“Being holy makes you hungry,” said Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, speaking to the seemingly universal experience of eating after church services. Food and eating together is not just about nourishing the body but also the soul.
Brown was the keynote speaker at the Do Good. Better. Conference on March 13, hosted by the BYU Ballard Center for Social Impact. He was also honored as the 2025 Social Innovator of the Year and presented with a check for $10,000 to further his work in promoting food security in Black communities. Brown founded the Black Church Food Security Network 10 years ago, which, according to its website, co-creates “Black food ecosystems anchored by Black churches working in partnership with Black farmers and other organizations.”
Brown shared how, as a new 28-year-old pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, he spent most of his time on “Monday through Saturday work” with the people in his congregation. He realized as he ministered to members of his congregations who were experiencing health challenges that sometimes included hospitalization, that there was a common thread to many of their stories: lack of adequate, healthy food.
Love, he said, motivated him to look for solutions. His first ideas were not fruitful. A local grocery store providing “food charity” was a no go. He went stomping back to his church and heard God say to him: “Heber, why are you mad?” After he was done venting, he heard God tell him to look to his right, and there was a tiny patch of yard in front of a building the church was using. “Roll up your sleeves and grow it yourself,” he heard.
From the 1,500-square-foot plot came 1,200 pounds of produce that went into the church kitchen and then to congregational meals and into the homes of church members who were unable to attend Sunday services. Brown said one of the key insights he gained was to maximize what was already in hand. “If nothing else,” he said, “we have churches in the Black community.” So how, he wondered, could he get other churches involved, not in food charity, but food security and sustainability?
Sometimes, Brown said, “all you need is a small group of people,” echoing anthropologist Margaret Mead’s admonition to “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed,” she said, “it is the only thing that ever has.” Brown began to wonder if Black churches could create food systems. No one church could do everything, but every church could do something, whether that was growing food, transporting food, or offering food nutrition and cooking classes.
The Ballard Center has a two-pronged approach to social impact: helping their students develop the faith and the skills to solve social problems. This year’s conference, focused on solving food insecurity, is part of a two-year focus on hunger. The first year kicked off in September with Barron Segar, president and CEO of World Food Program USA and Sharon Eubank, director of Latter-day Saint Charities and a former member of the Relief Society general presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
During their joint appearance at BYU, Segar shared that today, the No. 1 driver of hunger is war and conflict around the world. And, “as always,” Segar said, the most vulnerable are the hungriest, specifically women and children. Eubank noted that you do not need to go around the world to address issues of hunger and food insecurity.
“You are more important than you realize, right where you live,” she said. Often, she said, people think they need to travel internationally to be powerful in a humanitarian setting, but at home you speak the language, you know the culture and you can be involved in issues you care about every single day. What “gets me more excited than any foreign location,” she said, “is what we can do in our own communities.” That is the same point the Rev. Dr. Brown made: Look at what is right in front of you and the skills you already have in your hands, and then get to work.
The Ballard Center also emphasizes loving the problem to create the best solutions rather than coming in with a pre-determined solution. On day two of the conference, Andrew Reed, Chair of Religious Understanding & Associate Professor of Church History at Brigham Young University, interviewed Brown and asked him what loving the problem looked like to him.
First, he said, was the need to stay curious and to “resist the blind spot of expertise.” Brown said that even if you have some things figured out, don’t believe you have all the solutions, so keep learning.
Brown stayed curious about earlier members of the Black community who worked on food security, reasoning that he could not have possibly been the first African American religious leader to have this idea to work together on solving a sticky problem. He dug into history and found stories of people like Father Divine and Mother Divine, of the Peace Mission Movement, who grew food in upstate New York and trucked it down into Harlem to feed their members during the Great Depression. They had a “supply chain ministry,” Brown said.
Or, there was the Rev. Dr. Vernon Johns, a pioneer in the Civil Rights movement, who looked at ways to connect Black farmers, Black restaurant owners and churches and “weave them together” in mutually supportive ways. He also wanted to make a point to his “silk stocking” congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, so he would preach his Sunday sermon, then put on overalls and sell produce to the congregation as they left the church.
Learning from his predecessors and his 1,500-square-foot garden, Brown has been able to co-create a food security network of almost 250 Black churches across the country. Their offerings range from a citrus orchard in Florida to long-haul trucking distribution, farmers markets and, of course, many church gardens.
Brown said God spoke to him again on the eve of his 30th birthday. “Heber,” God told him, “it’s wonderful to point out what is wrong as long as you save some energy for the things that you can build to make it right.”
Brown left the audience with this message from God: “Critique what is. Create what should be.”
