ABOUT US
The work of the Black Food Fund is grounded in a long history of Black agrarianism. As people of African descent, our work finds its meaning and strength in a powerful legacy of community building and collective struggle.
Cultivating food justice requires moving capital to Black farmers and land stewards. The Black Food Fund recovers financial capital and redirects those resources to support Black food and land justice. The act of leveraging capital for social change is an opportunity to recover wealth and redirect its flow, as a way to offer acknowledgment and reparative redress. It’s about reimagining a system that wasn’t built for Black bodies. At its heart, this collaborative work is about creating a pathway for Black farmers to build collective wealth and pass that wealth on using cooperative structures that benefit the collective wellbeing of future generations.
Since 2020, we have redistributed a total of 52 grants to 49 unique Black farmers and land stewards across Oregon and Washington. Our redistribution of capital to Black farmers and land stewards supports community-led efforts that promote food justice and preserve Black agricultural traditions. Funds are used in a variety of ways, including to purchase new equipment to scale up business; expand food justice projects that connect Black communities with fresh, culturally-relevant foods and medicines; reclaim and expand ancestral climate stewardship practices; and more.
The Black Food Fund was founded in August 2020 by Shantae Johnson, Tiffany Monroe, Jamese Kwele, and Mirabai Collins. We currently operate as a charitable vehicle redistributing capital in the form of grants to Black farmers in the Pacific Northwest. We are building up organizational infrastructure to facilitate our continued evolution into a movement-led, self-sustaining fund that fuels transformative, Black-led change in our regional food system through the coordinated deployment of different forms of non-extractive, financial capital (including loans, investments, and grants) and other non-financial resources.
Black Food System Leaders
Capital for Black Farmers and Land Stewards
Black Food Fund Team
Black Land Justice
We support Black people in returning and reconnecting to our land-based roots by recovering and redistributing capital for Black-led food land justice efforts, including acquiring land for Black ownership. We prioritize land justice projects that integrate Afro-Indigenous stewardship, communal healing, and community ownership.
advocacy
We organize farmers in our network and build alliances to advocate for meaningful investments in systemic change, the kind that build Black power and ownership within our regional food system. We engage in ongoing relationship building with and educating of state and federal representatives, advocating for ideas that are generated through consensus building in Black communities and targeted funding that is Black specific.
Ecosystem Coalition Building
The Black Food Fund is a part of an ecosystem of Black-led organizations including the Black Oregon Land Trust, Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, Black Futures Farm, Mudbone Grown, Come Thru Market, and Feed’em Freedom Foundation, all of which are working to support Black-led transformation in Oregon and across the Pacific Northwest. Each of our organizations focuses on different, though often overlapping, components of the work (network building, education, capital, land, markets, etc.), and we collaborate to build synergy among our efforts.
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The Black Food Fund fuels Black-led food systems transformation across the Pacific Northwest. Our goal is to shift capital in ways that build wealth, self-determination, and resiliency for Black people within our regional food system.
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