Rhonda Spencer is a native of Brooklyn, New York. She is married, a mother of two, an educator and entrepreneur. She has a background in education that began in 1999 in the New York City Public School system, where she taught in The Bronx and Manhattan. She received her Master’s Degree in Education and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Educational Leadership at Cambridge College in Boson, Massachusetts, and would later become an adjunct professor and student teacher supervisor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.

In 2010, her journey and interest in agriculture began with her first summer food garden at her home in Pennsylvania. Within the same year, she and her family would move to Virginia for a land and farming opportunity. Although this did not materialize as expected, in 2020, after relocating with her family to Oklahoma, Rhonda would again revisit her quest of growing her own food and her interest in farming and agriculture.

Rhonda continued her agriculture journey by once again growing her own food on her back porch. This time, however, as news reports foresaw the beginning of a food shortage, along with the limited ability to get around due to quarantine, and the general difficulty to find healthy, nutritious fruits and vegetables in Oklahoma City, she was not growing food just for leisure, but because of the growing uncertainty of food access during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Her attempt to answer to this need presented many challenges, particularly in an urban setting. Her desire for learning more about urban gardening and her will to educate her community about this information as well, is what prompted her to start the live virtual workshop series “From Seed 2 Harvest”. What began as a show on gardening quickly expanded to cover many stages of growing and storing food, including food preservation, freeze drying, hoop houses, green houses, aquaponics, animal husbandry and more.  The shows featured seasoned farmers, gardeners and experienced individuals, such as Kwame Mboya, a local farmer, founder and manager of the NEOKC Farmers Market Incorporated. The show also included international guests as far away as Zambia, Central Africa. The advantage to the show being virtual was that it reached larger audiences and forged relations with farmers and food Sovereignty Advocates around the country and the world and put From Seed 2 Harvest on the global scene. Just as we cultivate to grow fruit, vegetables and flowers, this is only the beginning for “From Seed 2 Harvest.”

In December 2021, Rhonda was a cohost on WOLB AM Radio 1010, The Mentoring Klinic, in Baltimore, MD.  The featured topic was: “Community Preparation for Food Shortage/How to Prepare.”  As Rhonda continued to engage various groups and study, she realized that farming is a lost art and she believes that it is important for our youth to reconnect to the earth and to learn the art growing food. This, she believes, is the key start to sustaining a good quality of life, by taking charge of our lives through cultivating good, wholesome, life-sustaining food.