Nishiki Maredia is an Austin, TX based retail professional and a prolific social justice activist and organizer. Her family owns and manages Marigold Market Cafe in Southwest Austin (https://www.instagram.com/marigoldmarketcafe/), a suburban grocery store that caters to a community that craves convenient, trendy and ethically produced foods and beverages. Like many grocery establishments, Marigold Market belongs to a business services cooperative that creates efficiencies and connections for its stakeholders. Nishiki’s efforts to make Austin a more just and inclusive community include organizing with Sunrise Austin (https://www.instagram.com/sunriseatx/), Austin Mutual Aid, DefundAPD, ATX Free Fridge Project, Protect Montopolis, The 2020 ATX Winter Help Guide (https://docs.google.com/document/d/19HgBCE5hUDZFgaHwykSRrcezAbMuOzsR_mfRPWf0bCs/edit ), as well as the Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential Campaign. Follow Nishiki at https://www.instagram.com/nishikimaredia/ .

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From https://www.chicagofoodpolicy.com/our-staff : Ma’raj Sheikh is a daughter of immigrants, descendent of liberation leaders, and a Castanea Fellow. Land, food, and justice are in her blood. Ma’raj has worked across many areas of food system development including soil bioremediation, bioenergy, stakeholder relations, consulting in the edible insect industry, and advancing racial equity in land, food, and water access. As a National Science Foundation Fellow, Ma’raj moved to Iowa from Southern California to learn about industrial agriculture from the belly of the beast - studying Sustainable Agriculture and Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University. Prior to starting at CFPAC in January of 2020, Ma’raj served as Director of Equity and Community Engagement at Community GroundWorks (now Rooted), where her work focused on improving stable land tenure for Hmong refugee farmers and leading Gardens Network, a partnership with the City of Madison and UW-Extension, that provides support services to a member base of 65+ community gardens across Dane County, WI.

From https://www.chicagofoodpolicy.com/services : CFPAC co-develops, facilitates, advocates for, and supports implementation of policies that advance food justice and food sovereignty in Chicago and across the region. CFPAC envisions a food system where all Chicagoans, regardless of race, class, gender, and/or social identity, have the right to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through community-driven, ecologically regenerative, and economically viable processes. The Council recognizes the history and modern maintenance of structural racism in Chicago and across the country that have led to massive inequities in land access, food business ownership, food security, and political power along lines of racial identity. CFPAC works to address these inequities and dismantle racist structures in the food system by building local political power, supporting frontline workers throughout the food system, and facilitating Black/Brown partnerships and understanding.

Donate: https://chicagofoodpolicy.z2systems.com/np/clients/chicagofoodpolicy/donation.jsp?campaign=1&

“ It is very hard to start farming if you don’t come from privilege, if you don’t have those financial resources or social safety net and that’s a huge barrier, especially for people of color, to get into farming. That’s really something we need to figure as a society, how to fix that.”

From https://www.farmshareaustin.org : Michelle Akindiya caught the farming bug in 2005 when she left a theatre career in Chicago for an internship on a farm in Southern Wisconsin. She continued her farmer training with Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) and the Michael Fields Institute, while managing a CSA farm and vineyard outside of Chicago. Returning to Austin in 2009, she worked with Gabriel Valley Farms and managed the urban farms at the Monument Cafe in Georgetown,TX. Michelle loves the endless learning opportunities inherent to farming, and she loves to share her passion for sustainable growing with the community and is excited to nurture a new crop of farmers. The mission of Farmshare Austin is to grow a healthy local food community by increasing food access, teaching new farmers and preserving farmland. With the help of there supporters, Farmshare Austin has begun to make a visible impact in the greater Austin area: The Farmer Starter class is full of dynamic students poised to become the next generation of organic farmers. Fresh for Less Mobile Markets and Curbside Delivery are bringing affordable, fresh, healthy food to Austin and Travis County. Farmshare Land Link connects landowners with growers & farmers looking for land.

Donate: https://www.farmshareaustin.org/support

Please note: The Checkout Host and Co-Founder Errol Schweizer was a Board Member of Farmshare Austin from 2014-2017, and is still a big fan.

From https://www.benjaminlorr.net/bio/: BENJAMIN LORR is the author of The Secret Life of Groceries, an expose of the dark underbelly of the American food industry, and Hell-Bent, a critically acclaimed exploration of the Bikram Yoga community that first detailed patterns of abuse and sexual misconduct by guru Bikram Choudhury. Lorr is a graduate of Montgomery County public schools and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

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“Black folk can’t go into any other space and enjoy the autonomy they do in the Black church… it’s a powerful incubator space. ”

From https://www.heberbrown.com/about and https://blackchurchfoodsecurity.net : Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III is a Community Organizer, Social Entrepreneur, Base Builder, and Network Weaver and Senior Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the Founding Director of Orita’s Cross Freedom School. Based on the Freedom Schools of the 1960's, Dr. Brown works to reconnect Black youth to their African heritage while providing them hands-on learning opportunities to spark their creative genius and build vocational skills. In 2015 he launched the Black Church Food Security Network a multi-state alliance of congregations working together to inspire health, wealth and power in the Black Community. The BCFSN accomplishes this by partnering with historically African American churches to establish gardens on church-owned land and cultivates partnerships with African American farmers to create a grassroots, community-led food system. Dr. Brown's dedication to service has been widely recognized. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Ella Baker Freedom Fighter Award and The Afro American Newspaper’s “25 Under 40 Emerging Black History Leaders” award. In 2018, Baltimore Magazine named him a Visionary of the City and the Baltimore City Office of Civil Rights presented him with their Food Justice Award. In 2019, he received the coveted Emerging Leaders Award from the Claneil Foundation and has presented and lectured at many institutions of higher learning including Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), Drew Theological School, Wake Forest School of Divinity, and the Black Theological Leadership Institute at Princeton Theological Seminary.

​The Black Church Food Security Network utilizes an asset-based approach in organizing and linking the vast resources of historically African American congregations in rural and urban communities to advancing food and land sovereignty. They are on a mission to organize the strength and focus the assets of the Black Church toward advancing health (physical and spiritual), economic opportunity and self-determination in the African American community.

To Donate or support the BCFSN: https://blackchurchfoodsecurity.net/donate/

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“ It’s a tragedy to rob Organic of it’s proud history to imagine that it is new, an innovation of the West. ”

From https://www.farmingwhileblack.org/team and https://www.soulfirefarm.org : Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. Leah holds an MA in Science Education and BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun. Leah has been farming since 1996 and teaching since 2002. Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Their food sovereignty programs reach over 10,000 people each year, including farmer training for Black and Brown growers, reparations and land return initiatives for northeast farmers, food justice workshops for urban youth, home gardens for city-dwellers living under food apartheid, doorstep harvest delivery for food insecure households, and systems and policy education for public decision-makers.

Indispensable resources from Soul Fire Farm:

https://www.soulfirefarm.org/media/publications/

https://www.soulfirefarm.org/portfolio-items/food-sovereignty-action-steps/

https://www.soulfirefarm.org/portfolio-items/equity-guidelines/

https://www.soulfirefarm.org/media/farming-while-black/

Take Action:

Policy demands: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/get-involved/take-action/

Reparations: https://m4bl.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Reparations-Now-Toolkit-FINAL.pdf

Fairness for Farmworkers Act: https://www.harris.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Fairness%20for%20Farm%20Workers%20Act%20One%20Pager.pdf

Justice for Black Farmers Act: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/11/black-farmers-have-been-robbed-of-land-a-new-bill-would-give-them-a-quantum-leap-toward-justice/?fbclid=IwAR1unD-AUvcnYkDBkV2dHBVxUyyiaZS8NtpYTq1O490XAqucUMT3yznQVu4

More on George Washington Carver: https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/george-washington-carvers-legacy-went-beyond-peanuts

Donate: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/support/

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“I use the philosophy of cooking in two worlds, having that ancestral memory but with the modern techniques, with the modern times.”

From https://www.yazziethechef.com: Brian Yazzie (a.k.a. Yazzie the Chef) is a Diné Chef from Dennehotso, Arizona which is located on the Northeastern part of the Navajo Nation. He currently resides in Saint Paul, MN and has a degree in Associate of Applied Science (AAS) in Culinary Arts from Saint Paul College. Yazzie focuses on bringing together hyper-local indigenous ingredients from the streams, rivers, and forests to revitalize healthy indigenous cuisine.

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“ We can create a system that understands essential work should be paid as such, that if you risk your life to take care of society, you should be paid more.”

From https://www.cristinatzintzun.org: Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez founded and led two of Texas’ largest voting and civil rights organizations: Jolt, a Texas-wide organization focused on energizing the Latino vote, and Workers Defense Project (WDP), winning the passage of local and state laws protecting the rights of hundreds of thousands of workers. Cristina is a former 2020 US Senate candidate. She was named “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living Magazine and her work has been featured on NPR, Vogue, The New York Times, MTV, USA Today, Univision, MSNBC’s Up Late with Alec Baldwin, among others.

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We started The Checkout for a few reasons. One, we are food industry lifers and wanted to do a show about food from an insider’s perspective. Two, we felt we needed to center the efforts of working class and BIPOC folks on the frontlines. Three, there is so much injustice and inequity in the food industry and we need to change that. And four, we feel a deep sense of love and solidarity with our colleagues and want to recognize and give a voice to the work they do everyday of the year to feed the world. We hope you enjoy The Checkout and this interview with Ray Latif on Taste Radio.

“Our mission is to create a rank and file democracy of essential workers… to get enough workforce behind us that we have more power than Congress itself…

“Until we have enough power to tell Amazon or any employer we’re not going to work unless you meet our demands.”

From tcoew.org : The Congress of Essential Workers (T.C.O.E.W.) is a collective of essential workers and allies across the United States coming together under a common goal: to support each other in a fight for better working conditions, better wages, and a better world. T.C.O.E.W. was founded by Chris Smalls, a former Amazon warehouse manager who was fired by the company after organizing a protest against the company’s abysmal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has put hundreds of thousands of workers at risk without proper PPE and social distancing regulations.

The TCOEW Vision:

A living wageAll workers are shareholdersJob securityPaid sick leave and hazard pay at full pay rate Free healthcareNo wage cap1-hour lunch breaksPPE to be provided at all timesChildcareMonthly bonuses

To support Chris Smalls: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-chris-smalls-who-was-fired-by-amazon

For more info: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/dear-jeff-bezos-amazon-instead-of-firing-me-protect-your-workers-from-coronavirus , https://twitter.com/Shut_downAmazon and https://tcoew.org/about/

Which side are YOU on?

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