Soul Fire Farm’s niche in the movement ecosystem is as SOWERS OF SEEDS – sharing knowledge and resources to inspire, equip, and mobilize the community toward food and land sovereignty.
Our theory of change recognizes:
- The unique, essential role of each collective in our movement. No one actor or strategy can complete the work alone.
- The ethical and strategic importance of abolition and nonviolent social change
- The value of emulating the forest by working at a relational scale, limiting growth, embodying humility, and redistributing resources
- The power of joining with Indigenous farmers across the globe toward a shared food sovereignty vision.
- The necessity of rooting our work in the Sacred, practicing reverence for Ancestors and the Earth.
- The centrality of Black cultural survival as a tool for liberation of the Land and her People
- The belief that proliferation of self-determined land-based community projects will shift culture, heal people and the earth, and help build the necessary political power to actualize food and land sovereignty.
Purpose1
Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous2 centered community farm and training center dedicated to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.
With deep reverence for the Earth and wisdom of our ancestors, we practice regenerative3 agroecology, raise and distribute life-giving food, equip the rising generation of BIPOC farmers4, and mobilize communities to work toward food and land sovereignty5.
- “Purpose” is a decolonial word choice to replace, “mission” – given the connotations of mission with Christian imperialism ↩︎
- Afro-Indigenous: Related to decolonial Black heritage, thought, and practice ↩︎
- Regenerative Agriculture: Millenia-old Indigenous sustainable farming practices that were codified and popularized by Dr. George Washington Carver, a Black agronomist at Tuskegee Institute. ↩︎
- Farmer: A person whose livelihood engages with an ecosystem to produce food, forage, seeds, medicine, or other crops. The returns of their labor may afford the farmer wages, sales, and/or self-provisioning and they may be termed a peasant, land worker, urban grower, campesino, farmworker, shepard, herbalist, nonprofit farmer, or edible landscaper. They have in common the tending of soil as their means of ‘securing the necessities of life. ↩︎
- Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. – Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty, Mali, 2007 ↩︎