“Aye Loja, Orun Nile.” (Earth is but a marketplace; heaven is home)
Yoruban Proverb
On the day we arrived in Jamaica, my godmother, Iya Shani, skillfully shaved 30 minutes off the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Portland, all in time to catch a cultural event and curated marketplace called We Ting.
Nicola Shirley-Phillips, the co-founder of Ecovillage and Source Farm Community Development Institute near Johns Town, Jamaica sat in the front passenger seat during the drive.
Ecovillage/Source Farm in St. Thomas Parish is an intentional living community, organic farm, and wellness center that builds community through annual conferences, local institutional partnerships, and a research center/ land conservancy. While in conversation, I quickly realized how much Shirley-Phillips drew parallels in her words about the food justice landscape in Jamaica to the work I do in the U.S.
“We have to listen to the plants,” Shirley-Phillips said. “The plant spirits teach us how to live in this world.”
On our journey to We Ting, we cruised past the sparkling blue coastline and endless ackee trees and bounced over unfinished, gravel-filled sections of road where funding had yet to arrive to complete them.
“My mother’s also very SPIRITUAL, and that side of the family, I’m finding out now my grandmother used to do [spiritual] tables in those days, even though, when I was coming up, she never said anything about that,” says SHIRLEY-PHILLIPS.
The Ecovillage co-founder addressed the harm done to local farmers while presenting unique opportunities for change. Along the way, we passed half-built outlet malls, including a new abnormally placed Starbucks, but made a pit stop at a roadside wooden shack to buy fresh chopped sugarcane and breadfruit to cook later. While we chewed on the sugary sticks, Shirley-Phillips highlighted how well-intentioned government interventions had actually worsened the country’s climate-vulnerable food system.
Shirley Phillips—a native Jamaican who moved to Philadelphia and later returned to the island as a self-proclaimed expat—embodies the twisty, fast-paced journey we took to We Ting. It wasn’t lost on me that, even on an island like Jamaica with a distinct and recognizable cultural identity, the path to creating an intentional community with and among your people sometimes requires leaving home first.
Both of Shirley Phillips’ parents originate from Portland, Jamaica, but she grew up mainly in Kingston, the country’s capital, with her younger brother, Dwight. Her father was an all-round businessman, owning at one time a hardware store, pharmacy, yogurt hut, the first 24-hour restaurant, and a boutique importing clothes from Curacao, Panama, Los Angeles, and New York City. He was a classic example of postcolonial upward mobility, grounding success in acquiring material goods.
Shirley-Phillips’ parents were “movers and shakers” in the community, she explains. Her family enjoyed an upper-middle-class existence in Kingston, with her father driving Jaguars and Benzes. She assisted with the family businesses as early as eight, entrusted to open and close the pharmacy, balance the till, etc.
“My mother’s also very spiritual, and that side of the family, I’m finding out now my grandmother used to do [spiritual] tables in those days, even though, when I was coming up, she never said anything about that,” says Shirley-Phillips.
The Ecovillage co-founder thought it fortuitous that she was born to this couple, with her father’s business acumen on one side and her mother’s matrilineal spiritual connections on the other.
Jamaica then and now is still a British Commonwealth. The country’s overrepresentation of Christianity best exemplifies the vestiges of a colonial past to this day: 69% of the population is Christian, and the country boasts more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world. African spiritual practices continue to be stigmatized.
In 1985, Shirley-Phillips’ parents separated, and her mother and siblings moved permanently to the U.S., settling in Philadelphia.
Shirley-Phillips’ school in Germantown was plagued by a lack of funding, violence, and poor academic ratings. She wanted out quickly and took AP classes to fast-track her graduation. She worked in restaurants as a dishwasher and moved up the hospitality world while finishing school.
Shirley-Phillips moved up from dishwasher to sous chef at the Flying Fish restaurant, known as one of the first “fresh food” restaurants in the heavily Italian Philly restaurant scene. Paul Roller opened the eatery in 1984, and Shirley-Phillips reveled in the space. She cultivated a love for light and well-produced food and simply made sauces, vinaigrettes, and salads.
Shirley-Phillips would occasionally cook traditional Jamaican food for the staff meal, intriguing her co-workers, who put versions of it on the menu. This passion for hospitality eventually led her to Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island, where she studied hotel, food, and beverage management. She worked under another local food pioneering chef, Beth Cooper, who focused on using seasonal foods while harboring a dream to own a hotel.
This aspiration took her from the Flying Fish to well-known establishments like the Four Seasons Hotel. She planned to have experience in as many hospitality environments as possible for her later solo venture. She moved on to the Wyndham Hotel but remarked that the extreme racism forced her out.
Owing to these negative experiences in the hospitality industry, her dream of owning a hotel shifted to an aspiration of launching a restaurant. The idea for her eatery was already forming, and the final kick from her mentor got her to take the first step.
In 1992, Shirley Phillips borrowed money from a friend to open The Jamaican Jerk Hut on South Street in South Philly. Philadelphia didn’t have a thriving Caribbean food scene in the early 1990s, so she wanted to fill the gap with a simple takeout restaurant. But first, she had to get past the state of the area.
“We have this restaurant in this derelict kind of area. I have to clean up things. I can’t let it stay like that. I’ll clean the streets. Clean up those lots on both sides,” says Shirley-Phillips.
But as soon as she opened her doors, the community offered support. A Trinidadian woman named Ingrid in the neighborhood made roti every weekend, and her mother made fresh juices for the shop.
I discussed the term “derelict” with her during our conversation to better understand the condition of the space. Having worked in urban Black communities, I recognized a consistent pattern in gentrification: it often begins with government neglect, followed by sudden private and public investment. This community’s situation likely stemmed from “planned shrinkage”—an intentional reduction of public services like garbage removal and street repairs in urban areas, which is then used to justify redevelopment and the displacement of long-time residents and businesses.
In response to the neglect, Shirley-Phillips and her staff cleaned the community, including the vacant lots.
“And the restaurant kind of grew out of [that need],” she said. “Then we end up having a backyard area where we would have outdoor dining in the summer.”
In the warmer months, one nearby lot became an extension of the restaurant, while another lot was turned into a garden where community members could grow produce. Some vegetables, herbs, and fruits entered the Jamaican Jerk Hut’s dishes.
Soon, Shirley-Phillips and her staff began hosting workshops, lectures, movie nights, and farmers’ markets, transforming the Jamaican Jerk Hut into a community hub.
In 1996, when she was almost 30, Shirley-Phillips recalls things taking a turn. While at the restaurant, she describes strange activity.
“Stuff was falling down, [I’m] hearing things like heavy breathing,” she says.
Shirley-Phillips reflects on how fortunate she was to meet a Vodoun priest who gave her a spiritual reading and warned her not to get entangled in other people’s problems.
“You’re having a CRISIS of CONSCIOUSNESS, and you need to STOP.”
The most important message she received was that she would move back home in 2010 and establish a village. But, Shirley-Phillips was skeptical.
It took years for Shirley-Phillips to feel secure in her spiritual life. She heard whispers, “To start a yam festival,” a historical tradition throughout the African diaspora. And so, Shirley-Phillips obeyed.
The Ecovillage founder’s consciousness around food was growing alongside her spiritual awakening. She supplied the Jamaican Jerk Hut with goat meat for curry, sourced from a Black farmer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She tried to source organic food for the restaurant’s other meals but couldn’t maintain it at a price point the community could afford.
Then, her health began to fail with constant intestinal issues. “You’re having a crisis of consciousness, and you need to stop,” she reflects on her internal dialogue at the time. All was coming to a head, and the Jamaican Jerk Hut’s closure seemed all but certain.
South Philly reached a point when the planned shrinkage was entering the stage of active redevelopment, and the revitalization that the Jamaican Jerk Hut helped spur became the cause of its removal. White neighbors complained about the late-night music coming from the adjacent outdoor space, and an economic task force leader who was a patron of the restaurant blatantly told Shirley-Phillips that she must leave.
“It was intimidation,” she says while detailing the newcomers’ mounting complaints and the city’s threats. “But then I said, ‘these ungrateful wretches—I’m over here down the street and doing all this community development work, and then [they’re] trying to kick me out.’”
James Baldwin wrote, “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” His words reverberate from city to city where Black folks have created a home that then gets developed and gentrified on the backs of their labor, creativity, and resilience.
Shirley-Phillips eventually sold the space.
The Jamaican Jerk Hut’s transition inspired her to go back to school. For her thesis, she studied community economic development and flew back to Jamaica to study at a women’s center. She helped start a sewing cooperative with the young women in Johns Town and began envisioning what it would be like if she moved back. She often brought her mother and her godparents back, and they collectively dreamed of a return to the island.
Everything aligned to hasten that timeline: Having to give up the restaurant, the impending recession, and her failing health.
“My herbalist in Philly said if you stay in America, you’re going to die,” she says.
Shirley-Phillips’s gut health was failing, and the remedy of having a fully organic diet seemed impossible in the U.S. On her trips to Johns Town, her mother lamented the family house sale as part of her divorce. She told her that she wanted the family to purchase their own land.
Shirley-Phillips got “wooed back to Jamaica,” she recounts. She also wanted to return to the island to get more authentic recipes to write a Jamaican cookbook. She grieved the loss of the Jamaican Jerk Hut but resolved to apply her community-building efforts taken for granted in Philly (at the time) to her homeland.
During her childhood, Shirley’s family briefly lived on a farm in Kitson, near Spanish Town, Jamaica. The Shirley siblings loved the countryside, but their parents ultimately chose to move back to Kingston due to the poor quality of schools in the area.
Shirley-Phillips reflects on this brief paradise she and her brother enjoyed on the farm and used this as fuel to co-found Ecovillage.
For many island-born immigrants in the U.S., the dream is typically to move back to their country after retirement to enjoy their home with an American budget. Dr. Sharon Mckenzie (Iya Shani), one of the residents of Ecovillage and my godmother, had just that vision.
In 1992, Shani took a design class focused on outdoor environmental and eco-friendly spaces and drew a vision (which Shirley-Phillips later executed in 2005 with the founding of Ecovillage) for a retirement community for aging members of African Traditional Religions.
All of Shirley Phillips’ training and past work in perpetual community building culminated in an offer to purchase a 63-acre property with a small one-room shack. Her family—mother, brother, and their partners—all put down money for the deposit. She credits her mother, Blondel Shirley-Atwater, with the true founding of the space.
Shirley-Phillips and her then-partner (later husband), Chaz, sold their homes in Philadelphia to make the final payments. Her mother, godparents, and everyone who came to see it wanted to build ‘cots’ on the land. That’s when it hit her. “Oh my god, that’s a village!”
Shirley-Phillips wanted to start a community-supported agriculture project to address her health issues when she moved back to Jamaica. She offered a class to teach organic farming practices. No one who farmed in the neighboring town of Johns Town attended. Those from further towns and villages did. She quickly realized that the American food system she was attempting to escape was the aspiration of her home country.
In a 2021 panel focused on Youth in Agriculture, Shirley-Phillips highlighted the challenges of Jamaica moving towards more sustainable farming practices. The country is the largest island in the English-speaking Caribbean and has a population of 2.96 million (Food and Agricultural Organization, 2022). The former British colony was used primarily for sugar production, and sugar cane is still growing widely. Sugar accounts for 33 percent of Jamaica’s agricultural output. Despite having a high potential for year-round growth, Jamaica imports 60 percent of the food it consumes, and this reliance has grown and keeps growing over the last 10 to 15 years.
“We’ve been very slow to pivot,” Shirley-Phillips says. “We are plagued with too many imports. Many people who are supposed to be responsible for the health and wealth on the island are playing that logistic game of importing instead of creating systems.”
Items such as grains, produce (native to the U.S.), beef, dairy, processed snacks, and alcohol comprise a large share of imported goods, according the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report. This is largely attributed to the country’s tourism industry, but even looking through the lens of the meals the country is known for—rice and beans, curry goat, cornmeal, and plantains—many of these ingredients are imported. Imported rice has increased from 168,435 tonnes in 1962 to 580,919 in 2019.
Jamaica has the greatest potential out of most Caribbean islands to rely almost entirely on the local agricultural industry. Imported goods can be substituted with locally grown produce, and the rich biodiversity produces highly nutrient-rich foods and active pharmaceutical ingredients for local consumption and exports. The population’s health suffers from this, as 25 percent of adults live with at least one diet-related issue. Soil depletion is due to the over-usage of agrochemicals, while the lack of accurate data and reporting often leads to a misalignment in investments from the government and NGOs.
Small-scale farmers face even more challenges as they have less access to credit and financing than larger-scale producers, according to the FAO report. They are also competing for land with developers building foreign-based franchises.
“Since colonialism, we have been a very extractive system. Everything is to extract and take out, but we’re not looking at a regenerative system,” says Shirley-Phillips.
When Shirley-Phillips speaks, an image of Jamaica’s track team running a relay comes to my mind. Her words race to keep pace with each other and the information she conveys. One word passes the baton to another word, leading to phrases, phrases into aphorisms, and aphorisms into lessons. She’s statuesque yet humble—wildly talented yet relatable, full of wisdom, with a slight hint of mischief. Now 57, she’s in great shape, energetic, and physically capable.
“We’re all exhausted when we’re around Nicola,” Shani jokes. “But her drive is inspirational, we need that energy because that’s how change happens. That energy challenges us to get past our fear and our doubt. Even as spiritual people, we have doubt.”
Shirley-Phillips can identify each of the original and current residents of Ecovillage by their career paths and spiritual contributions. Although everyone in the community is not a practitioner of African Traditional Religions, they all support and celebrate anniversaries and special occasions within the traditions.
“Everything around us comes from NATURE—everything has SPIRIT and VIBRATION. It’s crazy to think you could do this work without talking about nature or spirit,”
“This is an ancestral project,” Shirley-Phillips says. “Ancestors are guiding the way.”
In the U.S., Ecovillage’s work can serve as a source of guidance and inspiration, but others are already employing this unique combination of spirit-led food justice. Georie Bryant, a farmer, professional chef, and food sovereignty consultant based in North Carolina and founder of Symbodied, combines a nuanced approach to teaching market creation and supporting farmers in organizing their work, grounded in African Traditional Religious practices.
“The market is a recreation of existence,” Bryant says.
He goes on to explain the role of a “Dibia” in Igbo culture. The Dibia’s role is to set up a market through divination and assessment of the land through the trees.
The spiritual structures that undergird market creation forge a practice that is cooperative in nature, regenerative, and accountable to the community and the environment. It seamlessly blends the tangible and mundane with the spirit world, seeing the latter as a guiding voice, a whisper of the past that can only concretize through our present actions.
At Ecovillage, Shirley-Phillips unwittingly enacts the role of a Dibia and continues to be a one-woman momentum builder for all of its work.
“Everything around us comes from nature—everything has spirit and vibration. It’s crazy to think you could do this work without talking about nature or spirit,” Shirley-Phillips says.
Disconnection, working in silos, is about control, she says. When you want to control something, you isolate it. Ecovillage/Source Farm is a project that fully integrates food, health, life, and work—guided by spirit—to connect us deeper with each other and the earth.
She wants to make food and create space for those who are already invested in their own healing. “Our next frontier is our mind, it’s reconnecting with the plant spirit. We are now raising the bar.”
At Ecovillage, the lush greenery is interrupted by strikingly white domes constructed using a method called Earthbag. Builders gather dirt from the land and fill it into rice bags, which are stabilized with barbed wire to create the bricks for the homes. Each dome features a glass-filled hole in the roof that allows natural light during the day and offers a view of the stars at night.
In the mornings, bird calls compete to serve as the neighborhood alarm clock while various bugs carry on, seemingly unaware that humans now inhabit the area. Over time, their presence becomes non-threatening and even harmonious. During the day, the wind carries a mix of sounds in the summer heat, while the stillness of night makes those sounds easier to hear.
At the Ni Mala Healing Center on a hill of the Ecovillage, the peaceful view is beset with dancehall music on one side of the valley and Kumina drumming on the other.
These layers are constantly in competition with each other, in our everyday lives, but Ecovillage attempts to uplift a few things that are tantamount to the marketplace experience on earth.
Shirley-Phillips says that food, resources, the exchange of ideas, community, and healing are the infrastructures that help us ascend. They also help us get home.
Peer Reviewer: Shivon Love
