By Two Organizers of Bay Area Buyers’ Clubs
Facing a potential ICE crackdown in the Bay in August 2025, organizers in Oakland started the ICE Out of the Bay Neighborhood Defense Assemblies, to establish robust networks of solidarity that can protect our communities. More recently, we have built a new initiative from these Assemblies, partnering with rural food producers in a politicized project of organizing produce “buyers clubs” that support migrant farmers while reducing our reliance on corporate food systems. This article explains a little about our motivation and our model for organizing.
Initially, six Oakland neighborhoods began meeting and training around ICE defense. Those that remain continue to build relationships, plan, train together, and patrol our neighborhoods. In late 2026, ICE seems to be increasing its presence after a year of relative quiet, reinvigorating the Assemblies. Lessons from the Zapatistas, Rojava, and the networks that were able to respond quickly to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, teach us that long term autonomous local organizing and relationships are the robust structures needed for ongoing support and solidarity in both acute crises and the everyday struggle against encroachment by the state and capitalism into our lives. They are also the structures in which we can imagine building something else — we can do much more than fight, we can also build together! To live well, we must create alternative ways to take care of ourselves that confront the exploitative, extractive, and individualist ways that capitalism forces us to survive. As we have learned from our political predecessors (specifically the legacy of the Black Panthers and the Food Conspiracies of the Bay Area), communities that feed each other can defend each other. Now more than ever, food is a vital point of mutual support and connection.
To that end, our anti-ICE formations have become a platform to move from urban defense to urban-rural organizing that strengthens our material autonomy. Our Neighborhood Assemblies are now organizing direct bulk purchasing of produce from campesinás in nearby areas who have organized themselves into the Coalición de Pequeños Agricultores de California (Coalition of Small Farmers). We receive food directly from the farmers and distribute it amongst ourselves, on a weekly basis.
The Coalition’s farmworkers-turned-tenant-farmers utilize agroecological practices on 17 farms across about 200 acres. They face a market that favors Big Ag mega-corporations which exploit workers, pollute the water, the soil and the food itself, and then extract value across the distribution chain. On some Coalition farms, 1-2 people work up to 10 acres of land with limited access to equipment like tractors. In return for their hard work, standard aggregate distributors pay these farmers as little as 100 time less per unit than what we pay in the grocery store — literally pennies on the dollar. Just as we’ve seen gas prices soar in 2026 due to the US and Israel’s imperialist war in Iran, food prices are also projected to climb as much as 6 pecent this year. When inflation is high, grocery chains often raise their prices even higher. The cost of living in the Bay Area is already out of control, and instead of forking over so much money to distributors and grocery stores, we are organizing with our neighbors to provision ourselves.
By aggregating our demand across the neighborhood, we lower our costs while still maximizing direct support for farmers. Our self-organized ‘buyers clubs’ give us the chance to resist the ways that mega corporations alienate people in urban centers from their food production, and begin to break dependence on the production systems that isolate us, profit off of us, and diminish our capacity to live healthy and free lives.
We were initially inspired by the Los Angeles Tenants Union, who also began purchasing and building relationships with the Coalición this year based on organizing efforts of the Plurinational Land Reform in California Working Group. Over the last 6 months we built a similar model in the Bay, with 7 neighborhood formations and 2 student co-ops.
Farmers are organizing in their context, as we are organizing in ours — this project links our political struggle across territories. While we recognize there are many small farmers who grow food in and near the Bay, and many avenues to obtain free surplus produce (largely siphoned off the typical supply chain), we are choosing to work directly with a coalition that holds a shared political vision of the future: one that directly challenges mega-capitalist markets and extractive forms of agriculture, while building the collective power of tenant farmers and campesinás.
A buyer’s club is only possible when robust autonomous organizing in both urban and rural contexts join together. When this happens, we also extend each other’s political horizons and new worlds become possible! But this requires intentional relationship building. As of late 2026, Bay Area buyers’ clubs have begun solidarity brigades to visit the farmers, support materially (although in a very limited way) the farmwork, and get to know each other socially and politically.
A significant portion of California farmworkers are migrants at increased risk of targeting by ICE. By building material and relational connections with these farmers through a buyers’ club, our localized community defense and support efforts can ripple out to the communities we depend upon for food. This relationship may extend to supporting farmworkers during potential ICE surges in rural areas, supporting other farmworker struggles against corporate land and delivery monopolies, and fundraising for crucial equipment like tractors, harvest support etc. As we grow our movement, the possibilities of bidirectional solidarity are revealing themselves. Our struggle to protect our neighbors, feed each other, take care of the land and protect our neighborhoods from corporate consolidation — whether in Watsonville or in Oakland — are linked. We protect us – all of us!
Unlike a CSA:
- We are not just buying locally, we are buying politically! This project directly connects community organizing in urban spaces to farmers organizing in a rural context, linking our struggles and our vision for the future.
- This is not a centralized or individual delivery service. We all have to organize to make it happen. The farmers organize in their context, aggregating produce, sharing resources etc. while we organize in our area, making orders, coordinating delivery and pickup, making distro boxes, etc. We are building trust in a shared system in which everyone participates and pays what they can, to ensure that anyone can receive food and that the farmers stay well resourced!
- This is an opportunity to connect and organize with our neighbors, share food, provision ourselves and bring new folks into anti-ICE assemblies. Starting to organize around our food needs can be a great way for people to get involved in neighborhood organizing.
- Organizing around material reproduction is a long game strategy to render our dependence on capitalism and the state obsolete and to resource ourselves to fight back better. This project is carried out in that spirit!