Sweet Freedom Farm of Germantown, NY has been named the winner of the 2024 Community Food Funders Champions Award!
The selection committee was comprised of winners from previous years along with two members of the Community Food Funders steering committee. Sweet Freedom Farm was chosen in recognition of their agricultural practices, approach to food security and sovereignty, and focus on supporting incarcerated people and their families.
You can meet the folks from Sweet Freedom Farm at an online award presentation to be scheduled later.
2024 Champion: Sweet Freedom Farm
Sweet Freedom Farm is a Black-led and majority queer farm that grows culturally relevant, nutrient dense foods for communities impacted by food apartheid and the prison industrial complex.
Their primary vegetable operation is in Germantown, and they also make abolitionist sugars from sorghum and maple trees that they steward in Millerton, NY. These sugars, Sweet Freedom’s namesake, have long been an alternative to cane sugar, whose production historically and presently relies on enslaved labor.
In addition to the organic vegetable farm and aggregation hub that they built, Sweet Freedom Farm trains and incubates Black farmers and rural leaders, connects youth and families in the region to healing land, and grows 15,000 pounds of food per year reaching over 500 Black & Brown working-class households across Eastern NY and Western Massachusetts.
Their produce moves through mutual aid programs, traditional food banks, and other institutions serving working families. Sweet Freedom Farm also operates a free farm stand outside of Sing Sing Correctional Facility in partnership with the Sing Sing Families Coalition. They envision a world free from prisons and from food apartheid, and are working to bring that world to fruition by building regional networks around co-operative food systems and mutual aid.
You can sign up for Sweet Freedom Farm’s mailing list here.
More about the CFF Champions Award
The Community Food Funders steering committee created the CFF Champions Award to recognize the leaders empowering food system change in our region. The award aims to promote the work of an outstanding organization that is working towards the transition of our food system to one that pursues a true triple bottom line: a system that honors and values people, the environment, and sustainable economic models.