NESAWG reflects on last month's A Regional Imperative webinar and report

In January 2022, Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG) and Community Food Funders hosted a webinar to release an updated report on regional food systems written by two long-time NESAWG participants who are white. BIPOC attendees brought up concerns during the webinar about the webinar’s orientation toward and treatment of racial justice. Attendees noted that they couldn’t find racial justice specifically mentioned in the report’s table of contents; that the composition of the panelists did not reflect the racial diversity they had assumed and that they expect from NESAWG; that the report and the webinar glossed over, excluded, and factually misrepresented BIPOC history and present-day experiences. We heard these concerns loud and clear, and we agree. We were dismayed that this program and process fell short of our values.

I n addition to the authors, most of the paper’s collaborators, reviewers, and funders were also white. This lack of racial diversity, as well as subject matter expertise in race as it relates to the food system, contributed to a report that did not meet the expectations of NESAWG network participants or current NESAWG staff and board. The report’s authors and most of their collaborators’ lack of direct experience with racism and lack of critical analysis of its systemic effects was apparent in both the finished report and the related webinar, and the treatment of racial equity as it relates to regional food systems– and as a result, all the other topics addressed in their paper– suffered as a result. In all of our other programming, NESAWG intentionally seeks to center presenters, topics, and experts speaking from positions of first-hand knowledge as well as holding analyses grounded in racial equity. We also recognize that those most affected by food systems’ harms must lead the solutions. Further, we hold racism and white supremacy as central food systems issues; we know they are inextricable parts of all other food and agriculture issues, and must be dismantled if we are to build a more just food system. These core values were not adhered to in the report and webinar that was just released under NESAWG’s name. 

This report was a legacy project that was authorized in 2018. At the time, our organization put forward a very different analysis and approach to racial equity work under leadership that has almost entirely transitioned. There is a distinction between where we were as an organization when this project was greenlit and where we are today, when the product was presented as finished. While our internal conversations in 2018 laid the groundwork for the progress we’ve made, the dissonance between NESAWG then and NESAWG now was jarring to us all.

However, we still authorized this project and allowed it to proceed for three years, then organized and promoted the webinar, ignoring the racial equity analysis and rigor in shaping this project that we do in our other work. We did not revise the scope of work to place racial equity at the center, as we might have. When the authors failed to recruit collaborators of color, we didn’t challenge or pause the project. We did not question presenting the webinar, although we failed to do our due diligence and review the paper in advance. We are sorry we failed to question this process at any step and that we allowed our platform to be used in a way that doesn’t represent our organization in its current iteration nor the network that we build with. 

We’ve identified power dynamics between a long-time board and a relatively new (at the time) director, fear of alienating important people in NESAWG’s history, and lack of capacity to more closely support this project as some of the factors that enabled its continued progress down a path misaligned with our values. Even the process of trying to move forward from the webinar has illuminated growing pains, unearthed new learnings, and sparked internal debate about how to proceed. We had to navigate tensions between upholding our values, pushing a critical analysis, and prioritizing accountability to the BIPOC communities within our network, and our fear of what would happen if we made a decision that some people, even people foundational to NESAWG’s past trajectory, wouldn’t like. It is not our intention to hurt feelings, but we do need to hold true to our values and name analyses as wrong when we see them as such, and unfortunately some will not agree with us as we affirm our own analysis. In failing to center racial equity, the report and webinar put forward a view of regionalism that undervalues BIPOC people’s foundational role of shaping the northeast region’s agricultural and food systems, and lost an opportunity to recommend strategies that strengthen our regional food system for everyone by making agriculture more equitable for BIPOC farmers and communities. We disagree with the report’s findings, and will not be hosting it as a NESAWG project. 

As we continue to operationalize our equity work, we uncover old vestiges and practices of white supremacy that must be uprooted. While we may not get it right every time, we are committed as a board and staff to making it right when we fall short. We are putting in place matrices and checks to ensure future programming is filtered through our values before we agree to devote institutional time, resources, or our platform to a potential project. We are committing to exercising our leadership in favor of racial and social justice, even when and if we are afraid of voicing opposing viewpoints from people we respect and who hold prestige in our sector. 

To begin to repair some of the harm done, we will be hosting a follow-up network chat to discuss our learnings and commitments moving forward from this experience. We will follow this with additional programming that explores regionalism from perspectives centered in anti-racist analysis and BIPOC experiences; details about both of these projects will be forthcoming, and will be publicized on nesawg.org. During and beyond these sessions, we will be seeking feedback particularly from frontline BIPOC communities and organizations. We are also receptive to and grateful for feedback from BIPOC network participants and/or organizations in 1:1 conversations; please reach out to nicole@nesawg.org to speak to her or a board member with feedback or concerns about the webinar report, our handling of it, or general feedback about NESAWG’s current direction or approach. 

Signed,

NESAWG board and staff

If you want more information on the event that precipitated this response, please visit this site with a recording and synopsis.

Join NESAWG for a network conversation
Save the date: April 27th, 4-6pm

In January 2022, a legacy project that culminated in a report and webinar was presented to the NESAWG community and met with backlash for failing to center BIPOC perspectives and anti-racist analyses. Since then, we’ve been working to unpack what NESAWG could have done differently in overseeing this project, reflecting on our growth and lessons learned, and navigating tensions in honoring NESAWG’s past while building with the communities we reflect in the present. 

Join us as we discuss these issues in a conversational format, and share your reactions, insights, and questions for us in our treatment of the situation as well as our trajectory and overall approach. 

Register here! 

More details coming soon!