed us and said, "It's my job to show you around." And so, I was there with my partner, Rabbi Nancy Kasten, and we visited when we were there with you recently, but this woman showed us around and told us about it.

George Mason:
And the sense of pride that this is her work, and this is their work, and then she had on a shirt about a ministry she has to girls that she works, and I said, "Well, what do you do with these girls? What do you tell them?" Pretty much she said, "Everything they need to know."

Daron Babcock:
You were talking to Miss Hattie, and Miss Hattie doesn't have a confidence problem.

George Mason:
Yes. Well, but what was beautiful about that is there was a sense of ownership, right? There was a sense that it's not somebody else, not Daron's work, it's our work, it's our neighborhood. And beyond the point of the garden, the farm, there was a sense of now she's an entrepreneur. She's got her own nonprofit. She's working to change people's lives, and that's just beyond our imagination when you begin with where you did, right?

Daron Babcock:
Well, I think that's the thing about authentic discipleship is that it doesn't end with the person you pour into. It's something that continues to give back. And so, what you see is a beautiful person in Miss Hattie that's received the benefit of being part of a community and loved on and taught who she is and whose she is, and what that means to her.

Daron Babcock:
And now, she's passing that or carrying that forward by giving back to young ladies in our neighborhood through a young, single mothers in our neighborhood that have children that need diapers and baby wipes. And she uses those gifts to minister to them and to pour into their lives.

George Mason:
What you're doing, Daron, at Bonton Farms, appeals, I think, across the political spectrum, because there's a sense for those who are conservative, you might say there's a sense of self-reliance and of initiative and entrepreneurialism. And for those who are concerned about the ongoing plight of the poor and the disenfranchised, it's a program of uplift and transformation.

George Mason:
If you could say though, beyond the point of charity and the work that you're doing with your neighbors where you are, if there are systems that need to change in Dallas, that would help to alleviate the need for a project like yours, what are some of the things that you would point to and say, "Sure would like to have some help in our community that this would change things. This would help us."

Daron Babcock:
Yeah. I think the thing about it is, again, that seed analogy is so beautiful because God created things to work a certain way, and he created us to need certain things and to do well when those things are present. And we suffer a bit when those things are absent, when we get outside of how he had created us.

Daron Babcock:
And so, because he created us a certain way, of course, there's a science because his word is true and if it's true, it's verifiable, there's a science called the social determinants of health. You know what it says? It says that when a person is a part of a community where they're known and belong, we're not created to do this alone. We need to be a part of a healthy group of people where we're known and belong.

Daron Babcock:
When we have a decent shelter that feels enough like home, where we're able to get adequate rest, when we have meaningful work, we're created to drive a portion of our meaning, and purpose, and dignity through working with our mind and our hands to acquire the things we need to support ourselves in our family.

Daron Babcock:
When we know where our next meal's going to come from and feel safe, when those things are present, you know what happens? People are consistently more productive. They're physically healthier. They suffer from over 50% less mental illness and depression, and we live longer.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
And so, we have communities like Bonton that housing is predatory, right, there are no jobs, decent, real jobs for people to work. We're in communities that are divisive and torn because, as I mentioned earlier, it's an impoverished place where we fight over the crumbs that are here.

Daron Babcock:
When those things are absent, we suffer, and so I think what Bonton Farms is showing is that when we provide the resources, the foundational tools that people need to build a life with, they use them and things change. And to your point, this is a uniting thing. There's nobody, I think, that really thinks that we're better off when some people are left behind.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
And so, when we raise the tide for all people, all ships raise with it. And I think that's what's so beautiful. No matter what your political afflation or even your belief system, we all know that somehow I'm better when my neighbor is better, and that we need to do a better job of seeing that those neighbors that have been left behind have a balanced playing field to thrive.

George Mason:
Well, and so we're in a big conversation in Dallas right now in the wake of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and others about the nature of violence and policing, for instance. And as you know, there's a big budget discussion happening right now and we're about to approve a budget. By the time we air this, it will have been done, but nonetheless, there's this sense of, we need more police in order to stop violence, but there's the counter-narrative and that is, how do we prevent violence?

George Mason:
And you talked about when, when neighborhoods are impoverished, then people fight over crumbs. And so, a lot of what's happening in Dallas right now is the urging from the faith community and from activists to say, "Why don't we try to shift the concept of public safety to public health and investment in communities that have been previously divested from?" And so, what you're doing is modeling, I think, for Dallas what is possible when you actually invest in communities.

Daron Babcock:
The fruit is in the pudding, right? The deal is that when, nine years ago, before Bonton Farms started, Bonton had such a bad reputation the city had changed the name. They just thought, "We can't even empower this name." Bonton meant something and it was not good.

George Mason:
Yeah.

Daron Babcock:
And so, they tried to change the name to Rochester Park and we fought against that, and we're really proud of the fact that today, nine years later, Bonton has had the lowest crime rate of any neighborhood in South Dallas for the last two years running.

George Mason:
Well done. Yeah.

Daron Babcock:
And so, just simply put, it's not that complicated. Nothing is more dangerous than a person without hope.

George Mason:
There you go.

Daron Babcock:
Desperate people do desperate things.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
But there is nothing more life-giving than a person with hope. And that sounds mushy, feely, maybe a bit intangible, but it's just true. And the evidence of it, you can see in Bonton, in a place that was so bad it was given up on, and we'll just start over and call it a different name and maybe that'll change it, to a place that should be a model of what can happen when you invest in the right things that allow people to use those things to build lives with.

Daron Babcock:
The hope is contagious here. I have a lot of people talk about when they drive into Bonton, they were nervous on their way in, but once they came under that bridge, they felt something different.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
It's palpable. The hope, and optimism, and joy like people like Miss Hattie exude, because we have a bright future and we're doing it.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
We're participating in this redemption with our own hands. And man, that's exciting.

George Mason:
So you're also expanding. And so, you have not only this small farm in the Bonton neighborhood, you have a much larger farm out in the Seagoville area, I think. Right?

Daron Babcock:
Yes, sir.

George Mason:
And you're expanding into Lake Highlands now. Can you talk a little more about this expansion process?

Daron Babcock:
Yeah. It's exciting to me because we believe that God created every person in his image and that when you recognize his image in a person, then the potential... My friend, Chad Houser, that founded Café Momentum, always says, "People rise to the level of expectation you have for them."

Daron Babcock:
So when you start to recognize who they are and how special each of us are as individuals, it's amazing how we start to live into that. And I'm really excited that in Lake Highlands, the city's challenged us to specifically address a portion of the population that identifies as unsheltered. I don't ever call a person homeless. They're a human being, right? They're not defined by the thing that describes the greatest struggle they've ever had.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
It's a condition that people that, for whatever reason or not are unsheltered, and we get to show that when you treat people to recognize the image of their creator in them and show them that they're special and unique, and that this is no accident, and that there's opportunity for you, and you walk alongside them in that journey, to see people thrive and to become change makers in our city.

Daron Babcock:
One of the things I saw recently is there's a guy named Kevin Lee, I believe, that is a student at SMU law school that at one point experienced homelessness himself in Dallas. I was just meeting with a Dr. Henry Ricinos with SMU, who was homeless growing up in a empty housing project in the Bronx. As a 13 year old child, has been addicted, and shot, and stabbed, and he's now a teacher of theology at SMU.

Daron Babcock:
These lives are beautiful and precious, and there's still good works prepared for them to do when we start treating each other for what we were created to be, and not what's happened to us in the process. And I'm excited for Lake Highlands to be able to show that the population of folks that are in that area that need the kind of love and support that we're going to provide to watch the lives that flourish there as well.

George Mason:
Well, I agree with that. And while I live in Lakewood now, I lived in Lake Highlands for 17 years. And I think Lake Highlands has struggled over time to move from what once was a fairly homogeneous upper middle-class neighborhood to one that was more diverse because of multi-family housing that came in about 35 years or so ago, and the changing population and the like.

George Mason:
And Lake Highlands has struggled to figure out how to embrace its neighbors fully. And like many of our communities, when we talk about the unsheltered and when we talk about the need to spread out low-income housing and the like so that people have an opportunity to live, not in concentrated areas of poverty, but all over the city, we often get pushback with the so-called NIMBY mentality, not in my backyard.

Daron Babcock:
Yup.

George Mason:
And that's been true in Lake Highlands, but on the other hand, here we have an invitation from the community now because of a model like yours, that says, you know what? If that's what we're talking about, this more holistic approach that actually not only addresses shelter, but it addresses an entire transformational community, then we welcome that. This is a remarkable model, Daron, that I think we're excited to see it transplanted, so to speak.

Daron Babcock:
Yes, I'm excited to see it and excited to show. I think far too often as a society, we look at people groups and think that there's a problem with people. And the reality is it's not. All of us, whether it's ourselves or within our family, have had people, for some reason or another, that have found themselves in a place where they're vulnerable and need help. That life has become so unmanageable, I need some kind of intervention to help me re-establish. I'm incapable of doing it on my own.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
And when done the right way, to wrap around a person to bring out the full potential that's in them, it's just life-giving in a way that everybody sees the excitement of and wants to be a part of. And I'm anxious to be able to show the community in Lake Highlands this gift that people that have not found themselves able to plug into the resources that community has to become a part of beautiful work that people from all over the world are going to want to come see and be served by them as they re-establish their lives and get their footing.

Daron Babcock:
Hopefully, we'll begin to change the narrative that people really aren't the issue, right? That when you start to address the root cause of things, people are able to build on themselves a life that is beautiful, that people want to come alongside.

George Mason:
So before we wrap up, let me invite people to know how to participate with you. So there's a whole slew of ways to become part of this Bonton community. One is that you can go buy your groceries. You could buy fruits and vegetables and other produce and foods at the farmer's market there in Bonton. You can have lunch at the café, breakfast too, I think, right?

Daron Babcock:
Yes, sir. We open at seven, yes, sir.

George Mason:
Breakfast and lunch. There's a coffee shop now making all your Starbucks-like different kinds of coffee drinks. And then, there's a catering business, right? So you can have events that you have. During COVID, it's probably more difficult, but at some point you're able to have your events catered by Bonton, and then people can give financially as well to the effort. Any other ways you would invite people to become part of this community?

Daron Babcock:
Absolutely. For our city to heal, which is our aspiration, right, Bonton is a starting place, but we really want to show Dallas as a world-changing city that really addresses the people that find themselves in vulnerable positions for one reason or another really embraced, and lifted up, and transformed through that entire community wrapping around them.

Daron Babcock:
And so, the talents that people have, you work in companies that offer where you have great intellectual talent that help us develop business plans, that help us come up with concepts to create more jobs and revenue, to help us innovate housing solutions. Lawyers that help our people navigate some of the legal issues.

Daron Babcock:
We have a lot of people that as the economic stability starts to return, families start to re-coalesce. One of the greatest reasons why families break up is financial instability.

George Mason:
Right.

Daron Babcock:
And so, as that stability returns through work, we see families coming together, but in a lot of cases, the people we're serving never had models of a healthy family, or a healthy father, or what it means to be a parent. I'm young and inexperienced. And so, how do we come alongside them to grow into what their aspirations are? And it takes all of us.

Daron Babcock:
And so, what we always say is support us and give in a way that aligns with your talents. You have something to offer that we need, and so everybody's got a place and I think that's what's going to make this so special is it's not just the work that I'm doing down here, it's the work that we're doing together to make our city a better place for all.

George Mason:
Terrific. Well, Daron, thank you so much for being on Good God with me, and I know that people will want to go to the website and learn more about that. I do want to tell people that you did a TED Talk that was wildly popular, and they can find that as well and just Google that.  

George Mason:
But most of all, thank you for your own faith commitment, the way you connect good and God, which is what we're up to in this Good God podcast. So God bless you and your work, and we'll see you at the farm.

Daron Babcock:
Thank you, sir. Have a great day.

George Mason:
You too. Bye-bye.

Daron Babcock:
Bye.

George Mason:
Thanks so much for continuing to tune into Good God. We've enjoyed having these episodes produced, over a hundred of them now, usually in the studio, but now we're doing so through computer technology in this time of social isolation.

George Mason:
We're all trying to be careful with one another, but we also want to be careful to cultivate our spirit during this time. Not to be discouraged, not to be despairing, but to be encouraged and to encourage one another. So thank you for tuning in. We hope you appreciate these as much as we enjoy being able to offer them to you as a gift.

Speaker 3:

Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickery. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God, and faith, and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.