Radical Change is Not Only our Desire- It is Our Mandate.

By Dara Cooper, NBFJA Co-Founder and Executive Director (2016-2021)

As we end a year of incredible progress, transitions and evolutions, including our own transitions at the Alliance, I am sitting with what it means to carry the profound responsibility of radical and revolutionary change that this Alliance set out to hold. 

Radical change is not only our desire- it is our mandate.  It is our imperative.  Over the years, I’ve learned that if we are committed to this mandate, it must mean we understand this struggle is long haul so we must pace ourselves. It means we engage in a dual strategy of working to address the urgency of our people’s collective needs by resisting the incessant attacks against us while simultaneously building the nourishing, care-based systems, economies and institutions we know our people deserve. 

Radical change means we must collectively carry the load (“Men anpil, chay pa lou” - Kreyol proverb from Ayiti). This helps prevent burnout from individuals that may suffer from overcompensating when the load is too heavy and the hands are too few. Carrying the collective load - together- also helps ensure we disrupt patriarchal gender dynamics that normalize a culture of women shouldering so much of the work while charismatic male leaders get credit for individually leading entire movements.

This era and generation of protest has generously gifted us with the better sense to tell a much different, more accurate story about how real movements are actually quite leaderful. There are many voices and ideas and approaches and offerings from all genders and ages and birth place origins and abilities that actually make movements meaningful. Our intergenerational brilliance and commitment to making sure that ALL Black people— queer, trans, gender nonconforming, disabled, young, elder, urban, rural— are free is one of my greatest sources of pride in our movement.  And there is space—and a necessity—for ALL of our brilliance and leadership. 

In this pacing, this long haul struggle, we know we also need to care for ourselves and each other. Let us delight in the pleasures of the world we are fighting for today. Let us pause each morning in gratitude, make space for meditation and intentionality, make sure to breeeathe, move our bodies, make sure we drink water, nourish ourselves with real food- delicious food- grown by real farmers and land stewards, drink more water, and make sure we are getting the rest our bodies need and deserve. Let us touch the earth regularly somehow (plant, compost, or just touch the ground at least once a day.) Let us commit to regularly check on each other and our elders. Regularly. Let us never forget about each other.

And finally- let us always be identifying, building up, teaching, mentoring and nourishing the next generation of leaders, freedom fighters, land stewards, farmers and organizers who will continue to nourish and fight for our children’s children. In order for us to achieve the meaningful long term victories our people deserve— that delicious, nourishing future for all our people— we must not set the next generation up to have to reinvent any wheels or strategies. Let us set them up properly to take advantage of our intergenerational insights and lessons, to be able to pick up the relay baton and carry our victory forward.

As one of our fearless member leaders Germaine Jenkins of Fresh Future Farm once said in our recent policy workgroup meeting “Victory is certain because we are interwoven.” 

Let us lean on each other as we collectively carry this movement forward.

I am SO proud of our transition process, our team, our modeling and the incredible new leadership of this Alliance. Cultivating a culture of care while maintaining the rigor, discipline and revolutionary fervor of what our people and our movement need and deserve. 

In the words of my comrade Moe Mitchell, let us forever commit to “Low ego + high impact,” fam. 

And in the words of Assata Shakur, “Carry it on.”

A luta continua.