March 16, 2019
9am - 3:30pm
With a GF/DF lunch included

Registration form: https://goo.gl/forms/RFUbQmXvuPm8JhOY2

The justice and agriculture working group of the Young Farmer Network is putting together a day of storytelling at the Southside Cultural Center, focused on the history of the land we are farming.

The central question we ask is: "Why does it matter for people who work + live on this land to know and tell its history?” And we seek the courage and the practical skills to dig deeper for the truths of how we got here.

The morning portion will be a panel of storytellers from a few perspectives— Lorèn Spears, a Narragansett educator from the Tomaquag Museum, local historian Tim Cranston, who writes in the South County Independent newspaper about his studies of history here, and Prof. Christy Clark-Pujara, author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. The conversation will be moderated by the organizing farmers, and will focus on how these histories overlap, and how they reverberate in our daily lives on and off “the land,” and how we can actively share them.

The afternoon portion will be a workshop led by Tim and the moderators— participants will break up into small groups aimed at helping people practice telling their own land stories (familial, national, personal, ancestral), plus learning research techniques so that we can become better educators for when people visit our farms, homes, and neighborhoods.

Midway through the day will be a GF/DF potluck lunch prepared by the organizing farmers.
The event is open to the public— if you're able to support this event financially, please consider making a donation of $1-$40. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Storytelling is our most ancient art— it is a sacred way for histories to be maintained and passed along. Telling the histories we hold in our bodies, and the histories held in the land, is vital to the preservation and passing along of wisdom and forms of resilience, and to healing from past trauma. Our hope is that everyone present will leave this day with a sense of themselves as history holders, and with an inner mandate to learn more about the story of their specific farms, ecosystem, homes, and families.


We are grateful to our sponsors and collaborators for helping to bring this event into reality -
= the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism
= a Local Agriculture and Seafood Act (LASA) Grant, made possible through RI state funding and generous contributions from the Van Beuren Charitable Foundation, Henry P. Kendall Foundation, and Rhode Island Foundation, with matching funds from the State of Rhode Island
= the Southside Cultural Center of Rhode Island