Fire Flower Farm

This initiative is being supported by Congregate Charlottesville.

Building on many years of community care and social justice organizing and advocacy, Fire Flower Farm, a project of the Anarchist People of Color Collective (@poc), will be a place of support and healing particularly for folx from BIPOC communities.

@poc arose out of the People of Color Caucus of the General Assembly of Occupy Charlottesville in 2011. Formerly located for 6 years in a collective house in the 10th & Page neighborhood of Charlottesville, @poc built a foundation of community care through personal relationships nurtured at our weekly community dinners and vigilant attendance of public meetings of the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA), City Council, Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail (ACRJ), the City of Charlottesville Planning Commission, and others. Initially, @poc focused energy and collective resources on supporting the needs and demands of public and subsidized housing residents, as well as neighbors who faced chronic houselessness. @poc also spent much of its formative first few years traveling extensively to broaden its network of comrades aligned with a vision of a world of fully liberated people. These travels also allowed @poc to witness and learn from the work of comrades near and far to increase the scope of its work in Charlottesville.

That work has included: providing hospitality housing to neighbors evicted from public housing, recently released from the carceral system (including the local jails and immigrant detention centers), and street-based folks in need of shelter on nights of inclement weather; trainings in facilitation, direct action, cop watch, ICE watch, court watch, etc.; assisting the family of Sage Smith to raise funds to hire a private investigator and to hold community events to raise awareness about violence against trans women of color; co-founding the Charlottesville Community Resilience Fund; co-founding the Visions of Liberation project of the Defund CPD campaign; and co-founding the Charlottesville Immigrant Transit Assistance (CHITA) organization, to name a few.

The violent events of the 2017 Summer of Hate brought deep trauma to the collective, as it did for much of the city and comrades who joined in defending against the white supremacist attacks of July and August. Many of @poc's members were forced to retreat from years of work to find solace and healing.

Those who remain seek to pivot energy and collective resources to land work aligned with needs and demands of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Some headway was made in exploring this new work in 2019 when @poc helped to start a healing house for formerly-incarcerated BIPOC women on a 12.5 acre parcel in Fluvanna County that included building a hugelkultur-based food garden from scratch and learning to raise chickens, guinea fowl, and ducks. Through research and connections made with other BIPOC gardeners and farmers in the area, more food than the household could consume was grown. By the end of the summer of 2020, this effort fed approximately a dozen BIPOC elders and families in Charlottesville (including several single Black mother-led households). The collective also took up cold pickling and gave out pickled cucumbers and pickled red onions as gifts to friends and visitors.

@poc was also able to connect the women living at the house with recovery services, employment opportunities, and even started a weekly Sunday Yoga and Meditation practice for BIPOC-identified people with Ayanna Hall of the Women's Initiative and Common Grounds.

@poc now hopes to continue and expand on that land and community work with their own property so that their work can progress in a way that is better aligned with an anarchist and anti-authoritarian vision that is grounded in the principles of mutual aid as well as practices of wealth and resource distribution which models solidarity-not-charity, abundance-not-scarcity, and transformational-not-transactional relationship building. As @poc has never intended to become a non-profit and has instead used its own funds as well as crowd-sourced funding to sustain the work, and as its members are all BIPOC folx from low-wealth backgrounds, they seek the assistance of those with greater wealth access to acquire and build on the property.

Thank you for your consideration in contributing to this vision.