Jumping Fences – understanding and addressing the barriers to access to land for agroecological farming for Black people and people of colour (BPOC) in Britain. A new collaboration with Ecological Land Cooperative and the Landworkers Alliance. Jumping Fences’ purpose is to identify the barriers that BPOC face when considering a land based livelihood in Britain, to map existing and prospective BPOC led land-based businesses and organisations and to discover what challenges they face and how they seek to overcome them.

In the summer of 2021 Land In Our Names were invited by the Assemble team to renovate the garden and make it a functional space that can host workshops, events and create a space to grow food and herbs. We were also asked to curate a series of workshops and events in the Annetta garden over the summer and we centred BPOC, women and queer LGBTQIA+ people within these events.

We opened applications on August 20th and closed them September 12th. There were a total of 334 applications, requesting a total of £191,200. Originally, we had a meagre £36,000 to distribute, but the panellists secured an additional £15,000 while assessing the applications. Unfortunately, there was still a £131,200 excess over what was available. We ask funders and large organisations - what will you do? We hope this article demonstrates the urgent need to find sustainable, long-term ways of supporting BPOC growers and our communities. That there is a role for you in redressing imbalances in ways that smaller organisations cannot.

We are incredibly happy to announce that we will be redistributing over £29,000 in grants to Black people and people of colour who are either interested in getting into growing, investing in their already established allotment or back garden, investing in their learning and training or their projects/businesses. We have different grants available for Black growers and growers of colour to either take that first step or have that helping hand.

Rootz into Food Growing is a collaboration project between Ubele, OrganicLea, Black Rootz, Land In Our Names (LION). It is a 15 month programme (November 2020 – February 2022).

The project aims to more clearly identify, understand, plan and implement a series of interventions which subsequently reduce barriers to entry into the social enterprise growing system and begin to identify appropriate land for commercial food growing purposes.