8/14/2020 Foundry Giving Friday: The 40 Acres & A Mule Project

• Posted on 14 August 2020
• Posted in Foundry Giving Friday
• 0

Every Friday The Foundry Home Goods donates 5% of our total sales to a different community-nominated small-and-mighty cause. This Friday's Foundry Giving Friday recipient? The 40 Acres & A Mule Project!

The 40 Acres & A Mule Project is a campaign dedicated to establishing land sovereignty for Black farmers, with money going directly to the purchase of arable land to be Black-owned and farmed. Started by Adrian Lipscombe, one of the very few Black restaurant owners in the Coulee Regional area in Wisconsin, the fund takes its name from the U.S. government's post-Civil-War-era "40 acres and a mule" reparations provision, a promise of land ownership to formerly enslaved peoples. As Adrian says: "The significance of this promise to Black people was to present a conduit not only to be free, but also to own land and be integrated as a part of the fabric of the United States to achieve a more equal footing. Freedom, land ownership, and the means to prosper were seen as a significant pathway to empowerment by enabling African Americans to be a part of the economy, create businesses, and community." 

Like so many promises made, this one has yet to be honored. On the contrary, Black land ownership has been systematically and almost militantly divested: between 1910 and 1997, Black farmers "lost" ~90% of land they owned, in comparison, White farmers "lost" ~2%. By investing in the re-appropriation of land itself, and by putting the power of reparations into our hands, The 40 Acres & A Mule Project is dedicated to empowering Black farmers through land ownership and education, to enshrine and preserve Black foodways, and to recognize and celebrate the potent ongoing power of Black culture in food and farming. Fall down a beautiful, nourishing, infuriating rabbit hole @40AcresProject.

We are pleased and proud to support this excellent Midwest-based campaign this Foundry Giving Friday! If you don't need anything from us, consider supporting them directly  If you DO find yourself in need of beeswax or bulk supplies, know that your purchase goes to support good change happening on the community level.

Thanks to Susannah for the stellar nomination!

If YOU have a worthy cause to nominate for our Foundry Giving Friday initiative, pop on over to our Nomination Page and drop us a line. We're all in this together.