Move the Money: The Richness of Southern Soils: Supporting Black Farming and Food
Tuesday, June 4, at 2pm EDT/11am PDT
- Carlton Turner, Co-Founder, Sipp Culture and Board Member, National Black Food and Justice Alliance
- Kolu Zigbi, Founder & Principal, Zigbi Consulting and Facilitator, Southern Black Farmers Community-Led Fund
Cuisine stands as a cornerstone of cultural identity, yet it's predominantly commercialized within the private market, unlike other artistic forms that receive backing from both public and philanthropic realms. This discrepancy largely stems from historical neglect of the invaluable contributions to American culinary heritage by communities of the global majority, who have endured land dispossession. Specifically, sustainable farming traditions rooted in African heritage have yet to be reclaimed by Black communities, perpetuating their struggle with disproportionate food insecurity and limited access to fresh, nutritious resources.
Join Carlton Turner (Sipp Culture and National Black Food and Justice Alliance) and Kolu Zibgi (Zigbi Consulting and Southern Black Farmers Community-Led Fund) on Tuesday, June 4 at 2pm EDT for a discussion of the movement for Black cultural and economic self-determination in the South through land access, food production, and Black Southern cuisine and community.
This 90-minute webinar will include breakout discussions between members.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Live captioning will be available in English throughout the webinar. For additional accommodation requests, please contact GIA Program Manager Jaime Sharp, jaime@giarts.org, at least three (3) business days before the event.
Presenters
Carlton Turner, Co-Founder, Sipp Culture and Board Member, National Black Food and Justice Alliance
Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, researcher, and co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture).
Turner serves on the board of First Peoples Fund, Imagining America, Project South, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. A member of the We Shall Overcome Fund Advisory Committee at the Highlander Center for Research and Education and is the former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS, he is also a founding partner of the Intercultural Leadership Institute.
Turner is an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA100. He is a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and former Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts.
Turner is also co-founder and co-artistic director, with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction), a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling.
Kolu Zigbi, Founder & Principal, Zigbi Consulting and Facilitator, Southern Black Farmers Community-Led Fund
With Zigbi Consulting, Kolu serves as a re-sorceress, strategist, connector, and catalyst for social and environmental justice. With a focus on collective governance of land and financial resources by BIPOC and marginalized communities, she promotes solidarity over charity and builds liberatory power. Kolu works on both sides of the funding and investment flow, partnering with grassroots groups to activate participatory grantmaking and investment funds, and with foundations to grow funding for BIPOC-led organizing and advocacy. She conceived of and facilitates the Southern Black Farmers Community-led Fund, co-designed and co-governs Safe House for Black Farmers (both housed at RSF Social Finance), supports the National Black Food and Justice Alliance with strategy development and implementation of its Resource Commons. Kolu advocates a recasting of the problem of food apartheid beyond the provision of healthy food access to include establishing BIPOC food value chains. For 20 years she managed a national portfolio at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation to bring about a more socially just and ecologically sustainable food system. Kolu co-founded Community Food Funders, a tri-state funder network promoting a more socially just and ecologically sound foodshed around New York City. She serves on the board of the Lawson Valentine Foundation. Kolu is inspired by her parents and ancestors, particularly her paternal grandfather who was a traditional town chief, healer and teacher in the Poro Society in Liberia, and her maternal grandmother a teacher who ran a protestant school for orphans in Naples Italy.