Help Us Build All the Things of Collective Dreams

Hi Friends:

After some deliberation, our team decided to activate a stretch goal to really center what it means to support culture work serious about land sovereignty.  You have an opportunity to continue contributing culture workers of color with demonstrated commitment to community-building (THANK YOU), contribute based on your interests, and contribute in solid ways that materially support land reclamation efforts. KEEP US COMMUNITY DETERMINED #givingIsBelieving THANK YOU. 

For this STRETCH, we would like to lift up Diasporic Herbal Transmission. It's our second year. We do this stretch goal to support crowdfunding stipends so our crew of diasporic food medicine researchers of color may participate at the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group  (NESAWG) -  It Takes A Region! Conference. As NESAWG works internally on racial equity to properly compensate presenters of color for next year, they said they would be happy to share our gofundme to their food and farm network.   Sign up! they have scholarships to attendees.  We are raising $900. That's $300/each of us. We ask this amount not only to participate at the conference coming up in 3 weeks, we ask so we may also bring this workshop to community members who are not in conference networks.

So what is Diasporic Herbal Transmission?
An exploration of food medicine complicated by the diasporic experience of displacement + settler legacies. : Name and celebrate ancestral plants we lean on. Additionally, as diasporic peoples we are ace adapters. How might we lessen the burden on Native peoples and lands they steward (including our own homelands) + support the rematriation of Native medicine? 

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Finally, we are raising an additional 25% ($1025) of our entire fundraising ask in order to direct support local rematriation efforts. It's one thing to talk about it and make endless land acknowledgements. It's another thing entirely to make this normal practice in any fundraising we do. We believe in abundance and community care. Every person who has contributed and lifted up this fundraiser from the beginning will be mentioned anonymously as a group of people when we distribute monies evenly. TOGETHER WE MUST!

Here are a few efforts we are looking into supporting
Black Swamp Rematriation
Schaghticoke Land Reclamation Project
More soon!

If you prefer to give while avoiding gofundme cut, please venmo or paypal @PampiD

Many many thanks,
Neighborhood Grow Plan,
a collective of culture workers working on Public programming at the intersection of food, housing and land justice

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OLDER ASK 2075
thank you for taking the time to look in on my crew. My name is Pampi. As some of you know, I have been working since March 2020 on Neighborhood Grow Plan , where - with young organizers and neighbors - we grow where we live! It started as a bereavement project when my dad passed that April and honors all the beautiful gentle ferocious community care practices he passed on to me.

 

I write now, as my comrades and I hoping to build out the next two phases of the Plan - helping scaffold the regional food pathways between Boston and western (and later rural) Mass held by BIPoC growers, foragers and food distributors + building public greenhouses we need for food security (and eventually sovereignty) and public land reclamation efforts.

 

To support this effort, we ask your timely support in stabilizing our starting crew of three by contributing funds in two way:

 

** URGENT Timber Framing Training ~ 1075$ (tuition) ~Training starts in 9 days. Please help me finally secure the training that has been financially and systemically elusive for 20+ years! Though I am not formally accredited as an architect/urban planner, after 20 years, I see that’s precisely what I have been making my way back to through work in community. For the better part, unconsciously, and then daring not to believe it the last few years, and now undeniably, this past year through Neighborhood Grow Plan - when this summer we were formally called in to support building greenhouses for and with community, requested by community organizers responding to the pitch in the expanded vision of the Plan . Help us level up and secure the skills that can not only help me confidently build but also build innovatively - and anyways - the infrastructures that really matter. Our motto: BUILD FIRST ASK LATER! While the Timber Frame Guild had a scholarship opportunity for young people from communities that struggle with access (one I supported comrade Koko to secure), I have now aged out. So we look to you to help us become the queer auncty grandpa builders of our present. I’ve spent 20 years turning away from the bureaucratic violence I was groomed to support. I did not do so quietly. That has certainly made it very tricky for me economically socially mentally and physically. Those of you who have been following our work, your support at this intersection would be tremendous. THANK YOU.

 

** ASAP Stabilizing Land Stewards + Knowledge Transfer. Ideally raising 1000$ to get us started. This Fall I received an opportunity to help steward a beautiful food forest cultivated by a famed permaculturist. He is transferring ownership to a newly minted housing cooperative that QTBIPoC comrades are designing. There is a great need to translate the nearly 20 years of data collected of the 300+ species of medicinal native and (much E. Asian) diasporic plants and trees. Most of these funds would go to support one of the main land stewards here with this knowledge - a young person who negotiates displaced indigenous identities - who’s been building and tending this space since he was barely an adolescent - for 17 years - now an urban farm worker (currently in a bit of duress). To transfer this great wealth of information and help him stay connected with the work, we ask for support to stabilize the transition with this ask for direct support and some cushion to support the culture work we’ll be wrangling that is needed to translate the knowledge into an accessible popular education curriculum. We hope to host community herbalists and neighbors hungry to shape and participate in community determination here that we hope will remain connected to decades long work.

 

Both pieces are solid ways you can materially support and contribute to culture workers of color with demonstrated commitment to community-building secure the skills they need to be even more potent change agents. KEEP US COMMUNITY DETERMINED #givingIsBelieving THANK YOU