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Seeds of Liberation is an organization centered on communal learning and empowerment. We serve Black and Indigenous people through education on African diasporic history, collective liberation strategies, and land-based practices. Culturally rooted education is critical to the mission of SOL as we aim to rightfully frame the concepts of environmentalism, sovereignty, abolition, and political action outside the terms of white supremacy. We continue the work of establishing culturally rooted land-based education, reconnecting our communities to the land, and uprooting the prejudiced terms of traditional environmentalism by moving towards ecologies of care armed with the knowledge of self, history, and community.
Seeds of Liberation is an organization centered on communal learning and empowerment. We serve Black and Indigenous people through education on African diasporic history, collective liberation strategies, and land-based practices.
Our logo incorporates natural, culturally relevant elements that symbolize these parts of our mission. The sun represents life and power. The bottle gourd symbolizes the carrying of knowledge as our ancestors, and cultures globally use them for long-term storage and transportation. The seeds are our knowledge.
Throughout our website are depictions of just some of the seeds indigenous to Africa and critical to African diasporic foodways including rice, okra and black-eyed peas. These crops were essential to supporting the meager diets of our enslaved ancestors in the Americas and retaining our traditional agricultural techniques and culinary dishes. They are a powerful representation of our connection to each other across oceans, languages and time. Countless folk tales, historical records and family histories across the diaspora recount how these seeds and crops supported our liberation from acts of marronage to agricultural enterprise. Like the seeds themselves, the knowledge for growing, preserving and cooking them has been and still is passed down, reminding us of our inherited efforts for liberation and sovereignty.
Mission
Seeds of Liberation offers educational experiences in community agriculture and environmental studies through an African diasporic lens. We do this to support our community’s rematriation to nature and self. Our work is always in partnership with other organizations leading this work so we can cultivate stronger relationships together.
Vision
SOL supports the ongoing fights for food and land sovereignty for global Indigenous and Black communities. We help cultivate healing, understanding and worldmaking possibilities for our cultural and local communities by sharing connections across cultures and experiences. We hope to expand our work to include more experiential learning programs and community-developed projects representing our representing our movements.
Lex is a farmer, scientist, educator, organizer, and storyteller informed by their family’s history as African farmers, enslaved African laborers, and sharecroppers of the American South. They grew up in their mothers’ kitchens and gardens learning the relationships of Black foodways and land-based work and continue to engage this legacy at Sankofa Community Farm. Their call to this work is rooted in the reclamation of African diasporic agricultural roots as it is essential to maintaining our identities and the stewardship of our lands.
Akilah is a community-based researcher and social scientist, educator and student, organizer, and storyteller driven by their experience of being a Queer first generation Jamaican-American raised in South Florida, Florida. School years were spent in the states experiencing what it means to be Black in America, while summers were spent being Jamaican in Jamaica and feeling at home in the sea, rivers, waterfalls, and mountains. Driven by this, Akilah works to strengthen communities’ connections to their land in culturally sensitive ways. Their current role is at The Academy of Natural Sciences where they coordinate Science Shop, a community-based participatory research program, and are developing a program to address urban farming, and land stewardship issues in Philadelphia.
Amna is a Sudanese-born Philadelphia-native. She works in global health and is driven by intersectional global health issues. She currently is involved in anti-GBV and HIV prevention work in Zambia. She is the creator of Seeds of Liberation’s website and maintains the site.