While white tech bros continue to receive billions of dollars in venture capital to build apps we don’t need, Black visionaries are systematically denied the resources to build the community-owned, regenerative food economies we do need. CoFED’s Racial Justice Fellowship offers a meaningful stipend, leadership coaching, political education and technical assistance for Black and other cooperators of color doing the work that matters most: growing food, feeding our communities, and keeping us in harmony with the Earth.
Meet Dallas and Kriss, this year’s Racial Justice Fellows! Here’s who they are and how they’re transforming systemic injustice to feed their communities in their own words.
Dallas (ey/em/eir): I am a beginning farmer working towards nourishing Black people’s relationship to the Land and agriculture. Raised in Rocky Mount, NC by a loving family including a sharecropper’s daughter, Civil Rights Organizers, and a former cotton mill worker, I was raised by Black Southern strength. I am so excited to be a CoFED Racial Justice Fellow. This opportunity supports my work of celebrating Black Southern genius in North Carolina.
The collective I am working with is trying to unify Black farmers in Eastern North Carolina to ensure the farmer’s fiscal stability while feeding people we know and love. We believe in building our economic power to sustain our passions, improve our livelihoods, and feed our people with food and education. We are also passionate about animals, environmental justice, and growing food.
Our fellowship project is a mix of oral history collection and on-farm workshops [at the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm]. We will learn the stories of farmers and our rural elders, many of whom are the children of sharecroppers, to bring light to the rich history of our region as well as inform our context for growing in Eastern North Carolina.
Kriss (she/her/hers): I am a singer-songwriter, academic, and, I suspect, a designer of abstract things like frameworks for relating to each other; business models and roles that are both practical and perceptive, relevant and also responsive to the humanity in all of us.
I’m planting fruit trees in Baltimore City and learning how to grow food. My focus at present is integrating the healing properties of working in soil with all the factions of my public works as well as my private life. Amidst writing, recording, documenting and adulting, I’m exploring this latest iteration of womanhood, interdisciplinary art, what they can look like, and the height and the depth of what they can be.
As a CoFED Fellow, I am converting my family’s land of three generations into a universal design sensory garden that serves as a place of belonging for black femme bodies with ranging modes of mobility and ability.
Join Dallas, Kriss and CoFED in “celebrating Black Southern genius” and a “place of belonging for black femme bodies”! Consider making a donation today.
