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Guest Blog by Red Clifford: Beyond the (city) Limits

December 22, 2022 by Hayden

Beyond the (city) Limits: How LGBTQIA farmers create and seek community in rural America

We have been wrongly taught what a farmer looks like- this is influenced by the time we hear “Old MacDonald” or the farmer in the dell; a cisgendered, heterosexual couple, raising livestock and crops. Farmers are strereotyped as white, older heteronormative couples. However, this is not the full story; 15% of the global agricultural workforce is made up of women, and there is a growing number of queer identifying individuals creating space in the food system. There is monumental work to be done in a system designed against those outside the farmer Macdonald demographic. Queer oasises pop up, such as Unicorn Ranch in Colorado, but social and political pressure around them can cause the community to close to outsiders, preferring to be left alone.

The stories and experiences of those going against the grain are seldom mentioned aside from when negative things happen. Three queer individuals from various backgrounds, locations in the United States, and types of operation share their experiences with queer identity in rural agriculture, as well as how they create(d) community for themselves.

It is easy to forget the immense amount of labor, emotional effort, and time that goes into farming; this is further confounded by identifying as queer. Emily offers a sentiment most farmers relate to. “The type of person it takes [to farm] is a superhuman workaholic that works 16 hours a day. In order to have a successful farm, you make a ton of sacrifices. You have to choose ethical or personal lifestyle sacrifices,” Emily says.

Gilquist grew up in South Dakota, in an ag community where nobody talked about climate change, or queerness. It wasn’t until a trip to Oregon at age 18 did the realities of climate change sink in. This led Gilquist to working on some of the smaller vegetable producers around her. A move to Washington would bring her to a community of smaller scale producers, and eventually the opportunity to have her own plot of land, shared with the family of a loved one.

Even living as an isolated queer individual, there are still lessons to learn, and good people to meet.

When asked about how she feels about community, Emily shares, “I feel like I have cultivated a community with all the small farms around. There’s a ton of creative, resourceful (albeit straight) people there and I’ve built a network of chosen families, full of people willing to show up.”

Although being around other forward-thinking producers helped, The physical isolation of living in predominantly straight communities left a lingering unease. “We’ve gotten this amazing opportunity to build a farm, but the dream doesn’t feel as good as I thought it was going to, there is an essential part of my being I am not attending to. I started reflecting on my life and feelings about sex and identity… and I am gay gay. I should have put pieces together 15 years ago, but I grew up with no examples outside of being queer and getting harassed for it,” she said.

However, she holds dearly the idea of a deep connection with nature is something that she wouldn’t want to miss out on. Even if growing food is not the career path she ends up on, the relationship to nature is something that she will never lose. When asked what she would tell her younger self, she pauses for a second. “If I could go back to my young self that didnt know she was gay, I wouldn’t change anything. The agricultural knowledge and ability to spend time with myself out in nature is the most valuable series of lessons I’ve learned in my life,” offers GIlquist.

Gilquist isn’t the only one who felt a deep sense of authenticity being around nature. Logan, a farmer in Western Central Texas, mentioned that their family structure did not have a hard emphasis on distinct gender roles; everyone helped with what they could.

“Being on the ranch was liberating in allowing me to develop my identity, no gender roles, I just loved being out there and working with the animals, getting dirty and sweaty,” Prevett recalls with a small chuckle.

In order to fufill their desire for queer community, Prevett hosts WOOFers (Worldwide Organization of Organic Farmers) and also participates in various sites to rent camp space. Recently, the WOOFing website added a tab to filter by LGBTQIA+ aligned farms.

Logan shares more with us about the impact of hipcamp- “With hipcamp, we have a small inclusion statement at the end. And we get a lot of queer and people of color( solo black campers). I didn’t expect it to happen, its hard to meet new people when you work on a farm. But this brings a lot of new people out there.”

Ryan Goodman, a famer and communicator out in Southwest Virgina, also puts a strong emphasis on online community for queer individuals, but also has some ideas for how to equip those around us to be better allies.

“I’ve spent the last 15 years online building online communities for rural/agricultural spaces… queers in rural areas, we are spread out- thats why we hear about so many people moving to Urban areas. People may want to be allies, but not know how to,” says Goodman.

In June 2022 He helped with the Pride in Agriculture campaign. This included profiles of people willing to speak up, people who saw when we were out doing our work and jobs. Even those that didn’t necessarily already know how to be allies, but wanted to be, stepped up for the occasion. Part of the success here, in bridging the gap between traditional and queer farmers, was starting with the common ground of agricultural identity.

With the physical and emotional effort of people like Emily, Logan, and Ryan, we are the starting heat to building a new understanding of farmers. We have to build a physical community with our neighbors, and have healthy, productive questions with people living a different lifestyle than us. Ryan offers us some questions we can ask ourselves:

“How can we build connections with people around us, and share resources to bridge understanding with each other?”Goodman leaves us with a call to action, reminding us of the emotional effort these efforts can be- “We need to be open and transparent about how hard the conversation can be-”

Towards a More Inclusive Board Future

January 31, 2022 by Hayden

Towards a More Inclusive Board Future

How Boulder Food Rescue has been transitioning it’s board and seeks to further radicalize the nonprofit leadership space

Boulder Food Rescue works to create a more just and less wasteful food system through the sustainable redistribution of otherwise wasted food to communities in need. We create No Cost Grocery Programs, which are designed to address these barriers by taking food to people in places they are already gathered, such as affordable housing sites. They are community led distribution points that engage the voices, experiences, and leadership of program participants. Community leaders run their own unique food access programs and determine when, where and how the food is redistributed. Community autonomy provides a more affirming, accessible, and effective program for users. In operating these programs, trust and relationship-building are essential – we are redistributing produce and power.

Although BFR is community-led and community-run in our programs, we had some work to do around making sure the entire organization was community-led and run, not just the programmatic level. It’s great to give participants decision making power about their food access programs, but decisions that affect them, like BFR’s budget, strategic plan, overall logistics schedule, and bigger picture, there was less access to. We needed to take a look at the organization as a whole and see what barriers existed to keep participants from being involved in the staff and board level.

Prioritizing staff pay and well being and encouraging participants to apply for staff jobs increased the number of participants on our staff (5 out of 9 staff are former participants).We did the thing that a lot of organizations do first, by creating a participant advisory board. On one hand, it’s nice for participants to engage in broader decisions with less commitment than a typical board of directors. On the other hand, we found that participants mostly trusted our staff and just approved the decisions we were already making because they didn’t have all of the context to really give input. It didn’t seem like it was a meaningful way to engage and mostly seemed like a thing we would write into a grant because every time we mentioned it a funder would perk up in excitement. We felt like we needed to (and continue to need to) increase inclusivity on our actual board of directors. We have had participants and folks with lived experiences of hunger on our board starting with our co-founders and throughout the years, but we needed to look at what systems and culture we had in place to truly increase inclusivity and justice both externally and internally.

To start this process of increasing participant engagement and voice on our board, we took a look at every component

of what it means to be on our board and tried to ensure that we would be able to accommodate participant voice. These included:

Board meetings
Participating in activities that advance BFR’s mission and vision
Strategic Planning
Decision making
Professional Development
Onboarding
Board culture

Here are some of the ways we addressed inclusivity in all of these components.

Showing up to meetings: An essential component of being on our board is showing up to our monthly meetings. Meetings have physical components we need to ensure that folks can manage, or that we are ready to change to allow for inclusivity. We inspected each one: timing, day of week, frequency, duration, location, language, food, access to childcare.

Timing, food, childcare: We meet outside of traditional working hours because almost everyone on our board works traditional hours. Most of our board members are parents, so we also had to look at how timing affected people with children. We asked basic questions about the meeting time. How long does the meeting last? Is it during dinner? Will there be food available? Do board members have access to childcare? Can we provide it if not? Can the kids come to the meeting? What’s the board culture around children? When we were in person before COVID-19, kids would come sometimes and do their own thing. We made sure we had childcare available if any parent requested it, and made sure there was a line item in the budget for it. We had snacks and drinks available at every meeting. Now that we are on zoom, we are accustomed to parents engaging while also making their dinner for their children, and their children joining in and giving bunny ears to their parents in the background. We welcome interruptions as a part of the culture of the board.
Location and transportation: Before we moved our meetings to zoom, it was important to ensure that the location was accessible to board members. If they didn’t have their own transportation, we provided rides with other board members. We stayed in central Boulder and discussed our location upon joining the board. Now that we are on zoom, our meetings are more accessible.
Language: Many of our participants speak Spanish. We wanted to ensure that if Spanish was somebody’s only language, that we had interpretation available for all of our board meetings and translation available for all of our materials. We added this to a line item in our budget so we can immediately be prepared for this. So far, we only have board members who are multilingual (including English) or monolingual English speaking, thus all of our board meetings are in English. We are aware that if we transition into having interpretation, that it will take more time and effort and will need to adjust our meeting agendas to reflect this.
Stipends: Meetings take time, and far too often organizations that hope to diversify their boards or volunteer committees only want to extract information from participants and other marginalized communities but do not adequately compensate them for their knowledge. When someone is struggling to get by day to day, every bit can help. We stipend meeting participation to anyone who wants it. All board members can opt-in or opt-out depending on their financial needs. All board members can change their opt-in or opt-out status because we know financial needs change.

Board Activities: Board members are responsible for other activities besides coming to meetings. Here’s what we changed to make sure activities that advance the mission and vision of BFR are accessible to more people:

Fundraising: Many boards have “give or get” policies, and fundraising is an essential component of what it means to be on a board. As an Executive Director, I totally understand why! However, fundraising is probably one of the most intimidating things to board members who do not have experience, regardless of their class backgrounds. We wanted to keep fundraising as a component of being on our board but make it accessible.
- Everyone gives a donation that is meaningful to them. We have never had a “give or get” policy and most of us don’t come from high class backgrounds or are even connected to wealth in Boulder. However, everyone does have something to give, and everyone on our board donates. We say what is meaningful to you is something that will feel good and important to give, but also something that will not break you or stress you out. It’s important for everyone to come up with this number for themselves.
- Everyone participates in fundraising in ways that honor their skills and resources. For some, this may be hosting dinner parties and asking their friends to show up and give money. They may cook food and have large networks of people they know who to ask. For others, this means showing up to those dinner parties and talking about their experiences with BFR. For others, it means sharing posts on social media about our fundraising campaigns, showing up to fundraising events to lend a hand with set up and clean up, or reaching out to businesses to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Everyone has different skills, ideas and resources and it is all needed to successfully raise the funds we need to operate. It’s all valued and appreciation is expressed to all of the varieties of contributions.

Projects: We used to have an arbitrary time commitment we asked from board members, everyone contributes 8 hours a month. However, projects and capacity change over time. When stressful things happen in our lives, it can be more stressful for everyone if board members have commitments that they really cannot show up to. We shifted from this time-commitment to a project-based commitment.
- Each board member picks a project that feels most in line with their skills, desires and interests, as well as what the organization needs. They work with the board members and Executive Director to find the project that works best for them. This could be fulfilling a board role, or a project such as board recruitment, qualitative analysis on our food access research, or helping with fundraising events.
- We do not expect each board member to contribute the same amount of time, just ask that board members be reasonable and honest. We expect time capacity to ebb and flow, and keep an open line of communication. We check in about projects and stay accountable to one another. We recently passed an option for board members to take a leave of absence if something comes up that is keeping them from showing up, but they are not ready to leave the board.
Board Roles: We have a treasurer and two board co-chairs. Having co-chairs enables us to both split the workload but also use the skills different people bring in. For example, one of our co-chairs helps set the agenda and facilitate the meeting, while the other is always silently checking in with folks and organizing spreadsheets.

Strategic Planning: We are in the middle of strategic planning currently. In the past, we used to have an all day (or all-weekend) retreat that board members had to participate in. This made it hard for folks who couldn’t take that much time off all at once. Now, we are working with strategic planning consultants to spread the workload over a year. We have long meetings on zoom, but they are pre-scheduled way ahead of time and not all day. We provide stipends for these meetings as well. We are also centering staff and participants (program participants who are not on the board) in every step along the way. The entire process turns the power structure upside down, so board members play a helpful role, but not the only role.

Decision Making and Professional Development: Board members make important decisions for the organization as a whole. While it’s amazing to give more people a voice in making these decisions, it’s not fair to them or the organization, if they are not fully informed about the decisions they are making. This means understanding all of the components of the decision. When decisions come on the agenda, we make sure there is space to ask questions about all of the background information, the potential consequences of the different ways the decision could go, and how to read and understand the information. We also see engaging on the board as a professional development opportunity for board members. Most of our board members haven’t previously served on boards and are interested in learning more, so we support that. For example, we have pre-recorded videos looking at our budget and explaining not just different line items, but budget theory (and how BFR typically budgets), financial documents and what they are saying. We offer opportunities for outside workshops and trainings for board members also.

Onboarding: We provide a booklet of resources to board members when they are onboarded. We go over these resources at a board member orientation and give new board members time to sit with all of the materials. We intentionally recruit and onboard new board members in clusters, so that one person is not alone figuring it out by themselves. We provide space in the first board meeting with new members to have longer introductions, Q&A for each item and Q&A overall. We also created a buddy-system so that board members could have other seasoned board members they can go to for questions, besides the board co-chairs. We have existing board members schedule calls and check-ins to build relationships with new board members.

Culture: Increasing diversity without true inclusion often causes harm in organizations. It’s important to diversify a board and bring in new perspectives, especially those most closely linked to the work. But often when a board starts off on this journey, they haven’t done the work of looking at their culture, which unfortunately, leads to these new folks being burdened with the task of carving out a more inclusive space for themselves, and being harmed along the way. It’s not going to be perfect. As adrienne maree brown says, “we learn to love by loving.” We learn to be accountable to people by messing up and making mistakes, and then apologizing and changing our behavior. Our goal is to minimize harm, which takes every board member being willing to show up and look at the spaces inside of themselves that cause harm. This is uncomfortable, but it’s necessary to have a healthy culture. Trust is built through this process. If a new board member experiences harm and they bring it up, that means they trust the board to do something with that feedback, and it’s important for all of the individuals involved to be accountable to that, to create the space for feedback, to hear it and change the behavior, and to check in about progress towards minimizing harm. This work takes time, intention and emotional energy, and so both staff and board members need to be dedicated to that work. This is harder than any article can suggest. It’s especially hard for nonprofit workers who are overwhelmed and burnt out. Creating spaces of minimizing harm also means making sure there is time and space in ourselves to do this emotional work outside of work.

Here are some things we have done, and are continually doing, to improve our culture:

We engage in White Supremacy Culture reflections: Our staff has gone deep into these to see how White Supremacy Culture shows up in ourselves and in our organization. We share these reflections across our multiracial staff team. Our board has not done as much work around them, but does reference them and read about them.
We share and discuss readings on different board cultures: We are engaging in conversations around restructuring our board to make sure it serves the organization best. This means looking at articles that criticize traditional board structures and power-hoarding, and discussing them and what is right for us and for BFR.
Our board trusts our staff: Instead of having a board that gives direction to staff, it’s the other way around. Our board is very open to staff direction, because staff is working every day on this work. Our staff takes direction from participants, because that is deeply embedded in our values. Having a board that primarily listens instead of directs is important. Everyone has value and ideas, but our board doesn’t micromanage or dictate what needs to be done.
We respect and appreciate differences: We learn about cultural differences by getting people together that come from different cultural backgrounds. Most of us don’t know what we do that is culturally innate that others may not connect with. We encourage folks to speak up about different cultural needs, and celebrate and share our differences with one another. If those differences cause conflict, we also have to be willing to lean into those.
We laugh a lot and have fun: I won’t even share our secrets! But I will say, some of our board members say this meeting is the most fun one they have all month. It’s important to get to the work, but how we do this work and who we do this work with, is just as (if not more) important. What we do externally (create a culture of belonging through food) we also have to do internally. I’ve heard Executive Directors struggle with their board, and I have been there before. But we’ve built this board intentionally and I can honestly say I love each and every one of our board members and they not only support the work but are my friends and comrades in this fight for justice.

We have done a lot, but we still have a lot of places to grow. For example, in the case of current diversity numbers, we have a board of eight people and two are participants and four are people of color. But we don’t have any Black or Indigenous board members, board members with physical disabilities, and board members who don’t speak English. We are primarily a young and able-bodied board.

We also mess up. Assumptions are made, often in self-criticism, about not doing enough. That can get projected out onto others. We have to be accountable to that harm and retrain our brains to value all types of engagement. We have to remember that we are also our own worst critics, and we are actually doing really well.

Creating an inclusive board is about having a healthy organization that ultimately is focused on the mission and vision and unique theory of change of our organization. Diversity is a part of inclusion. Inclusion is a part of justice. Flipping charity on its head to truly value diverse board member perspectives, and not just tokenize diverse bodies, takes time, emotional energy and money. Ultimately, it’s worth it because it works better for everyone. People with lived experiences of the problems we are trying to solve know what they need most. It’s for community, by community, which also creates a culture of belonging and worth, ultimately increasing the health and wellbeing of the broader organization.

Food Resources during COVID-19

October 8, 2021 by Boulder Food Rescue

Food Resources in English

Recursos alimenticios en español

A Day With Boulder Food Rescue by Isaac Novak

April 21, 2021 by Boulder Food Rescue

Annually, grocery stores discard 43 billion pounds of food.* Further, 50% of all produce thrown out is still edible.** With over 23.5 million Americans lacking access to fresh produce, either due to high prices or living in a food apartheid, it is imperative that we create local, non-hierarchal, community-led, mutual-aid food justice programs to end this food waste epidemic and ensure food justice for all. How do we do this? Currently, countless organizations across the nation are working to rescue food and redistribute it to those in need. One such organization is the Boulder Food Rescue in Boulder, CO. To garner a better understanding of BFR’s process in food rescue and redistribution, I met up with volunteer courier Leo Barth.

Every weekend, Leo is one of many volunteers across Boulder County who sets out to begin the process of rescuing food before it ends up in grocery store dumpsters. Today, we met just a block away from a Sprouts supermarket before beginning our mission. All across Boulder, BFR has their fleet of bikes and trailers ready for volunteers to pedal to nearby grocery stores. Over the course of one day, a single grocery store may run through their stock two-to-three times and dump any food that may be close to or past the expiration date, or not aesthetically beautiful enough to keep on the shelves. However, grocery stores who have partnered with the BFR will transfer these blemished or “expired” foods on carts for volunteers to come pick up.

After loading up the cart, it is rolled out back to the bike and trailer to begin the process of sorting through foods to rescue those which are in a shape to be consumed.

All produce is carefully examined before being loaded into boxes.

Once the food has been sorted through, it is then loaded onto the trailer and pedaled away to a nearby drop off.

Today’s drop off was at the Pinewood Apartments – a low-income housing program – located a few blocks away.

Within minutes, we arrived and were greeted by the manager. She helped us unload the food and prepare it for residents to pick up.

Another successful rescue and redistribution by the Boulder Food Rescue. This is food justice in action!

Returning to the bike racks, Leo shows me the Food Rescue Robot app – a data collection system used to track pickups, deliveries and pounds of food rescued, among a variety of other data points. As of June 2, 2020, the Food Rescue Robot operates in 33 different cities with 557 recipient organizations. There have been a total of 80,500 pickups and 9.52 million pounds of food rescued by more than 2,000 volunteers. As more food rescue organizations begin to populate in towns and cities across the country, movements toward creating more sustainable systems for food distribution are created. While food rescue programs solve the problem of distribution, in order to fully achieve food justice for all, we need to ensure that the benefits and risks of producing, distributing and consuming food are shared fairly by everyone involved. We need to work toward a cross-class, multicultural movement that engages in a wide variety of work on local, regional, national and global levels. We all have a part in creating the equality and justice we want to see in our world, and the Boulder Food Rescue – among numerous other food rescue organizations – is already hard at work creating programs for the collaboration of people fighting for a more equitable and inclusive food system. To learn more about the Boulder Food Rescue, or if you want to get involved, head over to boulderfoodrescue.org!

Isaac Novak
PeopleForBikes Content + Design Coordinator

Source: National Resource Defense Council (NRDC)
** Source: The Food Trust

Transgender-led business by Hayden Dansky

April 7, 2021 by Boulder Food Rescue

It’s funny in the days of zoom when everyone has their pronouns in their name but not everyone knows what that means. It’s also really relieving in the days of zoom meetings to be explicit about my pronouns. I love my pronouns so much, some days I wish they were tattooed across my forehead, but since I haven’t found the courage to actually follow through with a face-tat quite yet, I’ll settle for a zoom screen sharing my pronouns to coalitions of food access providers. [For basic info on what transgender means, pronouns, misgendering, and why gender matters in the workplace, check out this article].

I’ve come to see no matter how many coalitions or workgroups I’m in, I’m almost always the only trans person in the room (this is not true internally to our organization, only externally). I’ve been curious about this and so I started looking into information about trans-led businesses in the City of Boulder. I have found that there is very little information about how many there are, or if there is any tracking of this in general. I was able to track down some information thanks to the support of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and City of Boulder. The following is a list of some of that actual survey information and data combined my poor math:

Boulder has 106,392 residents and about 7,000 employers (which is 5+ employees, and thus all of these numbers will be a little skewed when talking about trans-led businesses which could have less employees).
5,300 businesses were recently surveyed by the City, and about 2,600 responded. 7 of these responses were LGBTQ+-owned, which is about 0.2%.
They added this “LGBTQ+-owned” to the form after they sent me a survey that asked if we were woman-owned, and I asked about being trans-owned, and they added “LBGTQ+-owned.” LGBTQ+ is much broader than Transgender and/or Nonbinary, but I was still like, “cool, the City changed the form based on a tiny email exchange!” Visibility and asking questions matters.
About 5.6% of our population is LGBTQ+.
About 7% of people are business owners.
If 5.6% of the Boulder population are LGBTQ+ people, then we should have about 5,958 queer folks. So, out of these almost six thousand people, if 7% owned their own businesses, to compare to the general population, that would mean there “should be” about 417 LGBTQ+-owned businesses.
2,600 respondents of the 7,000 employers is about 37%, so even if we tripled the number of respondents that were LGBT+, hypothetically there may be about 21 LBGTQ+-owned businesses. Not even close to 417.
There is no formal information or data collection mechanism I’ve found about transgender-owned businesses in Boulder, CO.
0.6% of the world is transgender, which would hypothetically be about 638 people in Boulder.
That means about 45 should be trans-owned employers. We know of two nonprofits that are transgender-owned that qualify in this “employers” category (again 5+ employees), Boulder Food Rescue and Queer Asterisk. There are probably more than we know.
None of these stats incorporate solo-entrepreneurs or businesses with less than 5 employees, like therapists, yoga teachers, artists, herbalists, spiritual leaders, etc. (and you know most of us are therapists). Thus, there are definitely way more transgender-owned businesses (and LGBTQ+-owned businesses) that fall into this category, but these numbers are also not included in that initial 7,000 number of “employers.” Thus, the numbers still line up, and trans-owned businesses are also hugely underrepresented.

Instead of information on leading businesses, most statistics about trans people are actually about how many of us have been murdered, killed ourselves, almost killed ourselves, struggled with depression or addiction, or don’t have jobs. Most trans people who are murdered are black trans women. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a trans person who doesn’t struggle with some aspect of their mental health, but how could we not? We live in a world that is constantly gaslighting us, and it takes a lot of emotional labor to stay visible.

Being trans-led isn’t just about representation. Specifically, as a nonbinary person (I am both transgender and nonbinary; these are not exclusively tied together or are not always exclusively separate, but I identify as both), I feel like my existence relies on the process of questioning truth, questioning systems, questioning boxes that we’re given to us. I was told there are boys and girls, that there is masculine and feminie. I’m none of these things and never will be. To arrive there, I had to defy all I was ever told and learn how to trust what is real to me. It was the trans community that did this for me.

BFR does just this as well. We push against the rules that were given to us. We acknowledge the harm that the nonprofit industrial complex perpetuates and work to build relationships in a new way. We live in the liminal.

When I got into nonprofit work I naively thought that we would all collaborate because we are trying to dismantle the same systems of oppression, right? What I found is that nonprofits perpetuate just as much harm to one another and to the communities we are trying to help by instituting systems that don’t work for people, creating rules that convey distrust, operating out of scarcity and being in competition with one another. I get it. I’ve lived with a scarcity mentality for most of my life. It’s not just resources and money, but time, love, and care. Sometimes the things we need most really just are scarce, and that can be a terrifying world to live in. And that mentality for work is not working.

If we look at food insecurity over time, we can see that our charitable food system isn’t solving this problem. If we show up the same way that clearly isn’t working, over and over, year after year, nothing is going to change. But charity models aren’t actually seeking to address the issues they say they care to address. They seek to perpetuate their own existence. Being trans doesn’t change this, but being trans means I was forced into a way of living that created a rupture in what society said was true. Trans people force others to question their truth. That can be rattling, but it is the necessary thing that we need in order to pause, reflect, and come up with some other way of existing with one another.

My physical transition has also taught me more of this concept. I’m transitioning to nowhere. I have nowhere to arrive if I have no place to arrive to, and my health and well being is dependent on accepting just that. But for me, I had to transition anyway to find liberation today (disclaimer for folks that don’t know much about this: not all trans people physically transition). Our work looks like this too sometimes. I’ve heard adrienne maree brown talk about creating utopias within distopias. Although we may not be living in a utopia and maybe never will be, we still keep moving and creating the worlds we want to live in by showing up as our fullest most authentic selves with the people we love and trust. My transgender nonbinary queer identity gives me the courage to move through the world in a way that challenges the systems that were given and the “truth” of what is. Deciding to change my body to better reflect the way I want to exist in the world taught me that I could have liberation under my skin even when the world is not liberating. Trans people live in the future. We imagine new ways of being and embody them today.

Many movement spaces say that the personal is political. Our identities, in all of their complexities, shape the way we see the world. They are the glasses that we understand things from. My whiteness, queerness, ability, is all a part of my lens as well. My transness is what enables me to see our work with a different perspective. We don’t have to do things the way they have always been done and in fact we shouldn’t. Instead, we can imagine a new way of existing, somewhere in the future and create that space in the microcosms we have control over today.

We do things differently at BFR. We show up with care, and love, and respect and courage. We build trust internally and externally. We have a huge impact around food justice, but we also love and care about each other in a way that is hard to even show the world. We even say “I love you.” We don’t do things just because we are supposed to, because that’s what other nonprofits do. For example, most food access agencies ask people to fill out poverty-proving requirements to get food. This is a burdensome, exhausting, intrusive, and shame-inducing experience. Instead of asking people to prove their poverty, we could just believe them. I guarantee you, anyone using the charitable food system (which is already barriered, inconvenient and harmful) needs the food. What if we laid down our assumptions and biases and just trusted the people we work with? It seems simple, but it’s just now starting to be a conversation in food access spaces. Nonprofits have either just been doing this forever, or they have demands from funders who have never seen the work on the ground or understand how hard it is to get your basic needs met in a system that isn’t actually designed to support you. What would happen if we just all stopped doing that? We can provide countless examples of ways that we work differently on the ground to honor the dignity, worth, and inherent leadership of individuals.

We don’t operate in a traditional hierarchy. We are creating a model that we are calling “democratized leadership.” What this means is that we create shared decision making processes, respond to feedback as a gift, have autonomy over our positions and work collectively to dismantle hierarchy, share power, and create participatory systems. We have a restorative culture. We talk openly about white supremacy culture and how it shows up in us as individuals and within our organization. We have conflict, for sure, and we talk about it. We try to understand one another. We ask for transparency. I fuck up, a lot, and then my team holds me accountable. I fuck up, and then I apoligize. I try to be transparent, and then I forget. I ask for help. I cry sometimes. I laugh a lot. When tragedies happen, we try to support the people most affected by them. We know they affect all of us differently but we allow space to acknowledge how they affect us. We hold grief circles and make sure space is created if someone needs it, instead of going to work pretending like we don’t live in actively harmful systems that affect our mental health and overall wellbeing everyday.

This is queering nonprofit work. About ⅔ of our staff identify as LGBTQ+ and about ⅓ of our staff identify as transgender or nonbinary or something other than cis. But it’s not necessarily the numbers, but the way we do our work, that’s what’s queer, powerful, weird and liberated. That’s why this is about more than trans-visibility or representation. It’s about creating a new world. It’s about science fiction. It’s about the here and now.

BFR Staff, 2019. Photo by Brad Goodell, Unboxed Photography

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