In 2015, educator Leah Penniman’s Fulbright Teacher Exchange took her to Mexico to study indigenous agroecology. Since then, Leah has applied that learning to curricular development at her Afro-Indigenous community farm in Petersburg, New York.
According to its website, Soul Fire Farm’s programs reach over 10,000 people each year through “farmer training for Black and Brown growers, reparations and land return initiatives for northeast farmers, food justice workshops for urban youth, home gardens for city-dwellers living under food apartheid, doorstep harvest delivery for food insecure households, and systems and policy education for public decision-makers.” Leah says that “the Fulbright Program provided the container for the exchange of skills and knowledge between Soul Fire Farm and Indigenous-led farms in Oaxaca."
For more on her work, see the June 28, 2021 Washington Post feature, “A harvest for the world: A Black family farm is fighting racism in agriculture and climate change”.
Leah Penniman is an alum of the 2014-2015 Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Research Program, United States to Mexico.