KAREN WASHINGTON
Karen Washington has been at the forefront of the food justice movement since 1985, fighting for healthy food and community gardens.
In 2023 Karen shared the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the James Beard Foundation with her Black Farmer Fund co-founder Olivia Watkins. Sensing the need for a space where Black farmers could share stories and ideas, in 2010 she co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGs) to support Black farmers in urban and rural settings. Ebony magazine named her one of the 100 most influential African Americans in 2012. “I think people of color are starting to see the food and farming as a new revolution for them.”
LORRIE CLEVENGER
“What does it feel like to be able to provide food for myself and others? It feels like real freedom. There’s something that shifts whenever you learn to do something that builds the sense of security and the ability to just determine your own fate.”
— Lorrie Clevenger
MICHAELA HAYES-HODGE
“I think it’s important that we’re all farming together and I think it’s important that people see us all farming together. That there are women, that there are people of color, that [there] are queer people in the agricultural world, and that people coming from a social justice place are the people who are gonna start to build the change that the food system needs.”
— Michaela Hayes-Hodge
JANE HAYES-HODGE
“When people can control their own food, they have so much control over
everything else about their lives. And once they lose that control over
where their food is coming from, they lose so much. They lose their
communities, they lose their health, they lose their money.”
— Jane Hayes-Hodge
