Meet Cam Christian | Communitarian & Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Cam Christian and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Cam, how does your business help the community?
Plantlanta is an educational platform that combines social and environmental justice with pop culture, empowering youth to become better leaders.

What should our readers know about your business?
Plantlanta is a nonprofit community organization that is creating an educational platform that inspires, encourages, and motivates children & young adults in the Metro Atlanta area to promote food and environmental justice in our urban communities. We want to be intentional about combining things that our younger generation already engage in within pop culture like music, sports, and entertainment with sustainability, food & environmental justice, and social issues. Plantlanta prides themselves on being socially innovative when it comes to organizing these events and programs. For example, we’ve partnered up with A3C Hip Hop Festival to raffle off tickets to volunteers at Metro Atlanta Urban Farm. We also coordinated Atlanta’s FIRST virtual reality screening event of the docuseries, This is Climate Change. More recently, we started Plantlanta State University, a program where we take-over a local school and completely replace their curriculum for the entire day with classes and workshops rooted in recycling, gardening, farming, health & wellness, culinary arts, and STEM. We must be as innovative as possible when it comes to educating our future leaders. In my experience as a millennial biracial music artist that cares about his community, I noticed that our generation cares a lot but wasn’t as involved in taking leads on these types of issues. There was a lack of representation and lack of education and exposure on these subjects. Especially within our low income underserved communities specifically. To grow as an organization, we had to start from the bottom and identify a problem that needed to be solved. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we just wanted to support organizations and individuals who were already doing the work. Ideas will come but let’s find out what’s already being done and support that. Over the almost 4 years of our existence, we’ve pivoted in our mission and our approach but the desire to want to help remains. We learned that it’s ok to pivot. It’s ok to take a step back and reevaluate what exactly it is we were trying to accomplish and who we are trying to serve.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
If you happen to be visiting around the time of the full moon, you gotta check out Connected Camping. It’s a once-a-month camping experience like no other with activities that get you back to center. Kind of hard to explain but it’s one of those, “you just have to be there” situations. Revery is a dope VR bar in Atlanta where you can play games on a virtual reality headset. This is actually the venue we partnered with to do our climate change screening so i might be a little biased, but it’s still a unique experience. I love to eat at the farmer’s market food courts. Dekalb and Buford farmers markets have a food court that’s comprised of food from all over the world. Everything’s fresh from the market itself and it’s pretty inexpensive. Life hack: everyday after 4:30pm at Buford Farmer’s market, the food is 40% off. Use that information as you will. Other than that, i’m pretty much a homebody. During the summer, I like to go river tubing in Ellijay or maybe kayak Lake Allatoona. Never Lake Lanier. I repeat, never Lake Lanier.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to recognize my amang (grandpa), the late great Carlos Corpuz. My grandpa was a rice farmer in the Phillippines who instilled values in me directly and indirectly through my mother which I continue to reflect on as I navigate through life.

Website: https://www.plantlantastateuniversity.org/

Instagram: @officialplantlanta

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PlantLANTA

Youtube: https://youtu.be/7bpqLPw_8Tc

Other: Personal Instagram: @camchristian.mp3 Artist Link: linktr.ee/camchristian.mp3

Image Credits
Photographers: Modou Jallow Larissa Bermudez Carlton Adams James Carr