solidarity statement 

This statement is not intended as virtue signaling but as a form of transparency and as an accountability plan to let folks know how our work is aligning with our values. We have a general feedback form and cherish any time and labor that is spent communicating how we can be doing better. Sharing our journey openly moving from white freeze, to accountability, agency, and action we hope will encourage others to begin to interrogate their own place in our community and ways we can imagine and move towards a better future together. In our truth and vulnerability we can achieve a more just and powerful existence.

Our farm and home are situated on Abenaki land. While we aim for a sustainable lifestyle which reduces our footprint and connects us in right relationship with the land and everyone on it, we fully recognize the impacts of our colonizer ancestors and the colonizer energies within us. We are working toward equity within ourselves, our family, our land and community by restructuring the frameworks in which we act. This work comes from many angles and considers the intersections of our own marginality and privileges. Steadfastly, we recognize our society’s systems are strategically built to oppress and repress the global majority and anyone else who does not align with the violent needs and outcomes of our hoarding (wealth, power, resources, and/or opportunity) consuming (natural resources, knowledge, labor, life) culture.

Outside of recognition of the land we cultivate and on which the house we own is built we need to acknowledge all the knowledge and labor we benefit from. Our regenerative farming practices and gentle parenting practices are based in indigenous wisdoms. In our healing journeys and resistance work we are leaning on the work of generations of black women and in our queerness we owe a debt of gratitude and reverence to the black trans women who are responsible for the foundation of our liberation today. 

We believe in abolition, harm reduction practices, non-violent communication, transformative justice, reparations and land back policies, healthcare for all, universal basic income, and alternative economies of mutuality. Essentially, we believe that all people should be afforded the dignity and respect they deserve and that none of the conditions necessary to thrive should be based on standards regarding productivity or achievement. We are divine and no one should have the power to demand someone cosign that conditionally. While we claim these lifelong beliefs we boldly recognize we are certain to misstep. We are new to advocacy and activism work and are still very young in our personal healing journeys.

We are working hard to live through our values while understanding our limitations and the limitations of the system in which we still must live. This includes, balancing between our need to run a profitable business on which we can depend to survive (which is not presently the case) and resisting relentless hustle culture by treating our family with care and respect. It means standing in our power and demanding a living wage for ourselves while also addressing the deep need for affordable and nutrient dense food in our community. It also means relinquishing our learned ideas of “ownership” regarding the land we’re on and creating a community of abundance and access in which every stakeholder; human, animal, plant, soil, water is able to meet its needs with dignity through interdependence.