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OUR MISSION
Our mission is to honor the past, steward the present, and look to the future. As the founder of Seed2Fork Agroforestry Farm, I am committed to creating multi-generational agroforestry farms. I’m proud of our legacy and our dedication to building a resilient, sustainable operation for the next generation. Guided by this mission, we are sowing cultural seeds to help prevent type 2 diabetes and other health issues across Washington State.
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OUR JOURNEY
After the American Revolution, farming practices were drastically altered—leading to the loss of land, changes in the economy and culture, and significant health challenges that still persist in farming environments today. Our farming approach is crucial for the communities we serve. For example, our food production ensures a more reliable and abundant supply for the four Washington counties where we operate.
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Key issues such as community fear, minority stress, anxiety, institutional oppression, feelings of inferiority, and intersectionality have had generational impacts. These have led—and continue to lead—to mental and physical health crises in the communities we serve.
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Our aim is to focus on agroforestry practices: growing trees, shrubs, herbs, and vegetables together in a system that mimics a forest. This method, which involves cultivating useful plants in harmony, creates a balanced system where each species supports the others. These ancestral practices have been used in the United States and around the world for thousands of years.
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OUR FOCUS
We center our efforts on Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Native American, immigrant, and low-income communities. When it comes to safety, services, and being heard, we are too often treated as people with “silent voices,” living in the “wrong” zip codes. These factors frequently shape the conditions we face—conditions influenced not only by local realities, but also by national events and policies.
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OUR LANGUAGE
Traditional terms like "vision," "mission," and "values" don’t always fully capture who we are. When addressing our community’s needs, we use Adaptive Leadership Principles rooted in community collaboration. Our language includes social structures such as food apartheid, extended family hospitality, community bartering, social justice, Juneteenth, ancestral worship, and resilience in the face of adversity.
OUR RESEARCH
Our research is guided by the American Diabetes Association, the National Institutes of Health, the lived experiences of the communities we serve, and the work of leading experts like Dr. Silva A. Arslanian. Dr. Arslanian is a pioneer in the study of youth-onset type 2 diabetes and continues to break ground in exploring new therapies, while maintaining a balance between her research and family life.
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We are also inspired by Joel Bervell, a Ghanaian-American medical educator, content creator, and health equity advocate. Through platforms like TikTok and Instagram, he is known for debunking racial bias in medicine and educating broad audiences about health misinformation.
We care for the Earth. We know it’s a journey and an emergent design in the communities we serve. It is a moving target shaped by the various unjust infrastructures in our neighborhoods.
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We know caring for the people, and sharing and growing seeds, are our ancestors’ traditional methods for us to implement and achieve.
We incorporate fair share for all using methods that have been a longstanding tradition in Black, Latino, and Indigenous societies for hundreds of years when growing food.
