ANNUAL REPORT 2023
BECOMING OUR OWN SUN
CONTENTS 01
The Team
03
Our Vision
05
Letter: An Invitation to
08
Our Year in Review
11
Our Recipe for Revolution
Dream
12 Build Unlearn Decolonize (BUD) 16 Just Leader Fellowship (JLF) 18 The Cooperative Fund (CoFUND)
22 Tincture for Tomorrow SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FUNDING COMMUNITY
COFUND
WE ARE THE FOOD EMPOWERMENT DIRECTIVE
THE TEAM We completed our first full year as a 4-person team (the largest team we have ever had at CoFED). We have been working on continually disrupting organizational hierarchies to build a more collegiate environment of mentoring and development. We now have two Co-Executive Directors, Program Coordinator, and Communications Coordinator.
This is a significant accomplishment in us being able to create and sustain powerful and thoughtful programming we need bolstered by our increased capacity. Our Advisory Committee is a robust addition to our team and provides the backbone and care to our organization. We were also able to engage our graduating Just Leader Fellows in our programming and facilitation work at CoFED.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR TEAM
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THE TEAM
BEHIND THE SCENES COFED STAFF
PAULINA RODRIGUEZ
TEIA EVANS
Communications Coordinator
Co-Executive Director
SUPARNA KURE
Co-Executive Director
AYANO K. JEFFERS-FABRO Program Coordinator
JUST LEADER FELLOWS
ab
GABRIELA SILVA
AXÚL-SÓL SANKOFA
ADVISORY COMITTEE
AMETHYST CAREY
CARLOS HERNANDEZ
Center for Economic Democracy
Apeel Sciences
XAVION FREEDOM Original Blackprint PAGE 2
TIM LAMPKIN
Higher Purpose Co.
GREGORY JACKSON
Repaired Nations Cooperative
OUR VISION
The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFED) is building a cooperative food economy powered by the visionary leadership of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color. We are transforming the current food system that has roots in genocide and theft into one that is guided by collective liberation, radical reimagination, and healing of our relationships with each other and the land. Our work is to get and keep ourselves free. We are constantly re-membering our ancestral understanding that cooperation is not a new way of functioning for our communities. Cooperation is how we take care of ourselves. PAGE 3
Cooperation is how we can heal our food and land systems, and build collective tomorrows that we want to live in and leave behind for future generations. We create monetarily and culturally viable alternatives to capitalism by making co-ops more accessible and irresistible through providing technical, financial, and educational resources to cooperators. We strongly believe that the work of liberation and empowerment must center those who have been historically marginalized in order to dismantle systemic inequities. This is why we are led by and serve QTBIPOC folx.
MISSION CoFED is building a cooperative food economy powered by the visionary leadership of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color.
VISION We are transforming the current food system that has roots in genocide and theft into one that is guided by collective liberation, radical reimagination, and healing of our relationships with each other and the land. Our work is to get and keep ourselves free.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COFED PAGE 4
AN INVITATION TO
DREAM
LETTER FROM OUR CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
One of my favorite queer disabled poets, Andrea Gibson, once sang about their conversation with the Sun: “I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.” At the end of our 12th year as CoFED, and the 3rd of navigating a global pandemic, 1st of having the largest team we have ever had, I write this letter to you, less as a report, but more as an invitation to become with us. I write with the soul of a caterpillar – one that is confident it is still growing – and in the spirit of imagination. This is an invitation to dream of a love-revolution that encompasses all the ways in which we are stars, and especially, all the ways in which we are the Sun. To dream of another world is not new. PAGE 5
LETTER
AN INVITATION TO DREAM We are braiding the tethered ends of our elders’ and ancestors’ dreams and with each row in the quilt for our future, we are adding devices for delight, tools for triumph, and frameworks for freedom. Our ancestors and elders have given up a lot to not just dream about the future, but to breathe their lives into actualizing it. It is deeply anticapitalist to dream about the future, to be satisfiable. There is divinity in dreaming, honor in hoping, and pleasure in plotting the possible. In a galaxy of sibling movement-stars doing similar work as us, i.e., building resilience for revolution, our QTBIPOC communities often experience the longevity of a shooting star. Shooting stars have a galactic reputation of being gorgeous, albeit for only a split-second. That is the realm that dreaming is relegated to – a split-second distraction from the “real world”. But what if we get to be suns? What if we get to live for eons through the revolutions we birth? What if we get to be the central light of poems and stories singing of our radiance while we still exist and not in the universe of past-tenses? It can be easy to succumb to the glory of a shooting star. To let our systems decide how we will nourish ourselves and our movements, and when we will fizzle out. I invite you to release the fiction about why a different tomorrow cannot become. While we acknowledge the harms of internalized and institutional white supremacy, colonial genocidal empire-building, racialized capitalism, and ableism, we have also witnessed the power of deep healing. PAGE 6
The work of cultivating and resourcing Just Leaders and Building, Unlearning, and Decolonizing is the work of tincture-making. And we hope you will join us in casting the spells to alchemize this new world and co-creating a tincture for our collective tomorrows.
We have spent this past year in a lab where we are tinkering with ingredients of revolution so we can all be free. We are guided by the belief that a liberated future is accessible to all.
A world where we are winning is already here.
As Arundhati Roy says,
“On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
We need to be able to heal our collective woundedness that is a constant refrain in the soundtrack of an ableist, colonial-capitalist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, climate-catastrophizing, and xenophobic sytem.
And we need to be able to amplify the sounds of our collective freedom (struggles and triumphs) that ring with the same assuredness as the mourning dove’s coo, reminding us that the sun will set on capitalism, and a new day of collective liberation will rise.
At CoFED, we are dreaming of and building a world that has space for all our interconnected freedoms and we joyfully invite you to enter into this dream space. Join us at the dance floor, the stage, the wheelbarrow, and the loom to weave our dreams for the future.
With solar radiance, care, and warmth, Suparna on behalf of Team CoFED PAGE 7
OUR YEAR IN REVIEW We continue to be a part of alliances and coalitions to build our systems-level impact and collaboration around the United States. We are building connections, deepening our network and relationships, getting up-skilled, and spreading the CoFED work across geographies.
LAUNCHED THE SECOND ROUND OF COFUND our regranting program, and offered tailored technical assistance to 7 cooperatives around the country.
GREW OUR TEAM This is the largest team in CoFED’s history.
BUILT THE FOUNDATION for deeper programming through our cooperative education and training programs: Build, Unlearn, Decolonize (BUD) and the Just Leader Fellowship.
DEEPENED OUR RELATIONSHIPS within coalitions and networks that we are members of, such as the National Cooperative Business Alliance, Food Systems Leadership Network, HEAL Food Alliance, and the New Economy Coalition.
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SUPPORTED OUR TEAM TO SEEK PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES Our Co-Executive Director, Suparna, is participating in the Harmony Initiative with Justice Funders as part of their cohort of movement-builders in philanthropy co-learning how to decolonize our philanthropic systems. Our team also participated in People’s Hub Disability Justice Training and the Spiral of Transformative Change: A Liberatory Approach to Racial Equity.
COFED GOES INTERNATIONAL
For the first time in our 12 year history, CoFED went international. Aya and Paulina attended the third International Social Solidarity Economy and the Commons Conference - Decolonizing the Solidarity Economy and Commons: Enacting the “Pluriverse,” in Lisbon, Portugal.
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PRESENTATIONS This year, we increased our educational and training presence with invitations to present at various regional, national, and international cooperative conferences.
CHICAGO FOOD SUMMIT Virtual - Feb. 9 -12 “Our Existence is Resistance: Cultivating Compassion for our Collective Imaginations.”
MIDWEST INTERDISCIPLINARY GRADUATE CONFERENCE KEYNOTE Virtual - April. 28 -29 “Nourishing Trust: Building the tables and the chairs.”
CA CO-OP CONFERENCE San Jose, CA - June. 2-3 “Building a Liberatory Cooperative Movement for our Collective Tomorrows.”
ASSOCIATION OF COOPERATIVE EDUCATORS CONFERENCE San Juan, PR Aug. 7-10 “Ears to the ground, eyes to the sky: Lessons from the land and young QTBIPOC cooperative leaders.” PAGE 10
OUR RECIPE FOR
REVOLUTION We are often fighting from places of fabricated scarcity for a very small portion of the abundance that lies in the philanthropic Milky Way of the food and land finance system. There is plenty. But somehow, our communities are still not able to access the full breadth of the financial, educational, economic, and cultural resources that technically and wholly belong to us (and have historically been taken away from us). Movement organizations experience painful increases in the rate of turnover, burnout, and bankruptcy. But our work is still relevant, and though it seems like we are often shooting stars – ephemeral to the eyes – we are also the Sun. We are life-affirming and incubating; nourishing and encompassing; essential and renewing; central and collective.
OUR PRIORITIES 1. Economic transformation of the food system through the starting and scaling of cooperatives led by QTBIPOC young and emerging leaders. 2. Political transformation through organizing farmers and food workers for policy changes and equipping them with the political education necessary to sustain broader change efforts 3. Cultural transformation through building transformative narratives about our communities (QTBIPOC food and land stewards) and building our stories through communication and educational experiences and trainings
OUR IMPLEMENTATION PLAN a. b.
We redistribute capital among farmers and food cooperatives through CoFUND, our regranting program, and offer tailored technical assistance to cooperatives around the country. We provide cooperators with the technical and leadership skills through our cooperative education and training programs: Build, Unlearn, Decolonize (BUD) and the Just Leader Fellowship (JLF).
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BUILD UNLEARN DECOLONIZE There is magic when we gather, there is magic when we dream together.
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Artwork by Francis Mead
BUD
IN ACTION For the first time since 2019, twenty food and land stewards gathered in-person in Durham, NC for a liberatory gathering to Build, Unlearn, and Decolonize.
Borikén (Puerto Rico) intentionally gathered to welcome the fall equinox and its first full moon, to dream and be held by the land stewarded by the Occanechi band of the Saponi nation.
The entire CoFED team, two of our advisory committee members, and two of our JLF alumn embarked on the journey to Durham to make BUD come to life.
We laid in the grass and discussed what liberation means to us with Xavion Freedom, and how our freedom is connected to freeing the land. We quantum leaped into a collective dreamspace to enact our liberatory visions with Suparna and ab.
Folks coming from across Turtle Island, spanning from Hawai`i to
“This experience taught me so much about unmasking and being courageous enough to tell the whole truth about how we are feeling.” -BUD Participant PAGE 13
BUD
IN ACTION Carlos led an earth building workshop in which we worked with our hands, water, clay and hay to build a rocket stove for our host site. We built new relationships and pillars of knowledge forged in fire with tobacco and cedar - forever relatives connected by near and distant lands and waters. Our Care Team, led by Mitzi Melaine Wilson (emerge/flourish) and ab (JLF alumn), grounded and helped us maintain being rooted in love, self-revelation, and joy through the week. We wrote each other letters and notes of celebration, released what our bodies were holding through yoga practice with Gabi (JLF alumn), and played in the Eno river. We met each other’s needs as we unlearned that care is not just an act of service but accountability to self first and foremost before extending it out to others. We decolonized the way we call in harm and move through healing; holding space to grieve the wounds we didn’t know existed.
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Our visit to the Stagville plantation with Georie (Symbodied Inc) and Khadija (Stagville) opened up many wounds, but through care and love, we were able to support each other through the many faces of grief. As we moved through the process, Justin Robinson (ethnobotanist and Earthseed member) walked us through the forest and reminded us that plants are monuments as we listened to what the land and its flora have to tell us about the people who lived here before and what they are saying to us now. BUD was and is a deep ceremony. For those few days, we traveled through portals, collectively dreamed, individually healed, and in so many ways created new worlds together. There were many lessons that we learned, and are still learning from our time together on the land. We sang with her and to our ancestors, we cried and poured our tears back into that which has given us life, and through this release, we were given permission to lay to rest what was restless in and around us. We emerged from the land with clarity and re-commitments to our roles in the revolution, which we are currently in. It is liberatory spaces such as BUD that allow us to weave our fibers together and collectively participate in each other’s new worlds as they unfold before us.
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JUST LEADER FELLOWSHIP We successfully completed our very first expanded 9-month long JLF – Just Leader Fellowship – (formerly known as the Racial Justice Fellowship) with the intent to allow for deeper project and leadership development. We selected three fierce food system stewards from across Turtle Island to support them and their transformative projects to advance justice and community ownership in the food system. Our 2022-23 fellows spent 9-months together deepening our sense of self and practicing how we can bring our full selves into our work. We explored a decolonial history of our food system through the lens of Black and Indigenous folks with Georie Bryant (Symbodied Inc.), deconstructed our relationships with money and wealth building with Nafasi Ferrell (Narratives Unbound), and shared our journeys as food system leaders with the next PAGE 16
generation of changemakers at ListenUp! Youth Radio.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN We took the month of December as hibernation month to rest and recharge before the new year, which was an unexpected challenge for all of us, to pause and polish. Through this unlearning, we were reminded that the revolution won’t end because we are resting, and to lean into the cycles and rhythms of the land as she was using this time to rest too. Through our collaborative learning sessions, we explored our curiosity around how we can walk in compassion and grace as our truest selves as we navigate the confines of capitalism.
Our discussions named and uplifted the ancestral knowledge that we can draw on to form tools and concoctions to combat such confines, and reinforced unique elements of leadership in each fellow. In our 1:1 sessions, fellows were supported with grant writing, developing fundraising tools, technological support, learning mapping technologies, and building blueprints for the long-term transformative work each was enacting in the food system. Using new tools and remembering the ways of old (rest, slowness, speaking our truth), fellows emerged
from our 9-months together with clarity and affirmations – leaders through every part of their work as they walk in this world. We recognized that we are not waiting to spark the revolution, we are currently in it; and although it calls for our energetic output and innovation, it also calls for our restoration. As we struggle and joyously move towards our liberation, we also get to define our leadership and contributions in the movement towards a transformative food system.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FELLOWS
Gabriela Silva URBAN MAPPING (GIS) Food Sovereignty Zine
Axúl-Sól Sankofa NULEGACY
ab
Music as medicine. Speaking as medicine.
PEOPLE’S PROGRAMS Farm Manager PAGE 17
A REGRANTING FUND
Returning stolen wealth to the people it belongs to.
In addition to a successful first round of CoFUND in 2022, we also launched applications for the second round of CoFUND in 2023. We are delighted to share that we were able to fund two more organizations than intended and 80% of them are from hitherto unfunded areas in CoFED’s work.
$70,000 REDISTRIBUTED
7
ORGANIZATIONS FUNDED
145
APPLICATIONS We received over 145 applications from approximately 30 states and two international locations!
ABOUT COFUND CoFUND is our regranting program, aimed to support and build the collective resilience of food and land-justice based cooperatives; led by Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color of all ages. PAGE 18
COFUND
IN ACTION ASHOKRA
Albuquerque, New Mexico Ashokra Farm is a 2.5 acre diversified vegetable farm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ashokra is a group of landless BIPOC Queer and Trans farmworkers striving to create a farm that they are proud of and one that measures success not by crop yields or money, but through laughter and relationship with the land and each other. ashokrafarm
HEALING JOY MINISTRIES Salem, North Carolina
Healing Joy Ministries is a Black-woman owned farm that is establishing a compost facility and regenerative agriculture which uses Afro-Indigenous knowledge, permaculture, and sustainable practices. Healing Joy Ministries healingjoy.blog
PECAN MILK Decatur, Georgia
Pecan Milk Cooperative is a Southern, Black-owned, LGBTQ -owned, worker-owned food manufacture. The co-op turns pecans into high-quality plant-based milk. pecanmilk pecanmilk.com PAGE 19
COFUND
IN ACTION
SANKOFA VILLAGE ARKANSAS Central Arkansas
Sankofa Village Arkansas centers Black healing, liberation & regeneration in their work toward housing affordability, wealth-building, and climate resiliency. They are designing a space for Black healing, liberation, and regeneration in Arkansas. Their plan for their first village includes: ~30 households, communal spaces for ceremony, growing food, plant medicine, and native habitat. Key parts of this vision include the formation of the first Community Land Trust in Arkansas and the incubation of regenerative business cooperatives. sankofavillagearkansas sankofavillagearkansas.com PAGE 20
SISTERS OF THE SOIL Upper Marlboro, Maryland
Sisters of the Soil Community Farm is a Black women-owned, no-till farm located in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. They are committed to holistic and regenerative practices that improve the health of the land, plants, and community. The foundational rhythm of Sisters of the Soil Community Farm is being a community resource for fresh and nutritious food, family support, and education. By incorporating regenerative farming practices like no-till, composting, and cover cropping, they are able to give back to the land what it so expertly gives to us. sistersofthesoilfarm sistersofthesoil.life
SOMOS ESPEJOS Trujillo, Puerto Rico
SOMOS ESPEJOS (We are Mirrors) is located on 21+ acres in Trujillo Alto, Borikén (Puerto Rico). They are an agroecological + ceremonial retreat center committed to heal with and uplift local and international liberation movements. SOMOS ESPEJOS is rooted in ancestral and intergenerational wisdom of the following communities: BIPOC 2SLGBQTIA+, immigrant, diaspora, formerly incarcerated and their loved ones, allies, from Borikén (PR) and the Caribbean archipelago, Latin America, U.S., and internationally.
WILDPATH COLLECTIVE
Osceola, Wisconsin Wild Path is an intergenerational, multicultural, and interfaith community and commons where Black, Indigenous, People of Culture, Women, Queer, Trans, Poor and all other people who experience systemic and oppressive challenges to land may reconnect with land that is held collectively, in a commons.
wildpath.collective walkthewildpath.org
somosespejospr somosespejos.com
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WHAT WILL YOU ADD TO THE
TINCTURE OF TOMORROW?
O
ur beloved Team at CoFED has been cocooning and weaving together to alchemize another world where we can gently and cohesively build a cooperative food and land system rooted in liberation, healing, and regeneration.
continually dismantling systems of oppression that want to keep our communities in the same place; while also co-building our communities’ wings and prowess to build the liberated tomorrows we want to live in and leave behind.
We are also simultaneously building an organization worthy of our labor, time, gifts, dignity, care, and dreams.
We are following the leadership of Black feminists, Indigenous leaders, and disabled organizers who continuously remind us that this liberation is rooted in the deep practice of collective care, trust, and the pace of our humanity.
We are doing this immense and humbling task collectively and with the understanding that we are PAGE 22
DREAMING OF A FUTURE In our dreaming for the future, a world with abundant resources for QTBIPOC food and land cooperators looks like bellies full of healthful-care-fully grown food, laughter, freedom from fear of state violence and state-theft of resources that belong to our communities, abun-dance parties that are accessible to all, the sounds of children laughing at secure climate-caring futures, the feeling of nourishment of our souls and our bodies so deep it heals our ancestors. So I ask you this ... If you were to devise your ideal universe - what would it have? Who or what would represent the Sun? What would abundance from your systemic Sun of the imagination feel like? What are the flavors of freedom you want to season this moment of our collective struggle and revolution with?
BECOME We are stepping up to the WITH US invitation to be our own Sun. As we invite you into a realm of imagination for the future, we are also turning inwards and dreaming of abundantly-resourced food and land-based cooperatives that are generating and retaining wealth in our QTBIPOC communities, and therefore nourishing our own people, our own lands, our own tools, and our own futures.
Will you add to the tincture of tomorrow?
SUPPORT OUR WORK Scan the QR code & become a donor MAIL If you would like to mail a check, make it out to “CoFED” and send to 887 Sonoma Ave #23 Santa Rosa, CA 95404. PAGE 23
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