Interview Series
Just For My People presents the "Black Land Ownership Interview Series"—a series of discussions, interviews and conversations with various experts, researchers, participants and organizers who work or deal with land.
Leah Penniman Soul Fire Farm
Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. They raise and distribute life-giving food as a means to end food apartheid. With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of their ancestors, they work to reclaim their collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. They bring diverse communities together on this healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice.
Moses West
The Moses West Foundation supplies a safe, resilient, and reliable source of water to people in time of need with the use of donated Atmospheric Water Generators. They deploy and deliver Atmospheric Water Generators, when and where they are needed, to assist with recovery efforts in times of need. They support local population and first response during critical periods of water shortages, contamination, depletion, and other issues surrounding the loss of local water supplies.
In this interview Chris Carr, founder of BLO, and Dr. West, discus water, land, urban planning, self sufficiency in the Black community and future oriented problem solving.
Anzilla Gilmore
Anzilla Gilmore's passion for architecture manifests itself through service. When she graduated from Prairie View A&M University in the late 90’s, she entered a profession where very few people looked like her. She felt the lack of representation acutely and decided to take action to ensure that no black female that came after her would want for lack of representation. Gilmore has dedicated herself to professional mentorship, community outreach and professional service through leadership in professional organizations for over 15 years. She is a founder and the current treasurer of the Houston chapter of NOMA, sits on the National NOMA finance committee and is the founder and current advisor to the Architects Foundation Diversity Advancement Scholars Mentorship Program.
Dr. Kwessi Daniels
Dr KWESI A. DANIELS is the Department of Architecture Head at Tuskegee University. His Research Areas are Project based learning and community engagement, Social impact assessment of university expansion on neighboring communities, Preservation of African-American cultural sites; Impact of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Architects upon American history; Rosenwald Schools and rural education in the American Black Belt; Sustainable design strategies for economically insufficient communities.
Puzzles of Color
Puzzles of Color is a black-owned family business run by brother-sister duo William and Ericka. We have been doing puzzles as a family since we were in elementary school and really enjoyed the challenge it presented and the long hours of family time we spent putting together works of art. But in doing so, we noticed two distinct problems, (1) the imagery often did not represent who we were and (2) when we liked a puzzle, we couldn’t find a frame that would fit them. So we decided to take matters into our own hands and create a puzzle company that addressed both of these issues. Our puzzles are framable pieces of art created by artists of color.
Diana Norris & Kris Pickler
Diana Norris works as the Alliance’s Conservation Defense Associate Director. She holds the lead responsibility for conservation defense education and outreach and plays a critical role in assessing new tax-related challenges, leading brief writing teams and collaborating with Government Relations and Educational Services.
Kris Pickler is Senior Counsel, Real Estate at Lowe’s Companies, Inc. He supports the legal aspects of real estate, construction, facility and energy matters for the Company.
We think that the issues of land ownership, stewardship, management and conservation are unequivocally important and would like to create a way to amplify the voices of the individuals and institutions committed to these issues. This passion along with a few unfortunate realities catalyzed this series—there are limited outlets for people who work in architecture, engineering, construction, land management, sustainable development, city planning and fields that don't have an entertainment value or that don't directly tie into popular news topics. There are even fewer outlets that feature Black folks. Thus, we hope to empower architects, lawyers, engineers, farmers, urban planners, electricians, plumbers, designers, artists, folks that work in finance and any other person we think has information to contribute to the discussion around Black land ownership and land-use in general.
Another motivating factor for creating this series is to put faces to the issues in order to personalize topics that are extremely important to members of our community. It is these topics, ones mainstream media neglects to cover, that we'd like to remove some of the mysticism and distance around. We'd like to do this by bringing our audience someone who not only shares their opinions and feelings but who also shares their lived experiences. We hope to connect the academic, the technical and the systemic to the personal experiences of our audiences.
The interviews are hosted by Chris Carr and tend to be between 30-60 minutes long. Each episode flows in a conversational manner that is nonjudgmental and provides a space for our guests and contributors to be honest, authentic and as informative as possible. We try to make sure the information is accessible to people, regardless of their educational background or previous experience with the subject matter, but we also encourage our guests to be as specific as possible and to get as technical and complicated as necessary to fully elucidate the topics at hand. We want to tackle the big, untenable and complicated issues.
We hope that this series will provide information for folks who have no connection to land ownership or management conservation as well as people who have spent decades in the field.
If you have any questions, concerns or additional information and/or if you would like to be featured on the Black Land Ownership Interview Series, feel free to send us a note at info@blacklandownership.com.