June Love Notes

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Maya Angelou

Beloved Community,

The month of the strawberry moon graced us with an abundant harvest. We started our regular Solidarity Share deliveries of vegetables, herbs, fruits, and eggs to the doorsteps of community members surviving food apartheid. We revived our love-drenched SOULstice party and alumni reunion after a two year pandemic pause. And we mourned, gathered, and organized with our Buffalo family around our vision for community safety.

In the month to come, we look forward to the FIRE (Farming in Relationship with Earth) immersions where folks come live and learn on the farm for weeklong sessions. The Land continues to be our greatest teacher and we look forward to sharing these lessons with the rising generation of earth keepers.

Read on for June updates and July invitations below.

With Love,

Azuré, Briana, Brooke, Cheryl, Clara, Danielle, Hillary, Ife, Jonah, Kai, Leah, Naima, Ria and Shay

Men anpil chay pa lou. Many hands make the load lighter.

Kreyol proverb

This shared labor practice is built on the Haitian mutual aid societies called konbit and the West African Dahomian practice of dokpwe. In konbit, members take turns hosting work events on their respective farms. Everyone brings food and drink to share, and singing and live music are integrated to keep the cadence and lift spirits. The members of a mutual aid konbit often plan far in advance to avoid conflicts in scheduling and ensure that everyone gets the support they need. We learned about konbit from our farmer friends in Komye, Haiti during solidarity visits in 2010-2017. Ayibobo!

The SOULstice party was overflowing with love and beautiful energy! After 2 years of pandemic pause it felt extra magical to gather together to celebrate our interdependence with the land and each other. Highlights included a gravity defying aerial trapeze performance from the tree tops by Neshima, a multilingual hip hop / Afro-Colombian folkloric set by Kombelisa Mi, and the mind-opening and masterful flows of Kala and the Lost Tribe. Taína Asili & Naima Infinity sprinkled their vocal magic throughout and DJ Trumaster, DJ AyO and AJ Jungle Punk kept us dancing until the wee hours. There was a community altar, gratitude wall, photo booth, bonfire, hammock grove, scavenger hunt and delicious food prepared with love. Hundreds of kindred souls convereged and we elevated our JOY together.

We also want to take a moment to shout out the sponsors that helped us make this event possible. Huge thank you to CAP COM, East Hollow Cider, Honest Weight Food Co-op, CDPHP, Unitarian Universalist Society of Schenectady, Jonesville United Methodist Church, SEFCU, and MVP Healthcare.

It’s immersion season!!! We are thrilled to welcome our first cohort of aspiring BIPOC farmers to the land July 3-8 for FIRE = Farming in Relationship to Earth. We will be learning so much together from seed keeping to sovereignty to soil, in a space that uplifts Afro-Indigenous brilliance.

Special shout out to Shay Collins, Administrative Program Director new to the SFFI team this year, who is co-managing the Immersions alongside Naima. Shay, who resides in Chicago, will be on the land to support the first Immersion with their beautiful presence, in addition to all the behind the scenes work they’ve been holding down to bring us together.

We had a gorgeous walk through the land at golden hour, as Ria, Jonah, and Leah pointed out the abundance of food and medicine gifted by the wild: sorrel, sumac, black birch, spruce tips, chaga, blueberries and so much more. Ria offered a live demo of lambs quarter and chickweed pesto – recipe here – and we sipped her sumptuous strawberry dandelion kefir.

As part of Soul Fire in the City, Azuré, Danielle and Naima facilitated a plant propagation workshop in Troy, trading techniques for planning a biodiverse urban garden. Together, we learned how to create more perennial plants from roots and cuttings, and how to organize a planting calendar from seed packet instructions. Folks who attended this workshop were sent home with an abundance of propagated plants for their gardens, flower and vegetable seed packets, and annual crop seedlings! Thank you to Honest Weight Food Coop for donating seedlings, and to Collard City Growers for hosting us!

June’s Work & Learn Days were joyous! We harvested abundant bundles of mugwort, lemon balm, mint, and oregano to set them to dry, and liberated our lowbush blueberries from grasses and applied wood chip mulch.  We enjoyed delicious food around the pond and picnic tables and made new friends!

JOIN US!!! You’re invited to Soul Fire Farm to learn about some of our farming practices while supporting our food sovereignty work and getting your hands on the land.

• July 12, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link
• July 26, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link

In our last Ask A Sista Farmer, we were joined by the inspiring Beatrice Kamau, from Multiple Harvest in Chicago, where they keep bees and grow vegetables for other African immigrants. Listen to that episode here.

Join us on Friday, July 1st, 4:00-4:40 EST for our next episode on instagram live @soulfirefarm with Nivek Anderson-Brown, homesteader and micro vegetable farmer from Leaf and Bean Farm in Virginia. She’ll be dropping knowledge on how to apply homesteading to everyday life. Tune in!

Check out past episodes here (IGTV) and here (FB). Full list of past episodes here. 

Learn more or apply to present here

Our first tour was a blast, with the goats showing off their balancing skills and beholding the young 3 sisters garden reaching for the sky. We were honored to be joined by food and land sovereignty activists all the way from the Central Valley in California.

Soul Fire Farm will host 7 more tours throughout the 2022 farming season so that our beloved community can experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here.

Next up July 15 & 29. In-person tickets and virtual tickets available! Learn more and register here.

The art of constructing a building is a beautiful symphony of teamwork and shared vision. A typical commercial construction project works with a team of professional designers who create a set of plans, sometimes without ever setting foot on the building site. In contrast, we often use a design-build process that creates a basic design and then engages contractor experts as our collaborative partners. We are doing this with the office renovation to create an efficient and successful building.

High performance buildings have many details that have to be well-executed and fine tuned to our local climate. In addition to the high efficiency of this building, we undertook the ambitious task of sound-insulating the shop downstairs from the offices upstairs so that when both are in use, the folks in the office won’t be disturbed by the loud power tools downstairs. Our team gleaned knowledge from everyone that would talk to them, from experts and professors of sound, to vendors and sales reps. We settled on a highly effective, though intricate, design that needed to be communicated effectively to all the different trades people working on the project.

Big up team! And much respect to all out there pushing forward ambitious collaborative work!

Soul Fire Farm has always had a co-director model where two to three people share the duties of the executive director. It is important to us that power is distributed and that big decisions are made collaboratively. Further, the expected duties of a typical nonprofit ED are too diverse in skill requirements (human resources, fundraising, public relations, strategic vision, financial management, board development, etc.) to expect one person to perform well or to do them without intense overwork and burnout. Soul Fire Farm’s co-EDs get to lean into their strengths and skills and support one another. Even beyond the director roles, our board and staff practice consultative and collaborative decision making, with transparency around where decision-making power sits, and a commitment to consensus-building. What are your shared leadership and decision-making practices? We are excited to learn and grow together.

The Praxis series reflects on how our community can best put our values into action, sharing resources, ideas, and practice toward collective liberation. These will be shared each month in Love Notes and also on social media. 

Soul Fire Farm is located on unceded territory of the Mohican Nation. We remain committed to working in solidarity with the Mohican people and other Indigenous communities in our region.

From the evening of Friday, June 24th through to the end of the day Saturday before our SOULstice party started, we celebrated and deepened relationships with some of our alumni. We spent time together cooking and enjoying meals, playing games and sharing songs, and getting our hands on the land. We are so grateful to our extended Farmily for coming back to join us for reunions such as these. These points of continued connection help us keep moving together with tenacity and community care.

Maleeka with the HEAL Food Alliance reached out to us at SFF with a request to assist in the gathering of stories from rural farmers who have experienced discrimination from commercial banks on the basis of race and/or gender. The goal of this effort is to create a public record of discrimination in commercial lending, which would enable the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to pass a rule (1071) that would require banks to track demographics for lending, and thus begin formal data collection of discrimination to help hold big banks accountable.

Farmers are encouraged to submit written testimony of discrimination to build the record.  Farmers who want to submit a story directly may do so through this portal or send directly to Shawn.Sebastian@cfpb.gov.  If anyone would like to submit a story anonymously, send a note to Ife at love@soulfirefarm.org. She will reach out to schedule a time to talk and submit on behalf of the person wanting to remain anonymous.

In July 2020, a group of BIPOC-led organizations and farms working in food/ag justice across the US came together in solidarity to change the paradigm in which philanthropic institutions work with us.  Soul Fire Farm Institute was among many organizations who wrote an open letter to the Rockefeller, Kellogg and Walmart foundations to hold these institutions accountable to commitments to racial equity and justice and articulate how they can transform their current practices to meet the moment.  In August of 2020, one of the demands was met, which was to cancel the problematic RFP they had launched in June. But they did not meet the other demands.  The group has since continued meeting to push for the change needed to align food systems focused philanthropic institutions and their practices with a just transition in philanthropy. We value the work of this committed core of folks who’ve continued advancing this work and are excited to rejoin LIFE as partner and comrade.

A spiritual bath to tune the heart to the ancestors, containing blue vervain, marigold, mugwort, and prayer. The herbs are grown at Soul Fire Farm following Certified Naturally Grown standards and Afro-Indigenous heritage practices. Each container has enough herbs for one spiritual bath. 

SHOP NOW

• Article contribution in Angi with Brooke Bridges
• Recipe Contribution of Soup Joumou to The Cookbook in Support of the United Nations: For People and Planet
• MSU’s Race in 21st Century Americas Conference Panel with Naima Penniman
• UVM’s Inclusive Excellence Symposium Keynote: These Gardens are Blueprints: Sowing the Seeds of Food Justice with Naima Penniman
• Article in Nonprofit Quarterly Rethinking Food Culture Might Save Us with Leah Penniman

WHO: Farmers and workers who want to make our farms more fair for everyone involved. All are welcome, so feel free to share this invitation.

RSVP is helpful but not necessary. Email Jon (jon@agriculturaljusticeproject.org) if you think you’ll be there, but please come if you can, even if you didn’t RSVP.

Oppression underwrites our food system, and a tangible action to address food sovereignty in our communities is taking reparations into our own hands through the creation of the Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers. We recognize that the food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color. We also know that we cannot wait for the government to acknowledge that stolen wealth and land must be returned. Some farmers have already received funding through this project, and we want to provide that opportunity to other Black and Brown farmers. If you have resources you want to share contact a farmer directly to share them, or if you have a project you want to include on the map contact Northeast Farmers of Color!