Mission

 

Soul Soil Collective Farm, Inc.

 

Soul Soil Collective Farm (SSCF) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization working to buy a farm & community space to host sanctuary where those who face racist, colonial, and classist barriers to land access can cultivate rest, education, healing, connecting, and creating. We want to provide BIPOC and LGBTQIA individuals, couples, and families access to:

(1) land held in common for the use & healing of individuals/groups who face racist, generational, and classist barriers from access to land stewardship, especially Black and gender and/or sexual minorities; and 

(2) space for programming, events, and retreats that invite collaborators to deepen their relationships with and learn from local ecology and the more-than-human world; including

(3) culturally-competent, evidence-based and ecology-informed holistic healing services such as therapy provided by licensed clinicians, and peer support programming at free or low-cost to un/underinsured underserved populations. 

(4) Our first programs will center on:

• Trans-centered healing and therapy

• Healing retreats that support practices of intergenerational care and caring for the land

• Land Stewardship and defense 

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As an organization founded by and committed to centering Black, Indigenous and trans*NB/gender-expansive leadership, SSCF, Inc. seeks to support and enable new world-building for/as Black and Indigenous people and accomplices.  We are dedicated to healing our disconnection from the land, the ancestral trauma entangled in that disconnection,  and learning from the ancestral wisdom of all our ancestors, including the microbiome, plants, animals, and insects. We believe that we all have key roles to play in composting the extractive and exploitative systems / ideologies of white supremacy and homotransphobia,  and our collaboration is essential to cultivate collective liberation. All who are committed to this work are welcome in SSCF; at times, we may host spaces for those with particular lived experiences to facilitate safer exploration and deeper healing work (e.g., Black spaces, or BIPOC masculine-of-center spaces, or spaces for interrogating whiteness as white people).  In all decisions and work as a collective and nonprofit, we seek to center Black, Indigenous, and trans*NB/gender-expansive wisdom and experiences as we take back the economy and reshape it in service to health and life. We are, and are in collaboration and solidarity with those building an economy that asserts the right to breath, to care, and to life.

 

As Susan Raffo says in Liberated to the Bone, "All healing traditions evolve as part of culture." Within Soul Soil Collective, we seek to create and practice culture that evolves healing practices which support reciprocal restoration with all our relations -- plants, the microbiome, animals, ancestors -- and enable collective liberation.

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Land acknowledgement and pledge of responsibility

Based on a land acknowledgment statement drafted by a Susquehanna and Shawnee elder for the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project, as well as information shared by Piscataway Indian Nation tribal consultants with the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project.

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We acknowledge that the places today known as Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Harford County, and Cecil County exist as the result of duress. In 1652, Susquehannock leaders unwillingly transferred these lands to the English in an unsuccessful effort to stop English settlers encroaching up the Susquehanna River. We acknowledge that these places and their Indigenous inhabitants exist without rigid political borders and boundaries maintained by settlers and settler governments. The Piscataway Indian Nation also has a long history in this area and continues to maintain a relationship with the lands surrounding Baltimore. Along with the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, the Piscataway Indian Nation received recognition by the State of Maryland in 2012.

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We acknowledge the social, physical, spiritual, and kinship relationships this land continues to share with Indigenous nations of the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay; we acknowledge that these relationships have been displaced, damaged, and dispelled by colonists’ insatiable thirst for acquisition and domination. We acknowledge a place out of balance with its true purpose in being. We acknowledge our occupation of Susquehannock and Picataway lands. We acknowledge the continuing presence of Indigenous nations, and the shelter and nourishment that this place continues to provide all Native peoples who live here today. We acknowledge our responsibility to Indigenous nations to repair unhealthy relationships and to steward all life. When Soul Soil Collective Farm is able to buy legal access to land, we will provide material reparations to Native peoples who have been displaced from that land via land tax. We will pursue epistemic and environmental justice -- seeking to center relationally-based and Indigenous knowledge and life ways that have been suppressed through colonial capitalism -- through consensual reparative relationships with local Indigenous organizations and groups.

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