Where preserving and expressing our culture is an act of resistance to the constant pressure of erasure, Wildseeds Fund supports work that centers cultural organizing. Rather than community organizing from a place of deficit, we strive to lift-up a counter narrative rooted in community cultural wealth and capacity. We seek out grantee partners whose approach is strategic, generative and builds power through art, ritual, story, and celebration. Our Impact Media Award highlights media makers transforming the food media landscape through strategic cultural narratives. Our grantmaking has always supported leaders, such as the following two examples, who inspire people to think differently about their relationship to the food system and to get involved in community-level change.

The Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust (PPLT), is a tribally-led non-profit dedicated to reconnecting communities of American Indian tribes, clans, Urban Indians, and indigenous people across the Northeast. PPLT offers the Indigenous Roots Forever program that is a tribal community micro-farming initiative developed by the Indigenous People’s Network of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The program is led by Rocky Johnson, a Narragansett Indian. It serves marginalized BIPOC communities in Rhode Island and Connecticut by teaching people how to grow their own medicine through herbs, fruits and vegetables. In 2024, PPLT launched a video series about Indigenous Roots Forever.

La Semilla Food Center, stewards 12 acres of farmland with one acre of this land serving as an embodiment of farming practices and community education services that exemplify community-led, healthy, climate-change-adaptive, and equitable food production in the bountiful Chihuahuan desert. Their farming practices challenge multiple dominant narratives (e.g., the desert being a place of scarcity; ‘civilized systems’ being extractive to land and human beings; farmers as male and white). La Semilla has created counter narratives through respectful community story-gathering, historical and archival research, environmental writing, social media campaigns, and the development of visual narratives in collaboration with border area artists including a zine, murals, and video projects. Wildseeds Fund resourced La Semilla’s zine Food, Land, and Us and their expansion of storytelling programming.