A nonprofit aimed at serving Black Portlanders is hoping to restore that community’s control of their own food supply.
The mission of Black Futures Farm (BFF) is to repair the relationship between Black people and the land as part of what’s called the Black food sovereignty movement. BFF is a program of a nonprofit called the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition and fiscally sponsored by another nonprofit, called Know Agenda Foundation.
BFF is located on the grounds of the Learning Gardens Lab at SE Duke and 60th in the Brentwood-Darlington Neighborhood. The 1.15 acres is home to 17 fruit trees, along with vegetables, flowers, and medicinal and cooking herbs.
The farm is tended to by mostly the co-founders and co-directors, Malcolm Hoover and Mirabai Collins, who were married last year on the site. Other Black identified/Diasporic and Continental African people have worked on the farm in the past, Hoover said. But the coronavirus pandemic caused the organization to have to downsize its staff, so it is currently about 80% run by Hoover and Collins, he said.
