Foragers in the Foodway is a biweekly series that invites community members to the Bronx River Foodway to learn how to forage alongside NYC foragers and herbalists at the Bronx River Foodway! Participants will learn how to correctly identify wild and cultivated edible and medicinal plant species as well as learn the various ways to preserve and use their harvests. Tap into what the season has to offer by attending one or all the events happening between June and September. Register for each event below!
Meet the Foragers:
Journei is a Congo-born, Bronx-rooted clinical herbalist, foraging practitioner, and educator who has been teaching communities how to identify edible and medicinal plants since 2014 across New York City and the tri-state area. She is a founding member of the Bronx River Foodway and served as the first chair of the Foodway team, helping shape the space into a community learning environment where people can reconnect with the plants growing along the river. As a Creatives Rebuild New York Grantee and an artist funded by New York Council for the Arts, Journei shares practical plant knowledge with both children and adults through hands-on, place-based learning. Her tours invite participants to slow down, engage their senses, and learn how to identify and work with the edible and medicinal plants that grow along the Bronx River. Participants often leave seeing the landscape in a new way as a living source of food, medicine, and community connection.
Imelda is an herbalist, skincare formulator, and forager of Sierra Leonean heritage, founder of La Bel Skincare and Akita in the Bush to bridge traditional plant medicine with modern wellness. Through La Bel Skincare, she creates handcrafted herbal skincare products rooted in natural healing and ancestral wisdom, while Akita in the Bush offers immersive experiences where participants learn these practices firsthand through identifying wild medicinal plants and sustainable harvesting to preparing herbal remedies, teas, and skincare formulations from foraged materials. Her work spans local foraging workshops along the Bronx River (where she served as co-chair in 2025 and a Foodway steward since 2023) to international wellness retreats. Honoring her great-grandmother Akita-Cole’s legacy as an African community herbalist, Imelda makes plant-based wellness accessible through both educational programming and thoughtfully crafted products that invite daily connection to nature’s healing power.
Sana, a product of several diasporas, was raised with the philosophy that food is medicine, and wellness begins with understanding one’s body. Recently, she served as the 2025 co-chair of the Foodway Team and has been involved in the Foodway since 2022, both through stewardship and anchoring the annual Community Banquet with offerings that incorporate wild food to forge a third culture cuisine that highlights the harmony between indigenous & immigrant plants, cultures, and cuisines. Sana’s holistic study of plants is rooted in ethical foraging, herbalism, aromatherapy, formulation, and recipe development.
Foragers in the Foodway is supported by New York State Agriculture and Markets. For questions or concerns, email Nathan.Hunter@parks.nyc.gov or call 718-542-4124.
