“Until I am free, you are not free either.”
Fannie Lou Hamer
The forces of oppression would like us to feel uncertain about whether we have a future at all, so planning for 2021 feels like an audacious act of courage. We are left inspired, however, by the record numbers of people who went to the polls or mailed in ballots to make their voices heard in this election despite efforts to undermine them. Witnessing that commitment emboldens us to imagine and scheme. We have no illusions about the work ahead and we also have hope that with the strength of our movements and communities we will continue to usher in justice.
Our staff, board, and community met at the end of October to integrate feedback and plan for 2021. Facilitated by Lex Barlowe, we devised ways we can support our alums with their projects, brainstormed about future program offerings, and shared excitement around being able to welcome visitors onto the land next year. A couple weeks ago, we met again to celebrate the end of another tremendous season. We have so much gratitude for the land, each member of our team, the support of our community, and the power of the movements we belong to. We are feeling fortified and ready for what’s to come!
Upcoming events:
- Tomorrow, November 24th, Stephanie Morningstar of Northeast Farmers of Color will speak about Indigenous food sovereignty during NESAWG’s webinar series.
- On Tuesday, December 1st, Leah Penniman will be presenting at Food Tank’s virtual summit “Resetting the Food System from Farm to Fork.”
- On December 2nd, Leah will also be speaking at Hunger Free Colorado about inequity in our food system.
- On December 13th, we invite you to join us for the 2020 Bioneers Conference. Naima will be performing poetry, followed by Leah speaking about “Uprooting Racism and Seeding Sovereignty” and Naima moderating a panel “BIPOC Leaders Share Food Sovereignty Strategies” with Leah Penniman; Mohawk seed keeper and farmer, Rowen White; and Rev. Herber Brown, founder of the Black Church Food Security Network.
Announcements:
- We did it! The Justice for Black Farmers Act is born! Big shout out to our comrades at the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, HEAL Food Alliance, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees and dozens of other Black farming groups across the nation for collaborating on this legislation. This bill is an opportunity to reverse and correct the millions of acres of land loss within the Black farming community and fortify the next generation of Black farmers. Read more about the act here and here.
- We just premiered a stunning and soul-moving virtual keynote “Uprooting Racism, Seeding Sovereignty” which is now available for purchase to meet increasing demand for public speaking! Head to our website to learn more.
- We have added more tickets to our December 9th Uprooting Racism in the Food System training! Check out our website for more details.
- Our online store is live! Small and medium sized Soul Fire Farm t-shirts are back in stock!
- Farming While Black was included in this holiday gift guide featuring Black-owned businesses! The book is available for purchase on Powell Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, and Indie Bound, a website that connects consumers to local, independent bookstores in their area.
- We are making vital shifts in our campus infrastructure to improve the well-being of our staff and the hundreds of visitors who participate in our programs yearly. We are so close to meeting our fundraising goal and we have so much gratitude for those who have already donated to and shared our fundraiser! We invite you to join us in Fortifying Our Foundation at Soul Fire Farm.
- Help inform funding and policy making through the 2020 BIPOC Farmer Survey! This survey, developed by Soul Fire Farm, Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, and the Black Farmer Fund, is designed to gauge the needs and desires of current and aspiring farmers of color regarding land, access, and capacity in the region.
- Ask a Sista Farmer: The first Friday of every month, experienced Black womxn farmers answer your call-in questions about gardening, livestock, agroforestry, plant medicine, and food preservation. If you are interested in being one, reach out to us. If you want to view the previous episodes, they are linked here.
- Our Liberation on Land Video Skillshare series reflects our peoples’ intricate, intergenerational care for the land as its own distinct source of power, and affirms that we’re here, our ways are not forgotten, and that tangible strategies for food sovereignty and climate resilience endure and can be carried forward. Closed captioning and Spanish-English subtitles available!
- Check out our freshly revised website and the many resources available there, from recipes to reparations!
- Learn more about our work by checking out our features in the NY Times, Heritage Radio Network, Spectrum Local News, Gimlet Media, Bay Journal, KQED, and the IDEO podcast. An essay of ours is also featured in the new cookbook “Meet Me At The Table.”
- Corbin Hill Food Project is a Harlem-based, non-profit organization that distributes fresh produce to low-income communities and communities of color in NYC. This season, Corbin Hill delivered an impressive 66,000 food boxes, 594K meals and 720K pounds of food! $320K went to Brooklyn Packers, a Black-founded and -owned coop, and $64K of produce was purchased from a local Black farmer as part of their efforts to promote community wealth building. To learn more about Corbin Hill Food Project, sign up for their newsletter.
2020 has been a year riddled with multiple pandemics: COVID-19, police violence, environmental devastation, and consistently inadequate federal responses to each of these challenges. These problems aren’t new – indeed, low-income, BIPOC communities have been impacted by many of these “pandemics” for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the ways many of our systems aren’t and were never designed to support the most marginalized members of our society, catalyzing many people to form networks to support each other.
This season, we shifted how we distribute food to accommodate the needs of our communities, near and far. November marks the end of our Solidary Share program, in which we delivered more than 1000 boxes of food at no cost to survivors of food apartheid in the Capital Region. Much thanks to Leah and Justin for getting this food to our communities! We also sold over 900 units of healing medicine through our new online store, in addition to items like frozen meat, preserves, and merchandise. And this season we continued our seed keeping partnerships with Truelove Seeds and the Stockbridge Munsee Mohican Nation.
Despite the fact that our farming season this year was a short four months of frost-free weather, our crop diversity and climate resilient farming practices allowed us to successfully feed our community all season. Indeed, we recently received feedback from our soil tests and forest surveys that the land is thriving from our practices! We have already started preparing the land for the 100 fruit trees we are planting to establish a silvopasture next year! Folks, like our friends at Rock Steady and Love Fed Initiative, came up to support us with those preparations, as well as help us with firewood splitting, pig and poultry harvesting, garlic planting, and mulching. This year we expanded the livestock on the farm from laying hens and meat chickens to now include 14 sheep, a goat, guard geese, ducks, guinea hens, turkeys, and bees and plan on integrating our livestock with our silvopasture.
This season has also marked the start and completion of many exciting infrastructure projects to support the farm, our future visitors, and the staff living here. The new bathhouse will accommodate our program participants, and our improved wastewater system can now support the thousands of people who come to the land every year. Our new employee duplex cabin can enable more staff to live on the land year round. Our new classroom is almost complete, and we are currently developing plans for our incredible program center. Thank you Jonah, Kai, and the contractors we work with for making these needed shifts possible!
As food supply chains were disrupted due to COVID-19, many people in our communities became more invested in growing their own sustenance. This year we established more than 40 vegetable gardens through our Soul Fire in the City initiative, in which we offered materials, seedlings, soil, labor, and ongoing guidance to support people impacted by food apartheid, survivors of mass incarceration, refugees and immigrants, people with disabilities or chronic illness, elders, and families with children. We are grateful to the people who volunteered their labor and the local farms and companies that donated seeds, seedlings, and compost.
We were saddened that we couldn’t host our farming immersion programs this year, but loved the ways we were able to connect with our alums and new program participants virtually. Our 3D virtual skill share series for BIPOC was a massive success thanks to the work of Naima, Kiani, Cheryl, and our amazing facilitation team who Zoomed in from North Carolina to Ontario to share their knowledge with the 745 participants that attended the series. We also produced 15 incredible how-to videos as part of our Liberation on Land Video Skillshare series featuring BIPOC land stewards sharing hands-on skills. Thanks to Larisa, Naima, Dayo, Wendelin, Emet, Taina, and Gaetano.
Some of the work we are most proud of are the ways we were able to redistribute resources to BIPOC farmers across the country. We collaborated with other organizations to develop COVID-19 resource lists for BIPOC farmers and host the BIPOC Farmers Skillshare to connect people to important information about the pandemic. Larisa served on the advisory and application review committees for $5,000 grants from the Chipotle Foundation and National Young Farmers Coalition, 80% of which were awarded to BIPOC farmers. We directly moved $35,000 of funding to 10 BIPOC farming and justice organizations and indirectly moved $1.2 million to Black farming organizations in the South. And we are currently developing an alumni fellowship program to support alumni in access to land, capital, and other resources they need to develop their projects.
This year, our public speaking and training reached over 30,000 people! Just this past month we were invited to speak at dozens of online venues. Brooke taught a class for A Journey Home, a 9-month online course on what systemic changes are needed for a regenerative future. Naima spoke at the 2020 World Food Day Commemorative Ceremony, Nautica, Q Latinx “Climate Justice Organizing School,” iHeartRadio, Mashable, Claremont McKenna Colleges, Connecticut College, Iowa State, Springfield Tech Comm College, The Big Garden, and #WakeUpWalkTowards. Leah was a keynote speaker at The National Young Farmers Coalition’s 6th Annual National Leadership Convergence, appeared on a panel for Verge 20: Pathways to a Radically More Sustainable Food System, joined Linsday Cluge of Pukka Herbs on Instagram Live for a conversation of herbal medicine and health justice, and spoke with alum K. Melchor Quick Hall as part of her Transnational Black Feminist book tour. And throughout the winter we are continuing to offer our Uprooting Racism in the Food System workshops.
As so many of us grieve, condemn state-sanctioned violence, and experience the intersection of painful and disproportionate impacts on our communities, we want to uplift stories of hope, resilience, and dreams breathing into being by sharing the incredible work our alumni are doing. Larisa, Dayo, and Lytisha are collaborating with Look Studios NYC to share these inspiring projects on our social media.
Young Women Empowered (Y-WE) is an organization that encourages young womxn to be courageous changemakers, centering BIPOC youth on unceded Duwamish land (Seattle, WA). “Gardening at home and at our plot at Marra Farm when possible during COVID-19 has been a source of refuge and resilience for the youth in their community. Not only are we turning towards nature and plants for healing and inspiration, we are able to grow food for our families and local community experiencing food apartheid,” says Neli Jasuja, a Soul Fire alum and Nature Connections Program Manager at Y-WE. Y-WE is currently accepting donations to ensure that their programs remain financially accessible to participants.
Asia Beasley, an alum of our 2019 farming immersion program for BIPOC, is starting Noadiah Farm on an acre of land in New Mexico. Their goal is to establish a dry/rain-fed farm that is low or zero waste and will provide organic produce to local communities, with an emphasis on providing access to low-income families. They are currently raising money to secure the land and purchase tools and infrastructure.
Oppression underwrites our food system, and a tangible action we have taken for addressing food security and food sovereignty issues 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!
This month’s Love Notes was written by Lytisha Wyatt.