Ayana Young For The Wild is brought to you in part by the Kalliopeia Foundation who support reconnecting ecology, culture and spirituality. We are grateful for their continued support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners like you. Learn more at Kalliopeia.org. To make a donation, visit ForTheWild.world/donate, or find us on Patreon. If you’d like to support us in other ways, consider sharing our episodes through social media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to the podcast.

Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Amyrose Foll.

Amyrose Foll I think that the medicine for tragedy is community. We have everything that we need.

Ayana Young  Amyrose is an Enrolled tribal member of the Abenaki, a Veteran of the U.S. Army, and an alumni of Cornell University. She is cultivating the next generation of land and water protectors through sharing knowledge in Indigenous lifeways and ethnobotany. A passion for agriculture, and deep concerns about community food security led her to become a stakeholder in the Virginia Dept. of Agriculture Equitable Food Oriented Distribution Taskforce, and founder of Virginia Free Farms. Through Virginia Free Farm, Amyrose provides free nutrient-dense food assistance to those with need, free-of-charge plants and seeds to community gardens, schools, and community-based organizations, and educates young people in the Richmond metro area about Indigenous agriculture & lifeways.

Well, Amy Rose, thank you so much for joining us on For The Wild Podcast today, I’m really looking forward to our conversation. 

Amyrose Foll Yeah, thank you for having me. 

Ayana Young Well, I’d like to preface Virginia Free Farms by first discussing one of the great ironies of this country, which is the surplus of the food we theoretically have access to amidst our staggering rates of hunger. And it’s even more complex when you begin to think about food waste, as well as the reality that the majority of small scale farmers rarely make enough to sustain themselves with farming alone. In preparation for our conversation, I learned that despite Virginia’s 46,000 farms; some counties have rates of food insecurity that double the national average...Can you begin by framing this conundrum for listeners, and why we need to work on projects that simultaneously seek to address the quality of food offered to the community, the wellbeing of farmers, and equitable distribution?

Amyrose Foll Yeah, I actually live in one of those counties. So before the pandemic hit, we were looking at about 13.7 million households in the US being food insecure. After the pandemic hit, we're looking at 35 million households that can't either meet their needs on a daily basis, or they're uncertain of how to fill their plates. So when we look at all the ways, and all of the issues surrounding food security that come together, we really more accurately need to assess how we can innovate and problem-solve on these issues. Because it's so many things that go into this problem. I mean, we waste 80 billion pounds of food in the US a year that's like 30, or 40% of the food supply, and the largest component of solid waste that goes into our landfills every year, which is massive. 

We need to start looking at that in a perverse light, I’m not trying to be overly dramatic, but the fact that so many people are food insecure, and we're throwing so much food away, is just absolutely abhorrent. We also need to look at the set of facts and imagine better access and attempt to create an alternative model for production and delivery in order to serve these demographics that are experiencing this more effectively, while also kind of attending to the well being of what is considered a small scale farm worker. We have, as you said, over 40,000 farms in Virginia, and many of them are not solvent, because of this race to the bottom price structure that has been put into play by industrial farms, making it impossible to compete. And that's not new. It's been going on since the 80s very early 80s. So small responsible land stewards are crushed by these large vertically integrated organizations who are poisoning the water and land and causing desertification of our arable farmland and massive topsoil loss. 

So we have hundreds of farms in bankruptcy right now in the US and what really worries me is mental and physical well being of these small farmers, in addition to the possibility of these existing behemoth compounding factors that already causing so much food insecurity and such financial hardships for the small farmers by buying up all these farms and further consolidating farmlands, and perpetuating that system that's been devised to control us so much. That system works the way that it was designed to work there. It's almost the same thing as burning food stores and cornfields that controlled my ancestors, you control the food, and you control the people. And that's exactly what it was meant to do. 

So I guess our liberation as a people in the U.S. is intimately tied together, I think we kind of collectively need to work to make a drastic change in our own corrupt food system by reeducation of people and imagination of a new alternative model. We're trying to start getting to that, I realized that the biggest room in the house is room for improvement. So every day, we are doing a little bit more working with different community groups to help get these people fed. And the end goal is to kind of do a top-down and bottom-up approach for getting food distributed more equitably, getting people growing for themselves, all that sort of stuff. And it must include forging an alternative model that seeds new innovation in line with Traditional Ecological Knowledge to save ourselves from the agricultural industrial complex, that's not going to change unless we do something about it. We can't change what's been happening, but we can transform the future into something powerful if we work together.

Ayana Young In preparation for our conversation, I was reminded of a previous interview I did with Vijay Prashad who spoke at great length as to what it means for the cultural morality of a country like the United States that loudly boasts of its prosperity and convenience, yet it refuses to ensure its citizens are fed...I mean food insecurity impacts every community, yet no political party or popular movement really seeks to address it. So with this in mind, reading about how Virginia Free Farm really lives up to the ethos of giving freely, was a sign of relief, and I wonder if you could speak to the specificities of this; and what it looks like and who are you serving when you practice free food and free medicine?

Amyrose Foll We actually serve everyone, we serve a lot of individual families and community organizations and anyone that wants to kind of check out of the system. Currently, we have quite a few different programs going on, we do land access for LGBTQ gardeners, BIPOC gardeners, anybody that wants to get some garden therapy that otherwise might feel a little bit uncomfortable in the traditional like, you know, good old boy type farming situation. We have a free open source learning library, we have a seed library that's also free to community members. We do food distribution, twice a week to about 550 individuals and we're hoping to expand that, well, we are expanding that this year. Now we've got a fridge program going on and we have four satellite farms that are opening that are going to be funneling food into those refrigerator programs so that we can serve more people because we can only do so much from this piece of land. So we actually have been working to mobilize other community groups and other individuals to kind of replicate, because there's nothing that I do that's like groundbreaking or hard. I just get up every day and do something that puts food on somebody else's tables. That's literally my motivation every single day. 

So like you said, part of I guess the ethos or reason,  like you said in the very beginning when you introduced this, is there are counties in Virginia that have double the national average of poverty, and I live in one of those, but we don't just take care of this community. And we've been working really hard for the last couple of years, and really getting a lot of great innovation and collaboration out of our team members. I think above all else, that's the most important thing. The people that I work with are so hardworking and they care about their community so much. So we're trying to figure out ways to reimagine working within an existing system in a practical way, while also at the same time providing kind of a working example of alternative mode or models for food distribution for people to use and to check out, because we really need to be able to serve that target audience in a practical way, if we are just, you can't just go into a community and distribute food and expect that to work. So we're actually getting the community to grow a lot of their own food as well. 

Eventually, we want to be able to use additional donations to support small farms that are generally stewarding the land well, because there's a ton of small farms that end up throwing away a lot of their produce, which is terrible. I mean, when you go to the farmers market, you see these tables filled with abundance, and a lot of that food never gets eaten or sold. So eventually, what we want to do is start acting as a financial safety net for these small farms as well. Some of these farmer’s markets, I mean, a lot of people are like, “Yeah, it's great for us markets will offer fresh match for SNAP recipients.” That's awesome. But if you are a single mother with like, I don't know, a toddler at home, and you have no way to get to the farmers market, you don't have access to transportation, whatever. What good is that? You can't get there. So we're trying to work on all of these problems because it is such an intersectional - food access is such an intersectional issue. So we're kind of working to fix all of these things and working them out. 

So we've kind of gotten a bunch of people mobilized and harnessed that momentum by collaborating and working on some of the same types of projects with them together. And that's really been life-giving to the farm. I mean, we hold so much more power, and so much more powerful medicine, when we can struggle together to get things done. And it's been absolutely amazing, watching everything change, and so many people getting fed on a regular basis. So we've got community gardens going in, and those community gardens are stewarded by the people that live there. We're not just coming in and dropping food and leaving, because that doesn't do anybody any good. And it's important to involve the community because the community really knows what they need to heal themselves, but a lot of times people don't listen, there's a lot of this like white savior complex stuff that comes in and like the food, pantry food, I'm not knocking food pantries, I think they're fantastic. They're necessary. But a lot of the stuff that gets donated is shelf-stable, garbage food, that really is not good for us and doesn't do anyone any good. So we're trying to kind of overcome that. I mean, everyone loves a good box of macaroni and cheese every once in a while. I'm not gonna lie. I love that. I grew up in a family where, like, I don't know, I'm sure you've heard about the stereotypical commodity foods going into tribal households. I grew up with commodity foods in my grandmother's kitchen. I remember those black and white boxes. Sometimes that gross government cheese is so satisfying, but it's not good for us. And it's really killing us. And that's dependency. And what I want to do is create a measure of self-sufficiency and liberation from that food dependency for the people in my community, and hopefully beyond. I've had people reaching out to me from Maryland recently to create the same thing in that state as well. So hopefully we can gain momentum, and replicate it everywhere because it's so easy, and it really is the most fulfilling thing ever.

Ayana Young I love hearing that. I see. Yeah, just people everywhere really wanting to step into the work. And another thing that was coming up for me, was the word rewilding. And I know that rewilding is really at the heart of so many conversations I've had over the years and often on the program, we talked about the scale at which wild places have been infringed upon by development. But I've had fewer opportunities to discuss how development has infringed upon rural landscapes and communities and I'm really curious to hear if you've seen sprawling development, urbanization and gentrification change the place you now call home, and if this development impacts large and small scale farms differently.

Amyrose Foll So I guess I can only really speak from my own perspective on that, I guess, I don't know about small or large scale farms versus small scale because we're pretty small. I've got 26 acres but only six of them are under cultivation, because it's very important to me, specifically to have set aside land for wildlife. So a large portion of our farm is actually a wildlife habitat. When you pull down Broad Street, so you're talking about sprawl, so we actually have frontage on Broad Street, which is the main road that runs through Richmond, Virginia on the way out to Charlottesville, Charlottesville and Richmond are gradually growing each direction that kind of makes me a little bit nervous. But there are things available like our county actually has development easement, you can like, sell the development rights or promise that you won't be developed. I'm not really sure there's a program here in Virginia, I'm not sure whether it's universal across the US. But there is a program that you can take your agricultural land and make it so that even if the land is sold, it can't be developed in that way. I'd have to get more information on that. I can't remember off the top of my head what that is called right now. 

But I do know that like, for us when I moved here we are at the very tail end of the York River watershed, the creek that runs through my property is called Roundabout Creek and it flows into, I believe it goes South Anna River, then Pamunkey River, then the York River, and then out into the Atlantic Ocean. And you know, everything trickles downstream. Everyone's heard that phrase. Our water here was a mess. It had been driven through and rode the front fields. I don't know it was kind of like a ditch. It's not very deep here. But the end of Roundabout Creek, where the headwaters of all these rivers run are here on our property and they had been destroyed, like absolutely destroyed by tractor traffic. And so I've been here at least six years now going on seven years on this property and we purposely kind of set that area aside. There are big signs when you come down the road and turn on to the farm driveway that say “Do Not Mow Wildlife Habitat” and now we have, where it was a muddy mucky mess, and there was nothing there, now we've got standing perennial water and the Maryland Meadow Beauty’s are returning, the Bottlebrushes are returning. And it's really beautiful to witness. It's kind of one of the most magical things, but it also works with me on the farm. Paying attention to our water sources, and our wildlife around us is so incredibly important. I mean, we see tons of birds returning to the area from the habitat area, we let things grow up and very strategically managed the undergrowth, and the woodlot area with prescribed burns and clearing. We've had so many birds return and that really actually helps us because we do not spray pesticides, and we do not tell. So the birds help us keep our pest pressure down tremendously.

Ayana Young I love hearing that. It's amazing. I was thinking about in terms of the birds like I interviewed Peter Wohlleben and we were talking about planting oak trees and he had mentioned I think that the scrub jay is the best at planting oaks and it’s just such a beautiful reminder to get out of my narrow human mind frame when it comes to tending the land and all of the kin that's around us that are attending all the time that some of us aren't even aware of -

Amyrose Foll Oh my gosh, yes. We evolved in nature. I think we've forgotten. So many people have forgotten that, don't you think?

Ayana Young  Yeah absolutely, I mean, and modernity just continues to support us in the forgetting. But I'm yeah, I'm thinking about the many histories of extraction in relation to what we might identify as rural America, you know, industries that really propped up economies for several decades, but were ultimately detrimental to community and kin. And I know this is a really complex history that I don't want to oversimplify, but we know that rural America has been largely left behind in the dust of globalization and there's been a great loss of young people who moved to surrounding cities, join the armed forces, etc. And just that sort of legacy and the very real impacts that has on a place. Yet Virginia Free Farm is an example of radical transformation through regenerative farming, and perhaps even working toward changing the trajectory of rural homelands, and what wildlife preservation and restoration can look like in conjunction with farming. Because in other parts of the world, wildlife restoration and farming are mutually exclusive. So I wonder if you could speak to any thread here that piques interest?

Amyrose Foll I'm actually one of those people, poverty is a really great recruiter for the armed forces. So I actually ended up joining the Army, I found my way to farming kind of later in life, it was weird. I spent a lot of time in nature. I mean, my journey here to farming has never been a straight path. It's been as meandering and imperfect as the Appalachian streams I spent the weeks of my youth overturning rocks looking for crayfish. Like, I don't know, you're talking about the brain drain and the industries that are controversial. Now, I actually got into a fight with my mother this weekend about the Keystone XL pipeline. And it was not pretty, but um, oh, man, I don't even know where to start. Because it's so big. And there's so much that I could, you know, pick on each one of those things. 

I think the overarching feeling needs to be that if we fail to make current decisions for those that are yet to come, or the unborn, more so than those that are currently alive, this is what I was trying to impress upon her, that we are categorically unfit to make these decisions because we need to think about who's coming after us. And we cannot let these things go unchecked or the unchecked destruction of our natural resources continue, you know, water, soil, animal, plant life, they are more important than anything else. But I feel bad saying that because at the same time, we live in this capitalistic, like, Western society where the value of a forest is greater when the trees are cut down, and then they're standing. 

So it's very hard to reconcile those two things or to know like, what is the answer to bridging the gap between, you know, how will our leaders affect the change needed to repair the damaged ecosystems, and also continue to allow people to maintain the lifestyles that they expect in modernity, as you said, like, how do we find that I think that's the big thing that we really need to, we really need to answer. But I also think that like, at the same time, there's a lot of this extractive agricultural practice that goes on out here to where it's sad because those big tractors can practically drive themselves and not knocking big farmers because there's some big farms that are considered quote, unquote, family farms. That's not what you think of when you think of like the Rockwellian, beautiful rolling pastoral scenes in our head. But those farmers that farm that way, they're little more than technicians, they're not artisans, it's not the same thing that it used to be. And that I think that the regenerative crowd is trying to kind of bring back. 

So I think that like by revitalizing these agricultural traditions, and really planting, with more of an ecological mindset, maybe we can start to bring some of that back or people can find value in that simple lifestyle. I don't know what the solution to that is. But I'm hopeful that by getting a better understanding of what's going on with this agricultural revolution right now that we might be able to turn a corner because I know that this industrial farming nonsense is not the answer, especially that we don't need it to feed the world because we throw away so much food and yet leave people starving as you said, it's perverse, it's absolutely perverse. It's so why are we even trying to produce more and more and more and push and push and push for no reason? It’s to sell more chemicals and to line more people's pockets with patented seeds and herbicides and pesticides that we don't need? Right? It's making us sick. And the bad thing is like so we are, we are a commodity, we have become nothing more than a product for those people to make more money off of us. And then send us right over to Big Pharma so that we can take some pills and create a feedback loop in that food and pharma cycle, we're like a hamster on a wheel. 

Ayana Young Yeah, thank you for reminding us of those truths, because I'm sure many of us if not all of us listening, know that. And it's just a good reminder. And, yeah, I came across an interview you gave on Mother Earth News, where you’re quoted saying: “I realize one woman can’t single-handedly transform an entire regional foodshed. Luckily, women from matrilineal systems are taught from a young age to take up space and use their power by design. We have little trouble unapologetically embracing the positions of leadership and strength meant for us. My ancestors have willed this resistance into existence. I’m instinctively led by the wisdom and blood memory of all the matriarchs that came before me.” And, this notion of ancestral willed resistance is so powerful, and I wonder if you could speak to the importance of taking up space and using power thoughtfully and impactfully, especially in areas like agriculture where there are these sort of perpetual questions around scaling up or staying small?

Amyrose Foll So for me, really, the intention behind this and the deliberation of living kind of like every day as ceremony, every day as prayer, is kind of seeking to honor my ancestors. I mean, for me, I'm a big seed nerd, I love plants, so that's where I focus a lot of my energy on is preserving, growing out, preserving, and distributing seeds. My ancestors protected these seeds for millennia, through profound adversity. And so we as a people are an endangered species so it's vital to protect our traditional seeds, and our Indigenous foodways. These seeds, to me, represent a commitment to be a good ancestor, to preserve them for future generations, to protect the future biodiversity of our land. But I can't do that unless I am making sure that the wildlife around my farm is also protected biodiversity because all of these systems work together and I think that a lot of times, traditional farmers don't remember that and there's just like, wholesale, herbicide spraying or even like the railways that run through our towns and cities, that's harmful too. 

And so there's a lot of barriers put up for us, as Native people, for reclamation of our traditional foodways, people being cut off from traditional lands or subsistence lands, damage from resource extraction, climate change, political or legal regulations, or local resource control, you know. So this is a small way that I can remember them in a way and make sure that my children and their children's children remember them as well. Because if we don't do this work, no one else will do it for us. And it's so important, especially considering, like our foodways where they have arguably more influence over current world cuisine, sounds ridiculous, because when you think of Native American food, what do you think of? Frybread? No, that ain't it. But approximately 75% of everything that we chow down on or put on our plates right now is Indigenous to the Americas. So for ancestors for millennia, my ancestors cultivated this vast agroecology of food crops, and we've all been but forgotten. So I guess that's part of why that’s why I am the way that I am. I don't know how to see or say it other than that, but it's kind of like a live legacy for me.

Ayana Young I get that, I feel that in my own ways that this is, yeah, there's so much that has made us who we are and, and I just love the way you speak to that type of empowerment. 

So, yeah, but I'd like to transition our conversation to seed saving, you brought that up-

Amyrose Foll Oh my favorite subject!

Ayana Young Yeah, I love this subject, too. And lately, I've been thinking about how many scientists and researchers are scrambling to create new breeds of plants that are sturdier in the face of increasing temperatures, things like heat resistant seeds or changing a plant’s capacity for photosynthesis, and small scale farmers and foragers are doing this as well; but coupled with an effort in repopulating local native seeds and preserving genetic diversity, and so I’d like to ask you about this, but perhaps you can speak to it through the lens of how Virginia Free Farms is assisting the rematriation of seeds from the USDA and universities, back to the Rappahannock Tribe and the Monacan Indian Nation?

Amyrose Foll Oh my gosh, this is the best. And so actually, I work with the Richmond Indigenous Society too, which is good. It's kind of like a little loose organization in Richmond, Virginia, that serves to kind of create a family and a community and Indigenous community and fellowship for tribal diaspora that are no longer living on their ancestral homelands, of which I am one, I am, Penobscot and Abenaki, living on Monacan land. So seeds and foodways are an awesome teaching tool. I have kids. So it's a great way to teach language, culture, all that sort of stuff. So revitalizing these agricultural pathways is something that I'm very passionate about and I actually reached out, I don't even remember what brought me to this, reaching out to the Rappahannock and the Monacan, last year about really making a concerted effort to get this going to preserve their agricultural legacy. 

And, I mean, I guess, because I no longer live in my family's ancestral lands between Quebec and Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. So they bit and it was awesome. I started communicating with the University of Maryland, and VCU, and the USDA, and I will never forget, we arranged these meetings with the Tribal Council from the Rappahannock and some members of the Monacan Nation, and I think they're one of their administrators there. And I, my assistant and I went up to meet with the Rappahannock Tribal Council, and they were great. And we left their Tribal Center and followed them over to the Hereditary Chief’s home, they're working on restoring and they were interested in setting up a medicine garden there. And I had actually, as soon as they wrote back saying, yes, we were interested in doing these things, I immediately started petitioning these different places to give up any of their sessions that they had in their germplasm repository, that were attributed to these Tribes. And when I got home from a day of driving around out in Stevens Church, Virginia, which is where the Monacan winter hunting grounds are, and where their Tribal Center is, got a package in the mail from the USDA with seeds that belong to the Rappahannock Nation. And it was like, just magical. 

So it felt like a small victory if that makes any sense. I feel so silly because it's like making the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I have the biggest smile on my face, but it made me so happy I could have cried. So the pandemic hit and kind of, you know, threw a monkey wrench in all of this. So we will be working with Kirk Richardson, who is one of their tribal council members, and getting that going for them this year with the help of some volunteers and a little bit of fundraising and hopefully, that will be a good teaching tool for the Tribe to kind of inform the community around them that like, “Hey, we're still here. We're not some image in time adrift somewhere in your imagination that's sitting around dressed in beads and buckskin. We're still here, we still live here we exist. We're not just something in your history books from elementary school, or, you know, a mascot for your sports team. We're people with a rich cultural history and unfortunately, because of the way things went down, a lot of our foodways were lost.” And if it's one thing that I can do with my life helping to reclaim some of that, that'll be enough for me, I will probably do this work until the day I die. It is the most fulfilling thing ever. 

But I'm very excited about that, because we've actually been able to get somewhere and had really great responses from these institutions. And I mean, some of the seeds in my own seed bank are extremely rare. We were one of two, one of the corn varieties we grew last year, we were one of two growers in all of North America. This year, I think I'm gonna intensively be growing out Pima white corn, which is very water-thrifty, very short, stocky, 60-day corn that doesn't need to be irrigated very much, and seeds like that, like you were saying, these people are trying to adapt seeds to deal with climate change all of that sort of stuff. I mean, think of the potential for that - it matures quickly, doesn't need water. I mean, doesn't need as much water, can kind of be left to its own devices, but you can't buy it commercially from seed companies or anything like that. What's to say something like that is not going to be our answer to adaptation to what we all see in the grocery store that we know is not going away anytime soon? 

To kind of overcome these climate changes. I think that sometimes the things that have been sitting right next to us this whole time might be the answer to our problems. So preserving these native varieties that were very meticulously adapted for particular, for very particular, growing climates or microclimates over millennia, are going to be key. I mean, I can't even tell you how many people I talked to because we do sell some seeds on a webstore as fundraisers, because we don't sell food, I can't even tell you the number of people that have told me or asked me sent me messages on Etsy, asking me, “Can you eat this corn?” Or they'll start off by saying, “I know not all corn is edible.” And I'm just beside myself. Yes, absolutely. All corn is edible. Just because it's not yellow in the grocery store does not mean that it's not edible. I promise you my ancestors were not sitting around saying what can we decorate our wigwam’s with? No. But these things might actually be the answer, as you said to circle back to climate change because the depth and breadth of different characteristics are astounding. And it's beautiful, especially in the different phenotypical presentations of the varieties of different native tomatoes. So amazing. It's captivating. And it's really motivating to getting kids to learn about these sorts of things too, kids love color and all that fun stuff and I think that if we can get our children involved in this sort of stuff, because they're the ones that are going to have to deal with what we're doing right now you know, I think that's also clutch is them involved in getting them working on it now so they can take up this work and continue.

Ayana Young Gosh, there's so much in that response. Thank you for taking us to all those places. And when thinking about how Virginia Free Farms you know really emphasizes the importance of disseminating and democratizing education around agriculture, especially as it has become a commodified field, and so in recognition of this I wonder if you could maybe outline or share a bit about the practicality of starting your own small scale farm and what your journey was like starting Virginia Free Farm? 

Amyrose Foll I feel like I'm doing a bad thing by making all of this stuff shareable and open-source online. Because, so for me, I had a conversation with one of our teammates the other day, actually I stole her from the city of Richmond, got her to come out here, so she's a very talented grower and she now lives three doors down for me and has her own mini farm over there, that's going to be helping with some of the things that Virginia Free Farm is doing and she is going to be focusing on a lot of the South American varieties, things that are, you know, of interest to her. But we were talking about the whole education aspect and sharing that information, and not hoarding information or lording over information for yourself, or to stay in power. Because to be honest with you, like, this is why collaboration is so important, I have no interest in, I mean I want to do all of the things - but I understand that I might be a little ADHD, but I have no interest in lording over this project for the rest of my life, I just want to facilitate people to be able to do this for themselves and so that was the whole reason I started aggregating some of the information to empower other people to be able to do it for themselves. Because if we make the commodification of these things obsolete by, everybody's got access to it anyway, you know what I mean? I mean, I've even got stuff on there about like, getting your finances in order and figuring out how to market your products. Even though we don't market, I did at one time, sell commercially, but my life changed so that I didn't need to do all of those things. And so I just want to be able to empower other people and we were talking about the other day, and my ideal setup, is that whole not being able to tell who is the boss-type thing? I don't know do you know, what I'm talking about? Like the concept of like, everyone is so good at doing what they’re doing you don’t know who is in charge?

Ayana Young  Like everybody's staying in their lane and being amazing and we're all coming together with our skills and like that collaborative effort. I love that.

Amyrose Foll Oh, yeah, absolutely. So like, one of the things that we were starting this year anyway, was the RVA Fridge Program. Sorry, I'm diverging a little bit, but I'll tie it back in I promise. So to that end, because of Farmer’s Footprint, I had spoken to Amber Tamm on the phone, and she was talking about the fridge program that she and her partner were doing and I was like, yes, we're gonna do that here in Virginia, I started, I had already started making arrangements with my team, and a local chef and the satellite farms because our plan was to empower the satellite farms to run on their own, independently of us, but you know, doing the same exact thing. And just facilitating them, helping them and then do this fridge program, found a girl who had just graduated from VCU, and this was her thing, she wanted to do an RVA fridge program and so we just started funneling things to her. And we actually ended up getting one of our, one of our sponsors, to commit to providing a refrigerator a month for the next 12 months. But I'm not gonna be in the middle man, I'm just literally facilitating, I like to facilitate and I like to network, I've been called the spider because I like to connect people together and weave that web of human interaction, I think that's really the most important thing that we can do is to help each other be the best possible worker, facilitator, I don't know, facilitate each other to do the best possible job that they can do. 

And it's amazing because we literally just started talking to Taylor a few weeks ago and already there's a massive plan underway, and it's already making an impact on the community. It's really great. Like, that's why I'm doing the knowledge dissemination. I understand people want to like put out those programs for like, permaculture certificates and sustainable agriculture programs and all of that sort of stuff. But also, I've already done things, and I don't want anyone else to have the struggle. So why not help people? I know I'm not getting anything out of it, but it's not about me. Anyway, I guess that's why also I want to share with everyone, I want to make everyone's life better. I mean, the whole thing about the amount of food we throw away, and the insolvency and small farms and the hunger is just crazy to me, especially when we have the philanthropy dollars in the U.S. to fix these problems, but they're not given, there's a huge disparity in the demographics of where philanthropy dollars go, we could literally solve these problems if the funding went into the right places. But it's always got to be filtered through this, through the pipe of like, I don't know, middle-aged white, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be alienating by saying this, but like, a lot of the philanthropy dollars go to organizations run by middle aged white men. I've noticed that a lot of women are leading food sovereignty and food security pushes, and a lot of Women of Color are leading these pushes, but like Black women, and Brown women do not get the funding that other people get. And it's really unfortunate, because almost everyone I work with that is leading this project, or the groups that we are working with are women, and probably half of them are women of color and we just do not get the attention and we do not get the same funding, the equal funding. I mean, we apply for grants all the time. But yeah, we just don't get the same attention that the ASPCA gets.

Ayana Young Yeah, I feel like, in terms of the white dudes getting the funding, it's just this way that trust has been built around money and mistrust and who is trusted with money, and it's usually white men and it's really like this self-perpetuating loop that we are breaking. And that's wonderful. And, you know, I have a type of confidence that things are changing. But yeah, I know that they are still in that transition and I'm appreciative that you spoke to those pieces. 

And yeah, I’d be remiss not to highlight some of your upcoming work, particularly with Virginia Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and the creation of green housing and equitable food forests. And, I’m really thinking about the importance of us getting involved in green housing initiatives before climate gentrification starts to dictate everything, so I wonder if you either could share some of the concrete work you are doing, or perhaps what your vision is for green equitable housing in places like Virginia?

Amyrose Foll Yeah, so originally, La'Veesha Rollins, from C5, she is actually one of my Women’s Earth Alliance sisters, and she is a green architect located in Charles City County, which is on the other side of Richmond here. So this whole thing came about because of her imagination, sitting at lunch at The Daily in Richmond one day. And so her vision was kind of the green tiny housing and what we're thinking because all of these things are intersectional, so what we had dreamed up was the city of Petersburg, to be kind of a test site, because there's a lot of very, very low-income individuals and families in that area and that's one of the areas that a lot of our food goes to. And this all came about, I want to say around Thanksgiving, we had taken, we had worked with a local restaurant to turn a whole ton of our pumpkins into hundreds of pumpkin pies and there's like whole families living in one room. You know, those little motels that are up and down like the old roads before the highways came in. Yeah, we have a lot of those and we have I don't know what it's like where you live, but we have a lot of those and there are whole families living in those. I mean, like those hotel rooms, they have a microwave, maybe a hot plate, you can't really cook for a family or like really live in that. 

So what we were envisioning was green housing, with food forests planted in between it and intensive wraparound services with education, mental health, transportation, childcare, because you cannot disentangle these things from one another to break the poverty cycle or to heal these families that have ended up in this situation because of hundreds of years of inequities and the system being stacked against them. And they say that right now, it is I think, 217 years for women to reach financial equity with men and 250 years for Black families to reach financial equity with white families. 

So we approached Carroll Foy, because of the way her the governor's race is going right now, I don't think that's going to be moving forward with her as much as independently with La'Veesha and I, because the politicians you know need to do what they’re doing. They’re playing the game, their vision of bringing in economic stability, what was said to me was jobs need to come here and these people need to slowly pull themselves out of poverty. We have the ability through visioning that is big and bold, and fundraising, to be like, why wait for the Titanic to turn itself when you can hire a tugboat to turn it, turn that thing around right now, by instituting all of these things, and there is the money out there. We as a country spend money on way more foolish things than this, there is the possibility to really change the trajectory of family's lives within a generation by doing these things. 

So the fact that anyone would even hesitate to say, yes, this is what we're doing is just beyond me. So that is what we're going to be working towards. That's going to be like now, five or 10-year plan, unfortunately, because we're getting everything else up and off the ground. And there are only so many hours in the day, oh my gosh, if I could do all of these things, or hire an army of people to do them, I would do them tomorrow. But unfortunately, that's going to be slower going than some of the other things that we have going on right now.

Ayana Young I know there are so many moving pieces and so much to coordinate and implement. And I really appreciate you. And gosh, well, Amyrose, during the course of our conversation, I’ve been reminded of the importance of networks of connectivity, and how it is really only through their leveraging that we are able to accomplish really transformative work, but I also know that for many this may feel like the greatest hindrance because of our cultural attitudes towards individualism, and so as we come to a close, I wonder if you could end by speaking to the reality that these networks of connectivity are going to be what assists us in riding out systemic collapse?

Amyrose Foll I was of that mindset that you talked about, like the rugged individualist, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, my thing was, because of that I was afraid to ask for help, or assistance, because I didn't want to be perceived as weak, especially because I'm a woman doing this work. And that made me nervous. It's why I sought out an Ivy League education in sustainable agriculture, because I didn't want anyone to look at me, as a Native woman and say, “You don't know what you're talking about,” or thinking of me as less than them. But by doing that, and failing, trying to do everything myself, I learned the real true value of community. 

I mean, it's just like I said earlier, it's the way that we are supposed to live. We are herd animals, for lack of a better description than I can think of right now. There's so much I want to say, and I'm not sure where to go with that first. And I know that I can't, I could talk forever on it. But really, it's kind of coming back to that tribal collectivism, where we all survive together. Clan mothers take care of everyone. They make sure that everyone is housed and everyone is fed. So I feel like coming back to the networking and collaboration aspect, and tying it all in with disseminating information and empowering other people to do these projects that we are shooting off onto, and really take the reins and step into their own power in these projects is really kind of coming full circle and fulfilling that legacy of what many, many generations of my grandmother's pasts did with taking care of everyone. That's like the whole thing, the whole tribe survives together. And we make sure that our cash and food are full. And we take care of every single last person, no matter what we're all in it together. And I don't know, this has been a great tragedy for so many families, I can only imagine what some people are going through. We have mile-long lines at the food pantries here, some of the food pantries cannot keep up around the counties surrounding us. So I cannot imagine the dread that they feel not being able to supply their people or the dread that the families that rely on them feel. So I guess it's kind of making sure that I collaborate and work with other people kind of is a survival technique or survival method that we're all need. We all need to kind of get over ourselves and work together to be a little bit better about that in a way, I guess I could say, think that the medicine for tragedy is community, we have everything that we need if we share, and we need to come back to that mentality of collectivism because it doesn't just benefit that person, if our community is stronger as a whole, it benefits all of us. And I think people really lose sight of that, because of that attitude of individualism and we have to have, I mean, America like worships the hero or that sort of thing.

Ayana Young  Hmm. Well, Amyrose, this has been such an uplifting and energizing conversation. I feel so empowered after speaking with you. I just love your passion and the confidence that you bring to this work. I think it's so important for us to have leaders that are just going for it no matter how complex and complicated and challenging the issues may be. So I thank you for that. And thanks for spending some time with us today. 

Amyrose Foll Thank you, wliwni.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Ian George and Edie. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.