The Black Dirt Farm Collective is currently funded by grants, donations, and income from their training programs, but they are working toward building an Afroecological village that is self-sustaining and autonomous from wealthy donors.

This interview with the Maryland-based collective’s shakara tyler and Blain Snipstal is the second in a series highlighting grassroots organizations working, or seeking to work, outside a reliance on wealthy donors. It has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the Black Dirt Farm Collective?

shakara: We are a collective of Black farmers, educators, scientists, agrarians, seed keepers, organizers, and researchers guiding a political education process. Through our cultivation of Afroecology, we work to activate Black agrarian communities’ personal, cultural, and technical capacities to be used as a transformative organizing tool. We do this through co-facilitating political trainings rooted in the wisdom of nature. We see this as a process of recovering our innate agrarian identities, Afro-diasporic histories and magic.

What is your vision for the Collective?

shakara: It’s ultimately about liberating ourselves from interlocking systems of oppression. We want to live freely in the ways that our ancestors intended as we avenge their suffering through our work and fight for our future generations.

The short-term vision is to create an Afroecological village — a place that we can call home and emancipate ourselves from capitalism, imperialism, the nonprofit industrial complex, and white supremacy.

In the long-term, we hope to be a model for others who aspire to do the same. We know that this is the century of decolonization and abolition according to many Afro-indigenous prophecies, and this is our time to build the realities we believe in.

Read the full interview about the Black agrarian collective with shakara tyler and Blain Snipstal at Inequality.