Notes from the 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge

MFT is part of Food Solutions New England (FSNE), a regional collaborative network with goals to support a New England food system that drives healthy food for all, racial equity, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities. As part of the ongoing work to center conversations about the role of racism in our food system, FSNE hosts a 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge every April. Participants in the challenge receive a daily email with readings, videos, and other resources around a topic related to race and equity. Some MFT staff have participated in previous years, and this year a group of eight staff convened a discussion group to talk through the readings and our experiences during the challenge.

Our staff learned a lot through the challenge—both personally and professionally,—and finished the Challenge with lots of thoughts, and many more questions than answers. If you’re interested in learning more about how race intersects with food and farming, we highly recommend signing up for next year’s Challenge (which will be March 30-April 19, 2020), or moving through the prompts from 2019, which can be found here. There are also many other resources on FSNE’s page.

Here are a few of our staff’s favorite, most thought-provoking resources from this year’s Challenge:

• The Seeing White podcast
• How Racism Has Shaped the American Farming Landscape
• Dismantling Racism in the Food System
• Why We Can’t Separate Justice and Sustainability in the Food System
• The Real Story of Racism at the USDA
• Map of Native Land
• What it means to live on stolen land
• Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
• Decolonizing Wealth
• Voices of the Food Chain
• List of unproductive meeting behaviors and common reactions by white people
• Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization