Soul Soil Collective
About Us
Soul Soil Collective is a multiracial BIPOC and queer centered collaboration of healers, landworkers, makers, educators, and organizers working together to nurture right relationship with the land and each other. We co-create community-oriented and trauma-informed offerings of healing, learning, and deepening relationships with the more-than-human world in the Baltimore, MD area.
Soul Soil Collective Farm, Inc. is the non-profit organization that several members of Soul Soil Collective formed to facilitate acquiring and then managing the farmland that we plan to purchase to host community educational programming on environmental care, land-based healing, healing retreats, and other community-oriented activities.
Mission
Soul Soil Collective Farm, Inc.
Soul Soil Collective Farm (SSCF) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization working to buy a farm & community space to host sanctuary where those who face racist, colonial, and classist barriers to land access can cultivate rest, education, healing, connecting, and creating. We want to provide BIPOC and LGBTQIA individuals, couples, and families access to:
(1) land held in common for the use & healing of individuals/groups who face racist, generational, and classist barriers from access to land stewardship, especially Black and gender and/or sexual minorities; and
(2) space for programming, events, and retreats that invite collaborators to deepen their relationships with and learn from local ecology and the more-than-human world; including
(3) culturally-competent, evidence-based and ecology-informed holistic healing services such as therapy provided by licensed clinicians, and peer support programming at free or low-cost to un/underinsured underserved populations.
(4) Our first programs will center on:
• Trans-centered healing and therapy
• Healing retreats that support practices of intergenerational care and caring for the land
• Land Stewardship and defense
As an organization founded by and committed to centering Black, Indigenous and trans*NB/gender-expansive leadership, SSCF, Inc. seeks to support and enable new world-building for/as Black and Indigenous people and accomplices. We seek to center Black and trans*NB/gender-expansive wisdom and experiences as we aim to take back the economy and reshape it in service to health and life, and are in collaboration and solidarity with those building an economy that asserts the right to breath, to care, and to life.
Land acknowledgement and pledge of responsibility
Based on a land acknowledgment statement drafted by a Susquehanna and Shawnee elder for the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project, as well as information shared by Piscataway Indian Nation tribal consultants with the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project.
We acknowledge that the places today known as Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Harford County, and Cecil County exist as the result of duress. In 1652, Susquehannock leaders unwillingly transferred these lands to the English in an unsuccessful effort to stop English settlers encroaching up the Susquehanna River. We acknowledge that these places and their Indigenous inhabitants exist without rigid political borders and boundaries maintained by settlers and settler governments. The Piscataway Indian Nation also has a long history in this area and continues to maintain a relationship with the lands surrounding Baltimore. Along with the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, the Piscataway Indian Nation received recognition by the State of Maryland in 2012.
We acknowledge the social, physical, spiritual, and kinship relationships this land continues to share with Indigenous nations of the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay; we acknowledge that these relationships have been displaced, damaged, and dispelled by colonists’ insatiable thirst for acquisition and domination. We acknowledge a place out of balance with its true purpose in being. We acknowledge our occupation of Susquehannock and Picataway lands. We acknowledge the continuing presence of Indigenous nations, and the shelter and nourishment that this place continues to provide all Native peoples who live here today. We acknowledge our responsibility to Indigenous nations to repair unhealthy relationships and to steward all life. When Soul Soil Collective Farm is able to buy legal access to land, we will provide material reparations to Native peoples who have been displaced from that land via land tax. We will pursue epistemic and environmental justice -- seeking to center relationally-based and Indigenous knowledge and life ways that have been suppressed through colonial capitalism -- through consensual reparative relationships with local Indigenous organizations and groups.
Who we are
Soul Soil Collective's visioning team
All of us have been dreaming for years of finding/building/creating a sanctuary for land-based healing in Maryland; in 2022, our dreams came together to form the Soul Soil Collective.
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