NOC Stands in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter

NOC is heartbroken and outraged at the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others who have been unjustly and violently killed by the police. We stand in solidarity with people who are organizing and protesting to hold the police and institutions accountable for systemic racism and oppression. 

As NOC, we acknowledge our own privilege, as currently mostly white people who have had access to education and were born in the United States. We acknowledge the institutional racism that has formed our current agricultural landscape and food system, robbed indigenous peoples and other people of color of their land, enslaved and systematically disenfranchised people of color, and continues to impact people’s relationships with their food, their communities, their access to land, their relationship to agriculture, and with one another as individuals. 

As a coalition, we are prioritizing racial equity in our organization and strategies, and have committed to listen, understand, learn, amplify, work, and act to address and dismantle systemic racism. We invite you to read NOC’s full racial equity statement - a work in progress - here. 

We are grateful for the resources our coalition is using to grow - here are some of them we encourage you to read:

  1. Farming While Black, Leah Penniman https://www.farmingwhileblack.org/ 

  2. The Great Land Robbery - The Shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/ 

  3. National Young Farmers Coalition Racial Equity Toolkit: https://www.youngfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Racial_Equity_Toolkit.pdf 

  4. Food Solutions Northeast Racial Equity Challenge Resources: https://foodsolutionsne.org/racial-equity-challenge-resources/ 

  5. Want to See Food and Land Justice for Black Americans? Support These Groups. https://civileats.com/2020/06/02/want-to-see-food-and-land-justice-for-black-americans-support-these-groups/

    Find a growing list of resources we are learning from here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ncYsoIj503oBCqVd4zZ9C2ta5I1GvoozCJB2u7WdZoE/edit#heading=h.o0e7kr8gzuox 

If you have any questions or comments about NOC’s racial equity work, please reach out.

We are grateful and proud of NOC Member Organizations’ statements of solidarity, and commitment to racial justice. Here are some of their racial justice and solidarity statements:

Alice Runde