7th Annual Leadership Convergence - Registration

Introduction

This year, the 7th Annual Leadership Convergence will continue our theme of Achieving Equity Through Agriculture by hosting a collaborative space for farmer leaders to workshop projects, goals, and dreams of actions you would like to take to build momentum for making equitable change in your communities.

Knowing that social change work takes strong communities, and recognizing that it’s nearly impossible to do this work alone, for Convergence 2021 we invite you to bring your change-making community with you!

Convergence 2021 will be a week-long intensive workshopping space for a racial equity-related goal or project that you are working on in your community. Each day will guide you through a series of inspiration and collaboration spaces intended to introduce you to questions and frameworks that will help you best plan and take action on your work. By the end of the week you will have a clear vision, strategy, and action plan for your project, as well as a community of farmers nationwide who are doing similar work to support each other through the great undertakings you are all setting out on.

Attendance at 2020 Convergence is not a requirement for registration to the 2021 Convergence, as long as you come with a strong commitment to acting for racial equity in your community you are very welcome to this space. If you would like to watch some of the recorded sessions from last year’s event, part one of this theme, please email organizing@youngfarmers.org

What kinds of projects can we bring to this space?
Convergence 2021 is designed to help you move forward a racial equity project in your community. A project can be many different things, but it must have a tangible and time-bound goal.

Here are some examples of possible projects that could be workshopped at Convergence:

2020 and 2021 have been absolutely exhausting years for farmers and anti-racist activists, your group wants to spend your off-season (timebound) exploring resiliency and healing through series of meet-ups and collective healing practices (tangible).
You and your co-farmers want to use winter 2021-2022 (timebound) to create documents (tangible) that outline anti-racist on-farm hiring, training, and on-going practices.
Throughout 2022 (timebound), you will plan an event (tangible) that will bring together a collective of QTPOC farmers to come into an energizing collective learning space.
Your chapter has made a commitment to expand BIPOC leadership in your network. You want to spend the off-season this year (timebound) putting together a documented action plan (tangible) to move this goal forward.
You are a new chapter or a chapter with new leadership and want to create documents and art (tangible) that will define your identity and goals as a group so you can be better allies to the movement for racial equity on the long-term.
You have an idea of how to get non-farming people in your community involved in advocacy for changing your local food system to better meet the needs of your region (maybe a sliding scale on your CSA? Or a movie night?) but you haven’t had the time to explore that idea more yet. (not quite tangible and time-bound yet but we’ll help you get there!)
You are a group of friends, neighbors, and community members (or just yourself!) wanting to make change, but you don’t know where to start. We’ll help you figure that out!