Earthseed Speaker and Skillshare

Skillshare

Monday, Nov. 3, 2 – 5 p.m.
Woven Roots Farm (Tyringham)

Register to Attend

We have 12 seats for students and employees to participate in the Skillshare. Everyone is welcome to join, students will be prioritized in this experience.

Talk and Community Conversation

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 11am – 12:30 p.m.
BCC Room TBD

Registration details coming soon!

Jen Salinetti

We cannot wait to welcome our second Earthseed Speaker to BCC. Jen Salinetti, co-founder of Woven Roots Farm in Tyringham, will be sharing stories of seeds and the people that steward them. Our Skillshare will bring a group of students and employees to Woven Roots Farm to learn how to save our own seeds and about the significance of seeds for people living in the diaspora.

Earthseed Speaker, Jen Salinetti (she/they), is a co-founder, queer farmer, and a collaborative director at Woven Roots Farm. Jen is a transracial adoptee from the highlands of Colombia. She has chosen a path of deep relationship with the land to reconnect with ancestral ties that were forcibly removed from her. It is through this relationship that Jen has come to understand her responsibility for tending to community. As a farmer and community organizer for over 20 years, Jen has offered workshops and courses that develop relationships to land, build skills of resilience, promote Indigenous growing practices, and amplify pathways to social justice. Jen is a Massachusetts Environmental Justice Council member. She is also a soil health and beginning farmer consultant.

The Earthseed Speaker and Skillshare honoring Octavia E. Butler at BCC is an inspiring, accessible, and engaging event that brings experts from a variety of fields and experiences who provide unique insights into overcoming local and global challenges. Earthseed recognizes that imagining a better world and taking action requires the equitable inclusion of diverse voices and the sharing of deep-rooted wisdom and skills often ignored by broader society. Each session allows attendees to connect with speakers and probe deeper into specific areas of interest, fostering a collaborative environment that invites meaningful dialogue and interaction. The event aims to cultivate a community of learners, equipping them with insights and hard skills to enable us to adapt to inevitable change by making big ideas accessible, bridging knowledge gaps and providing attendees with actionable insights that can empower them both personally and as members of the greater community.

Earthseed Speaker events are open to students, staff, faculty, alumni, OLLI members and the public. The Skillshare is offered to students first as participation is limited to eight to 15 participants for hands-on learning, depending on the topic and modality.

Soul Fire Farm

Soul Fire Farm (SFF) is a community farm located in Petersburg, NY, a 45-minute drive from BCC, and is committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. SFF uses Afro-indigenous agroforestry, silvopasture, wildcrafting, polyculture, and spiritual farming practices to regenerate 80 acres of mountainside land, producing fruits, plant medicine, pasture-raised livestock, honey, mushrooms, vegetables, and preserves for community provisioning, with the majority of the harvest provided to people living under food apartheid and targeted by state violence in our local community. SFF is a resource for education in ancestral farming practices and collaborates with the land to support our communities in healing from racial trauma and imagining bolder futures.

Volunteering at SFF will teach students about some of the farming practices while supporting SFF's work and getting their hands on the land.

Community farm days are one of the few times SFF is open to the public, so a range of ages, geographies, and ethnicities are represented. Some people may be completely new to ideas of food justice, farming, or racial justice. For those who have been to the farm during immersions or another caucus space — this is different — there are generally more white people than at other times on the farm. Everyone who comes agrees to SFF's safe space commitments and generally the energy has been beautiful and synergistic.

Spring 2025 Earthseed Speaker Leah Penniman (all pronouns) is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, soil nerd, author and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm (SFF) in Grafton, NY. She co-founded SFF in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. Her books, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023) are love songs for the land and her people.

Lecture: Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices — from organic agriculture to the CSA — have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence have deprived the Black community of farmland, capital, and healthy food access. Soul Fire Farm is part of a national network working toward food sovereignty and land justice. Learn how we can build upon Afro-Indigenous wisdom in reshaping the food system to be based on equity and abundance rather than exploitation and deprivation.

Dialogue: How can each of us be part of the movement for food sovereignty and help build a food system based on justice, dignity, and abundance for all members of our community? Building on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed vision, this dialogue will explore the world we can create together in the face of societal collapse.