It’s Giving Tuesday!
Invest in hunger relief and seed the next generation of growers, cooks, chefs, makers, artisans, and herbalists.
Reclaiming Relics that
Keep Us
Why Us? Why Now?
Across the Deep South, families are hungry, unhoused, and hopeless. While Black farmers, cooks, seed keepers, and culture bearers are fighting to hold onto what our communities have always known for survival: land is livelihood, food is freedom, and cultural knowledge is resilience.
Today, Black farmers make up less than 2% of all U.S. farmers. In Memphis, 1 in 3 households faces food insecurity; many in Black neighborhoods. Climate shifts, land loss, the cost of food, and shrinking access to fresh, culturally familiar ingredients hit our communities first and hardest. Elders with generations of agricultural, culinary, and herbal knowledge are aging and lonely with no formal place to preserve or pass down what they know as a remedy.
This work CANNOT wait.
We are losing land, growers, access, culture, health, and the stories that made us.
Your gift helps CHANGE THAT.
Who We Are
For the past ten years, through Charlotte & Pickens LLC, we've been amplifying and demystifying the ways of the old folks: growing food, sharing meals, sharing herbal remedies, crafting/textile arts, caring for the Earth and the fullness thereof, lifting up black farmers and makers, documenting our stories, and building community through black Southern living and foodways.
Now, our work has mounted on the element of air and gifted us expansion through our nonprofit, The Center for Black Southern Culture.
We honor, reclaim, protect, defend, preserve, revitalize, and reimagine Black Southern cultural ways of life through love, history, land, food, art, culture, story, and environment for collective wellbeing and liberation.
This Giving Tuesday, we’re asking our community to invest in the work of reclaiming what has always sustained us: our land, our foodways, our healing practices, our cultural memory, and one another.
The Center for Black Southern Culture at the corner of Charlotte & Pickens STILL centers:
• Black growers & land stewardship
• Cultural cooking & community nourishment
• Herbal knowledge & traditional healing
• Sustainability & protecting natural resources
• Arts, storytelling, and archives
• Black-led community market
• Youth engagement & intergenerational learning
Your gift supports ALL of our work.
From paying growers fairly, to offering culturally nourishing food access, to stewarding natural resources, to preserving our stories, to building a future where Black land, culture, and infrastructure is protected, valued, and passed down.
JOIN US AND DONATE TODAY!
Why $25,000
We're launching our FIRST Giving Tuesday campaign to jumpstart our first full year of community-led food, land, and cultural programming, strengthen our market in its coming year 5, and lay the foundation for our future teaching farm and cultural third space.
YOUR Generosity Grows the Work!
Individual Impact
• $25 - Provides supplies for one herbal/nutrition education session
• $50 - Supports a participant workshop
• $100 - Helps grow and distribute produce to families
• $250 - Strengthens our Black-led community market
• $500 - Supports storytelling, archiving, and cultural preservation
• $1,000 - Funds a grower/youth seasonal stipend
• $2,500 - Supports a full quarter of community programming
• $5,000 - Supports a season of culturally relevant food access
• $10,000 - Funds a major expansion of the market + archives
Collective Impact
• $5,000 - Funds Black Southern Cultural programming and helps to keep our culture alive. Fund the teaching, storytelling, and documentation (workshops, oral history, photography, archiving, partnerships, participant stipends, etc)
• $7,000 - Strengthens our community market and helps us to decrease food apartheid, uplift black farmers/growers/makers, and build a healthy local food economy (market operations, farmer/maker recruitment, supplies, tents, tables, coolers, SNAP/EBT outreach, food access, recycling stations, etc)
• $4,000 - Builds our food justice & health equity programs. Fund classes that teach cultural growing, cooking, and heal traditions (cooking demos, nutrition educations, root medicine, herbal workshops, food system literacy workshops, farm-to-table classes, cultural meals, wellness gatherings, sustainability, venue rentals, vehicle rentals, travel, etc)
• $6,000 - Supports participant engagement and intergenerational learning. Invest in young and seasoned black land stewards, cooks, artists, researchers, scholars, and storytellers (field trips, knowledge exchange, cameras, mics, craft supplies, etc)
• $3,000 - Helps us build toward a future teaching farm and cultural third space. Lay the foundation for our future farm, kitchen, herbal lab, and cultural center (land assessments, soil testing, feasibility studies, early site planning, partnership development, tools, equipment, etc)
TOTAL GOAL: $25,000
Every dollar fortifies Black Southern futures and supports the creation of a community-led land, food, and healing cultural ecosystem.
Why Your Gift Matters
We are building something our people deserve.
Your gift invests in a living ecosystem that grows food, knowledge, resilience, and belonging. It seeds rebuilding Black land stewardship at a time when growers are facing unpredictable weather, restaurants are closing, costs are rising for all, and farmland is lost while families face SNAP benefit cuts and low wage income.
With your support, we can train more foodpreneurs, protect land, expand access to growing spaces, and preserve the seed traditions passed down through our families.
Your generosity brings locally grown, culturally relevant foods that reflect who we are back to our tables, ensuring that access is about calories, dignity, memory, and nourishment.
Your support also helps heal our community through history, herbs, and homegrown knowledge. It restores frayed healing traditions that kepy our families well for generations, our traditions kept families well.
You make it possible to document, archive, and preserve the stories that would otherwise disappear: recipes, quilts, seed histories, fishing practices, blues songs, land rituals, and pieces of culture that vanish each time we lose an elder.
Your generosity strengthens our community market, which feeds families while keeping Black growers, cooks, and makers economically strong.
With your help, we can capture more vendors, offer more goods, prepared foods, and access. Most importantly, you help us build a sustainable future grounded in cultural ecological practices which shaped us. You aid in care for the land and natural resources through recycling, reusing, composting, seed-saving, and ensure we can pass this forward to the next generation.
Give Cheefully!
Every
Gift
Builds
• 1,000 people give $25
• 500 people give $50
• 250 people give $100
• 100 people give $250