Word on the Street
Aug/Sept 2015
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WELCOME!

Soil Generation is a member of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA). This combined August/September issue is dedicated to the USFSA's 



Who is the US Food Sovereignty Alliance?
The US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system. We believe all people have the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound manner. As a US-based alliance of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based, and food producer groups, we uphold the right to food as a basic human right and work to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty.

USFSA Land and Water Resource Grabs working team planning committee. Spring 2015 Oakland, Ca.
Land ownership in the U.S. is also governed by structural racism and a history of tragedy, trauma, and colonialism. 97% of lands in the U.S. are owned by whites, and the share of land owned by people of color is shrinking as land ownership in general is concentrating in the hands of the wealthy.

Since 2011, the USFSA and its members have worked to improve access to and control over land and resources because they are critical to food sovereignty and food justice in the U.S. Communities need land and resources to grow, harvest, catch, and raise food for families and protect the environment, but access to land and resources is increasingly more expensive. With land distribution governed by the market in the U.S., communities are struggling to exercise their food justice and food sovereignty. This also includes families who depend on the ocean's resources, who are now facing industrial pressures to transform fisheries access from a public resource into private property, resulting in a few wealthy corporations taking ownership and control.

Family farmers, community gardeners and urban farmers, fishermen, indigenous communities, and others have all resisted the privatization of public land and resources and the threats to community control over them for growing food. The National Day of Action is a time to take a coordinated, national stand for communities' rights to land from an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial position on food sovereignty and food justice.

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Fisherman Bill Chaprales talking with Real Food Challenge students at the April New England Fisheries Management Council meeting
Please join the Fish Locally Collaborative for an action to defend the ocean commons and support community-based fishermen, September 30th in Plymouth, MA.
Learn more about the action + ways to support HERE. For those nearby, we can really use your BODIES and PHYSICAL PRESENCE for this action. Bring friends!
Sign-up for the Thunderclap campaign and Sign the petition
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The Right to Fish: Maintaining Fish as a Public Resource

By Andrianna Natsoulas

Elements of food sovereignty are seeping into the consciousness of people who are looking to create, or recreate, a food system based on respect, sustainability and local communities. Through that awareness the food sovereignty movement is finding its legs in the United States and is uniting with the global movement. Food sovereignty recognizes that food is a basic human right of all people and the right for all communities to define their own agricultural, fisheries and food policies. It is a food system where food production and distribution are under local control in order to meet the needs of the local community and ensure the environment is treated with care.
This growing movement and small-scale fishing communities are just beginning to connect. More and more fishermen are selling fish at farmers' markets, direct off the boats and through community supported fishery programs. In turn, seafood lovers are learning how to fillet a fish, recognize a fresh one and understand the challenges fishermen face to keep their boats afloat. As Padi Anderson, a fisherman's wife from Rye, New Hampshire says, "Fish is food." And that is how people can become political advocates for small-scale community-based fishermen.
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National Family Farm Coalition's (NFFC)
Homegrown Village team (#Water4All) at Farm Aid

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Thinking about Charitable Donations?
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What is the Black/Land Project?
What is the Black/Land Project?
Black/Land gathers and analyzes stories about the relationship between black people, land and place. The purpose of the project is to identify and amplify the current critical dialogues surrounding the relationship between black people (including African-Americans, Caribbean-Americans and African immigrants) and land. 
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The Black Belt Justice Center (BBJC) is a legal and advocacy nonprofit organization that serves African American farmers, landowners, and communities in the Black Belt region in efforts to retain and increase landownership; to create sustainable land-based cooperatives and entrepreneurial businesses; and to ensure intergenerational and community wealth.
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Decolonizing a food system: Freedom Farmers' Market as a place for resistance and analysis. By Dr. Gail P. Meyers

Every Saturday in Oakland, California, Black Freedom Farmers' Market (http://www.farmstogrow.com), a culturally specific, historically rooted market experience that is bringing Black residents together with Black farmers in a setting reminiscent of an African marketplace, takes place. This marketplace was named to honor the work of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer. In rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer started the farm cooperative called the Freedom Farms. That this freedom movement continues today in Oakland is appropriate. Oakland was home to the Black Panther Party, whose 10-point plan aimed for everybody to have enough food, housing, health, and education to meet their needs. It is the city where the Black Panthers began their Free Children's Breakfast Program, which caused FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to call the group the "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Grits, not guns, were what worried Hoover. By serving children breakfast, the FBI director said, the Black Panthers were "infiltrating the black community." The Freedom Farmers'' Market builds on that breakfast program freedom movement and on an earlier Black farmers' market started in the late 1990s by David Roach and his organization, Mo' Better Foods. 
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JOIN SOIL GENERATION AS WE CELEBRATE THE MONTH OF COMMUNITY POWER: RECLAIM THE COMMONS!

Soil Generation is challenging YOU to join us by posting everyday activities you do in your community to RECLAIM THE COMMONS! then share on your social media page with hashtags
#reclaimthecommons #communitypowerchallenge #soilgeneration


IF your organization is having an event in October that is about leveraging power through community acts of resistance or/or celebration...Bring more visibility to your event!

 PLEASE fill out this form to have your event posted on the US Food Sovereignty website and map.
And join our FB group Month of Community Power: Reclaim the Commons, to post your organizations events too.


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On The Street
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Philly, do you want to re-claim vacant lots in your community? 
Soil Generation is hosting a Philadelphia Community 
Land Access Training.
October 3 & 6th 


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Books of Interest



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