Relationships & Reciprocity Program
The Relationships and Reciprocity (RR) program carries out the NEFOC-LT vision by actionably prioritizing reciprocal relationships with land, community partners, external partners, and non-human kin. Guided by our vision and continuously evolving values and principles, in collaboration with NEFOC-LT’s Co-directors, community of organizers, and staff, the RR program is contributing to the co-creation of a community of holistic, celebratory, polyculture of Land-based Practice that reciprocally sustains each other and will continue to do so for generations. This co-creation ensures the RR program can develop, maintain, evolve, and compost the resources, structures, systems, and processes required to build and steward the reciprocal relationships required to manifest and maintain a kin-centered, BIPOC-led regional land trust. The core of the RR program considers how we can be in reciprocal relationship with the land and each other through ancestral, relational, and technical/transformational approaches.
Contact Email: reciprocity@nefoclandtrust.org
The RR program is where NEFOC begins its journey with potential partners, funders, allies, and siblings and includes:
Indigenous Reciprocity & Partnerships: We are building relational bridges between our communities with First Nations whose lands we currently occupy, partnering through reciprocity leading to stonger BIPOC land relationships and cross-cultural partnerships.
Communications: Stories are the key creating containers for historical memory, knowledge dissemination, and ancestral practice. The RR program holds and tells multi-lingual stories, communicating to our networks, partners, and resourcers about our work in the world.
Relational Bridging: We connect people with land. Through projects and events that build solidarity, transform conflict, and bring values-aligned land-based community together we are creating a critical mass of community aimed at healing relationships on land, with our ancestors both internally and externally.
Reparations Map: The Northeast Farmers of Color Network calls for reparations to heal the injustices of a food system built on stolen land and labor. We demand land, resources, and financial support to reclaim sovereignty, cultivate healthy food, steward ancestral homelands, and promote reconciliation. Through the Reparations Map, you can directly support BIPOC farm projects. Please respect their privacy and avoid unsolicited contact. We are currently working on a new map project that will respect farmer’s privacy and safety and tell their stories in a richer and more robust way. If you’d like to offer reparations support to a farmer in your area, please reach out directly and we will connect you!
Land Stewardship Planning and Biocultural Re-storyation: We are building towards developing advocacy for and partnership on the development of equitable land stewardship planning, grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge, that incorporates instead of excludes human and non-human relationships, centered on the restoration of ecosystems and re-storyation of cross-cultural land-based relationships.