racist without them even realizing it. Other activities include an alternative sentencing program for troubled youths, and community days where volunteers can come and work the land. Penniman estimates Soul Fire Farm programs have reached more than 5,500 youths and adults over the past five years, with up to 93 percent of participants staying involved with gardening or farming. “We’re not about getting people out to farms,” she says. “We’re about training the next generation of activist farmers.”
with dried straw bales sealed with lime and clay. That year, the family left Albany to live at Soul Fire full time and bring the bounty back to the Albany community. Vitale-Wolff devoted most of his energies to the farm, while Penniman split her time between Soul Fire and teaching. She won a coveted position at Tech Valley High School, where she taught science and took students on missions to Haiti. In 2014, she won a Fulbright fellowship to study indigenous farming practices in Oaxaca, Mexico. The family lived in Mexico for nearly half a year, and later adopted some of the thousand-year-old practices they observed for use at Soul Fire. Earlier this year, Penniman left Tech Valley High for a part-time teaching job closer to home so she could spend more time on the farm. Today, the family, plus interns and about a hundred volunteers, grows dozens of types of fruits and vegetables that are distributed to 80 families in poor urban neighborhoods in New York’s Capital Region. The number of programs at Soul Fire continues to expand. This past summer, the farm hosted three sessions of the Black and
Latinx Farmers Immersion Program, plus the group Undoing Racism. The latter was to help white leaders — nonprofit directors, for instance — recognize policies that might be
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Leah Penniman works with local women during her Fulbright fellowship in Mexico. (Below) A communal gathering in the Soul Fire farmhouse.
On a sunny day in early August, Soul Fire Farm had some special visitors — 32 teenagers from Worcester: black, white, Hispanic and Asian. They were members of YouthGROW, the low-income farming program that Leah and Jonah formed 15 years earlier. It was the first time an entire YouthGROW team had visited Soul Fire. On this trip, Penniman wasted no time. Minutes after arrival, participants were sitting in a circle, chanting: “They try to cut us down/but we gonna be all right!” Instead of lecturing, she used games to teach. In one, she asked everyone to get up and move if they knew someone with diabetes, someone who lacked clean water or access to healthy food, someone whose ancestors had lost their land. Leah and Jonah then split the group to conduct tours. Their son Emet, now 11, did much of the talking. Later, the teens formed groups and acted out historical anecdotes on such topics as the advent of sharecropping and the historical racism of USDA farm loans. “I never paid attention to the label of a food package,” said David Peal, 16, a YouthGROW member. Working on a farm, he said, would “change the way I eat.” Five hours after the group arrived, the teens boarded a yellow school bus headed home. Before the sound of crunching gravel had faded away, Leah Penniman was already on the way to her office to make a phone call. The day was far from over, and there was plenty more to be done at Soul Fire Farm.
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