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In collaboration with The Farmers Market Coalition (FMC), Black food system leaders and experts recently released a Toolkit to help farmers market managers improve the farmers market experience for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
The Toolkit is intended to help farmers market managers put anti-racist concepts and practices to action in their farmers markets. The Toolkit’s creators argue that the resource is needed to address various problems in society, including climate action and economic justice.
Working on the Toolkit “was an opportunity to bring in my roots from the food system into this space as well as an expanded understanding of how community functions and what’s needed for creating places of belonging,” Sagdrina Jalal, lead facilitator of the Toolkit, says in a recent webinar.
It has four categories. The management section provides guidance on assessing the current climate of markets and enacting positive changes. The second section helps managers evaluate the market’s mission so that underserved communities feel welcomed and included. The messaging section focuses on developing and disseminating communication materials that promote equity and inclusion. And the final section, focused on measurement, establishes methods for quantifying the Toolkit’s impact across all four categories.
Black food system leaders and market managers worked together to put the anti-racist Toolkit together. Jalal praises FMC for making space for the Black leaders who created the Toolkit “to show up authentically and to really create a body of work that is not only applicable to farmers market but is culturally relevant.”
FMC will continue to promote the Toolkit to farmers market managers and encourage people to engage with its content through workshops, webinars, and conference presentations.
They hope that the Toolkit will spark conversation among farmers market managers that leads to a reckoning with inequality and the ways systemic racism impacts Black communities in the context of the farmers markets.
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Photo courtesy of Dane Deaner, Unsplash
Adam Sella is a Senior at Harvard, graduating with a degree in Comparative Literature and Philosophy and a citation in Arabic language. On campus, he is part of the Food Literacy Project and he has spent his summers working on a farm and in a restaurant. Adam is interested in sustainable cooking practices and environmental peace building. In his free time, you can find Adam cooking or baking for his friends and family or training for marathons and triathlons.
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