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The food system in the US has supported growing dominance of industrial agriculture, corporate distribution chains, and other means by which power is exerted at the expense of environmental sustainability, citizen health and wealth inequality. Economic impacts have been most damaging to low resourced and racialized communities. Online purchasing creates new opportunities--particularly in the context of the covid epidemic--but barriers may arise that are also along race and class divisions. This paper examines an initial data set for two Black led collaborative Food System projects (two urban farms and a mobile farmers market initiative), all of which are primarily staffed by African American leadership and serve a diverse set of community members with Black consumers being of the majority. While issues such as government benefit payments constitute formal economic barriers, other challenges are better illuminated through the lens of the extraction of value: the loss of community connections and increased dependency on modes of production that do not return value to the community. We define “generative production networks” as those which maximize unalienated value return rather than value extraction. We utilize this framework to examine alternative online systems to overcome these barriers. 

Inequity and social injustice are omnipresent wicked problems, complex challenges for which there are no single solutions due to their cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and systemic nature. For example, the 'green revolution' of the 1970s was supposed to solve world hunger. However, we saw a rise in corporate control over agriculture (Pielke and Linner, 2019) instead. The design of social media, widely touted as creating a harmonious global village in the 1980s, has instead partly turned into hatching grounds for a global white supremacist movement and other forms of extremism. We cannot afford to allow accidental synergies to create global disasters passively. Instead, we need to bring social, technological, economic, and environmental concerns, among other considerations, into a deliberate and reflective emergent process. We refer to this decolonial, emancipatory form of design emergence as 'radical synergy.' In this paper, we begin by visualizing how radical synergy provides scaffolding for the program. Then, we show snapshots of how it took pedagogical form over the past two years, enabling graduate students and their partners to take steps toward attaining it by facilitating community-based, deep collaboration informed by anti-racism, decolonization, and integrative critical analysis, and facilitated by an integrative design thinking and making approach.