This October's Fallow, we invite our community to come together for a Collective Tending in the light of the past month.
We will commune together as way to process and compost the chaos and violence that we are confronted in our daily lives and work. As politicians stoke hate, and many governments dive further into white supremacist and fascist rhetoric, how do we find the strength and resilience to build the world we want to see?
Someone who wants to hate me will always find a reason to hate me, but the land won’t and that’s how I’ve been healing
We believe that the land can hold all our suffering and pain, as well as all our joy and dreams. So it is with this in mind that we call our community together for an evening to tend to ourselves collectively so that we can repair and transform.
Join us for an emergent and grounding session led by Dre, Sam and Sumayyah in which we will process grief and rage and imagine ways to collectively heal and support each other so that we can build the resilient infrastructures we need for the revolutionary future.
This event is for BPOC/Global Majority only.
Tickets are pay what you can with ticket sales going towards covering the cost of the event and LION's Land Pot. If cost is a barrier to you attending, email sam@landinournames for a free ticket.
Dre Ferdinand is a licensed social worker, artist and therapist, whose practices include movement, energy, sound, soil, and EMDR, a modality that has informed her approach which she refers to as ‘MESSE’. Dre’s practice framework is rooted in healing, social and restorative justice. Her professional journey involves aiding individuals and communities in processing and recovering from systemic harm and trauma as well as advocating for therapeutic support for social workers. Her teachings are centred on helping people navigate their internal landscape, collective care, and processing trauma. You can contact Dre at hello@dreferdinand.com or @idreferdi
Land In Our Names is a grassroots collective of Black and People of Colour getting land through reparations. Our collective is based in London, Britain, and works to reconnect Black and People of Colour to land, both in the city and in the countryside. Our work addresses the inequalities in access to land and food, and reimagines land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. We are organising toward collective ownership and land stewardship by Black and People of Colour, to heal the colonial-rooted trauma that has separated us and continues to extract from the land.
Fallow is a series of community care workshops integrating the healing and repair element of Land In Our Names’ aims and values into our work. We believe that there is a deep need for accessible healing spaces for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) landworkers and earthworkers, and climate, food, farming, land and racial justice organisers. In the context of intensive physical labour, low wages and the emotional toll of organising for racial and land justice, Fallow creates spaces to nurture restorative practices on and with the land.
This work is central to LION’s mission of reparations. Beyond financial restitution, we understand reparations as repair (Chinweizu), where restoring our relationship to land emerges as an important way to repair the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, enslavement and dispossession of land. As BPOC living in London, these histories are part of what brought many of us here, where our separation from land continues. With Fallow, we want to create opportunities in and around the city to reconnect us with the land, food and ancestral practices that nourish us.