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Apolo Cátala was decades into his career as an attorney when he received an alarming prognosis.
After seeing a doctor for high blood pressure symptoms, he was prescribed a regimen of medications including Metformin. He was familiar with the anti-diabetic medication because type 2 diabetes had contributed to his own father’s death. “It scared the heck out of me,” Cátala says — and it sparked significant changes in his life.
Cátala was in his mid-50s and 40 pounds overweight, he says. Then an attorney, he was also a self-diagnosed workaholic.
Today, at 67, Cátala’s life looks quite different. As a graduate of the Urban Farming Institute’s (UFI) farmer training program, he now thrives as a farm manager, driven by a deep passion for food, health, and community.
It wasn’t long after his alarming doctor’s visit that Cátala embarked on a “self-directed sabbatical” to reflect on his health and career. After traveling to California, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, he returned to Boston — where he had settled after studying at Northeastern University School of Law — and began volunteering for a Puerto Rican-founded organization in the South End of Boston called Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción. While there, he participated in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program that “had a phenomenal impact on my life,” Cátala says.
Thanks to the weekly CSA boxes, which deliver fresh goods directly from local farms, Cátala learned to cook — and love — all kinds of produce. He also met a young farmer named Tristram Keefe, who had recently completed UFI’s farmer training program.
A lifelong avid reader, he dove into literature recommended to him by Keefe and other urban farming advocates. The connections between food, physical health, and the environment were clear to the former lawyer, especially as his own health continued to improve.
“I started [reading] about food, and food as medicine, and the environment,” Catala says. It inspired him to think, “Wow, you know … there’s something to this. There’s this connection between food and health.”
UFI began in 2011 to develop and promote urban agriculture, says Patricia Spence, the organization’s president and CEO. Now, with six sites across Boston and headquartered located on a historic farmstead in Mattapan, UFI continues to deepen its impact through hands-on engagement and education. It also offers a myriad of other programs aimed at building healthy communities, such as youth education and meetup groups for seniors that incorporate functional fitness, healthy eating, and opportunities to connect. In season, UFI also operates a farmstand on Fridays at its Mattapan site, and spearheads an annual urban farming conference for New England farmers.
“You’ve got to have multiple streams to bring people into this world of farming and healthy eating,” Spence says.
UFI’s broad, multi-pronged approach to “food is health” put the organization on the radar for philanthropic efforts at Takeda, says Chris Barr, US head of corporate social responsibility and philanthropy for the biopharmaceutical leader whose global hub is in Cambridge. “We were looking for innovative programs that were not just supporting the community, but really integrated within the community,” Barr says.
Takeda pledged a significant multi-year grant to UFI in 2022. The support has helped to fund key roles, from farmstand and greenhouse managers to education and volunteer coordinators, to build the organization’s capacity to serve more community members. The 2023-2024 season marked a milestone as the organization served and supported more people than ever before, with record-breaking attendance at the farmstand.
Fundraising and contributions from foundations and corporations help UFI accomplish all that it does, Spence says, and keep its produce prices affordable for the community.
Within about six months of having CSA access and meeting urban farmers in Boston, Cátala had made significant progress losing weight and lowering his blood pressure. He was able to discontinue some of the medications that had been prescribed, including his diabetes medication.
As his own health continued to improve, Cátala’s passion for farming deepened. By 2014, he was certain he wanted to pivot his career to farming, but the training program at UFI had already closed enrollment for the season. So he turned to its other resources, like riding a UFI-provided bus to attend the Northeast Organic Farming Association Winter Conference. “I met people, I got excited, I got inspired,” he says, “and then the next time they had the training program, I was able to get in.”
Just a few minutes’ walk from UFI’s main farm, the OASIS on Ballou Urban Farm in Dorchester — a program of the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation — was a worksite during Cátala’s UFI training. OASIS on Ballou was a large plot of land with “a very small farm” on it, but “we grew that farm from 600 to more like 10,000 square feet of growing space with the help of UFI and tons of volunteers,” Cátala says. He took over as farm manager in 2016 and is currently involved with efforts to expand even further.
For Cátala, he sees a strong connection between community health and affordable food access.
“One of the things that really caught my attention is the incidence of chronic diseases in our communities and in my family,” Cátala says. As a kid in the Bronx, he recalls his parents having difficulty sourcing certain ingredients for traditional cooking. It could be difficult to find aji dulce, for instance, a pepper essential to sofrito, the base of many Puerto Rican dishes.
Today, UFI and Oasis on Ballou grow culturally appropriate crops like aji dulce, not only to meet the community’s culinary needs but also to empower people to maintain healthier, traditional diets. By growing the foods that resonate with their heritage, UFI is helping communities use food as medicine, connecting cultural roots with better health.
“We’re constantly trying to grow food that our community wants, and now we are known for that,” Spence says. With the right kinds of crops in their rotation, UFI is “looking at the demographics around them and how they can make a difference in their lives through food,” Barr says.
The farmstand in Mattapan makes fresh vegetables more accessible to the neighborhood and also serves as a gathering place for locals. Overall, UFI fills measurable needs within Boston’s inner city in ways that align with Takeda’s philanthropic efforts to reduce social disparities, Barr says.
While Cátala’s journey to embracing farming is one with a life-changing ending, not everyone who pursues the farmer training program may end up in the field, Spence says — and that’s OK. “We’re trying to get everybody at UFI to enthusiastically grow food,” she says, whether it’s in a container garden on their balcony or on a larger scale. The benefits are multifaceted, and include simple pleasures such as a sense of satisfaction, something to stave off isolation, or a tasty new recipe.
Cátala, ever pragmatic, says the return on investment for urban farming cannot and should not be measured by the conventional bottom line.
“It’s going to show up in young people coming to the farm and getting excited,” he says, “and making connections that will lead them to have a good relationship with food down the road.”
Because from his own experience: food is medicine, it’s culture, and it’s crucial to long-term health.
Learn more about Takeda’s local efforts in their Community Impact Report.
Community health workers: Unsung heroes for patients in need
