Task Force Member Introductions: Tawnya
Tawnya is a member of our 2025 Community Task Force. A nurse for 20 years, she exudes an unshakeable and competent demeanor. In early April, I followed her sticker-adorned Electric Nissan Leaf to see the urban alleyway project she has been involved in. A heavy blanket of mulch covered the ground, and colorful murals lined the block walls, projects painted by families, children, and professional artists. As we walked, Tawnya pointed out rosemary bushes, nopales, agave, hackberry seedlings, and goji berries, patiently explaining the benefits of each plant. On this early spring day, the ground was still brown, and the bushes looked more like sticks than plants, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the scene Tawnya described: block parties and laughter, tomato plants, native Arizona grapes, and drought-tolerant pollinators.
Tawnya immediately won me over by offering a carton of eggs from her backyard chickens before walking me through the journey that led her to this space.
I was born in Grants, a small town in New Mexico. If you haven't been out there, there's not much, just a prison and a hospital, and there used to be a coal mine. My dad has always been a very small-scale food grower; we grew our own vegetables. We always had chickens, raised meat rabbits, and goats. Some of my earliest memories are actually processing pigs, chicken, and sheep. My mom’s sister is Navajo, and her whole family would come down from the reservation, and we would process the animals, so I've always been very connected to my food. I learned to garden from that experience and from my grandmother, who bought her house here in the International District in the 1950s when this area was an agricultural community. There are even early photos of cattle being run on Central and San Pedro. I grew up playing in my grandma's alley. She had a neighbor who had a black walnut tree that overhung the alley, and grapevines overhanging another neighbor’s fence, so throughout my childhood, we would gather food there.
With all of the political and climate changes in our world, food sovereignty feels really important from a lot of different angles. Last year, what sparked my interest in joining the task force was the difficulty of growing food in the city due to the extreme heat, along with the need to start figuring out what we can grow here if supply chains are disrupted or if we experience an influx of population from hotter or colder places due to migration. The first Urban Alleyway project we launched last year was built on the ideas of Reyna Luz Juarez, who started this movement in the 90s. My primary interest in alleyways is community building; my alley is pretty wide, and the cars stay basically to one side of it, so there's a 10-12 foot space that can be used to grow. I thought it might be a really neat way to bring the community together. We did events every Saturday for six weeks out there, and after going to the Bernalillo County Urban Ag meetings, we were able to get mulch and then leftover vegetable plants from a greenhouse. We grew 100-150 pounds of food without even really trying on a teeny tiny little patch that I watered out of my back gate. It's definitely building community, we have seen the number of participants grow, and the kids from Wilson Middle School now take safe routes to school through the alley with the “Walking School Bus” initiative. School representatives from three different states and other cities in the country have also come down to take a look.
I think the pandemic was really instrumental in breaking the last little bit of connection that we had with our neighbors. It was so much easier to have a meeting over Zoom. Now we are trying to help people see that we need to be connected face-to-face with each other. I don't know how we do that, so we just keep having driveway parties and bringing people together.
I’m also working on sustainable regenerative circular sanitation (a container-based sanitation system), which ties in with so many issues that our community is facing. My mother-in-law was a water systems planner, and in New Mexico, apparently, if we have less and less water, they won't have enough water to process the human waste from the municipal sanitation process. Picking up human waste on the street doesn't do anything for public sanitation other than cleaning after it's already there, and it doesn't increase human dignity, so we're hoping to implement a city-wide public toilet project. We want to place these toilets in parks and places with service providers. They save between 3000 and 7000 gallons of water per person yearly over a flush toilet. We are working on creating a graphic that helps people understand why someone would adopt this in homes when you've got a perfectly functional flush toilet. It's because we're running out of water; we get nine inches of rain here a year, maybe less in the future.
Resilient community building is the tagline of my life right now. There are so many potential catastrophes in the world that I think can be seriously mitigated by strong community networks. We're much less likely to hate our neighbors if we know who they are. I would love to see neighbors in Albuquerque coming together a couple of times a month on their blocks to have coffee or drinks or just wave to each other; truly interconnected neighborhoods, block by block, where people share resources and practice neighborliness.
With dark sunglasses shielding her blue eyes from the sun, Tawnya laughed at her persistence to break down barriers built through isolation and individualism. “I call it force cuddling. I do a lot of force cuddling with my neighbors.”
NYU Sociology professor Erik Klinenberg wrote that shared public spaces are important to social cohesion. They are places where community is formed, where a common identity—belonging to a place, a city, or a sports team—ties people together. This is the world Tawnya is building with her neighbors, and a tenacious commitment to her community.