Penniman, Leah

Impact on the world

After struggling to find affordable fresh produce for her young children in what she terms a “food apartheid” neighborhood of Albany, New York, Penniman co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 to end racism in the food system and reclaim Black and Indigenous farming traditions, building it into an 80-acre operation whose BIPOC farmer-training programs, subsidized farm-share distribution, and policy organizing have reached more than 10,000 people; her 2018 book Farming While Black, with a foreword by fellow farmer-activist Karen Washington, became a standard reference for Black and brown farmers nationally, and she received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2019 for her food-sovereignty work.

Life & background

Born around 1980 to a Haitian American and African American pastor mother and a white father, and raised with two siblings in rural Massachusetts, where she says farming offered an escape from racial bullying at her nearly all-white school, Penniman began farming as a teenager and trained at Farm School MA, Many Hands Organic Farm, and with farmers in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico, while earning a BA in environmental science and international development and an MA in science education from Clark University. After years as a high school biology and environmental science teacher and a personal struggle to access fresh food for her own children in Albany's South End, she and her husband Jonah Vitale-Wolff bought land in Grafton, New York, around 2006 and opened Soul Fire Farm in 2010, which she now co-directs; she has been recognized with the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017) and the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award (2019), and authored both Farming While Black (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023).

Sources

1. Soul Fire Farm; Green America; Kosmos Journal