ONGOING SOLIDARITY
LOCAL FOOD JUSTICE
We hold deep gratitude for the Black and Brown grower communities that have been the force in our voices as we’ve infiltrated spaces and institutions in the name of racial justice, food justice, environmental justice, and land sovereignty.
Resources for Growers
From Philadelphia’s Urban Agriculture Plan: Growing From the Root, Appendix A
ALLIANCES
We hold deep gratitude to those who’ve listened when we’ve spoken up, shared power and resources with us, who allowed themselves to be challenged, and who were in turn receptive to change and growth.
ACTIVE ADJACENT MOVEMENT CAMPAIGNS
We hold deep gratitude for our fellow advocates across adjacent grassroots movements because we understand the intersectional and interconnected ways we are impacted, and therefore benefit from one another's work—despite how movements may appear siloed.
LOCAL
Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA) & The Save Chinatown Coalition
NO ARENA IN THE HEART OF OUR CITY
The billionaire owners of the 76ers announced they want to build a new arena just one block away from Chinatown – just one block away from the families, seniors, and students who call this neighborhood home. They need to listen to the people who call Chinatown home and stop playing games with our community.
The billionaire developers are working on a “Community Benefits Agreement” to try to placate Chinatown. They’re negotiating with a select few behind closed doors, without public input or oversight, so they can show that the community has agreed to the arena – without having to listen to the full community.
These billionaire developers who want to build an arena say that this development will be different from past projects, but unlike those developers, our community has been here in Chinatown to see how past development has played out over time. We know that developers’ promises are temporary and empty and that any Community Benefits Agreement would just serve to fast-track the project through City Hall because the developers will be able to claim community support for the project.
Chinatown is a treasured piece of Philadelphia’s history with a unique authenticity that is irreplaceable, and we are here to stay. We won’t let billionaires destroy our neighborhood so they can get even richer. We said no stadium in 2000 and we won. We said no casino in 2008 and we won. Now we’re saying no arena, and we will win.
national
National Black Food Justice Alliance - Justice for black farmers act
On November 19th, 2020, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced landmark legislation aimed at addressing and correcting historic discrimination within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal farm assistance and lending that has caused Black farmers to lose millions of acres of farmland and robbed Black farmers and their families of hundreds of billions of dollars of inter-generational wealth.
The Justice for Black Farmers Act will enact policies to end discrimination within the USDA, protect remaining Black farmers from losing their land, provide land grants to create a new generation of Black farmers and restore the land base that has been lost, and implement systemic reforms to help family farmers across the United States.
international
stop land grabs campaign
Retirement giant TIAA (Teacher Insurance Annuity Association) manages $1.3 trillion in assets and is one of the largest owners of farmland and timberland on the planet. Its clients are mostly universities and non-profits. It brands itself as a socially responsible company.
And yet, TIAA is still investing billions of dollars in oil, fracked gas, and coal. It also manages substantial investments in large-scale, high-emission agriculture and timber plantations to be burned for “bioenergy”. The company has been linked to land grabbers in Brazil, and its land acquisitions in the US have accelerated the corporate control over farmland, threatening family farms, and extracting land from Black farmers, communities of color and Indigenous Peoples.
We believe that the co-opting of social responsibility and non-profit affiliation is especially violent because of the deception it enables for impact to be overshadowed by stated intent. Accountability becomes necessary when there is a clear misalignment of the narrative being told by institutions, and the experiences of communities who live with the impacts of these institutions’ decisions. For this reason, we as Black and Brown land-loving farmers and organizers stand in solidarity with the coalition of environmental organizations, human rights organizations, farmers organizations, unions, and individual university professors who demand that TIAA:
Enact an immediate moratorium on all new direct investments in fossil fuels;
Divest from all current fossil-fuel investments by 2025;
Divest from the Cricket Valley fracked gas power plant;
Enact an immediate moratorium on all new investments in farmland, timberland, and industrial agriculture production;
Work with a panel of independent scientific and human rights experts and community stakeholders to assess and report on TIAA’s climate and social impacts; and
Commit to full transparency.