February Newsletter
We are back and excited for 2024 - some updates, opportunities and solidarity
We’re nearly halfway through February! We’ve been reflecting on the past few years, and sharing gratitude for having the time to dedicate to internal work as well as all the projects and events we’ve held. Creating a collective and understanding what it means to work collectively in a capitalist system are two very different things, and we spent a lot of precious time unlearning, reconceptualizing, and reconfiguring what made sense for us internally and externally. We are grateful to have spent time with this - and excited to be entering 2024 with much more energy and a lot of exciting plans brewing as our nights get shorter and the days get longer!
In this newsletter we share a lot of great opportunities (jobs and courses), some updates on our past year, and some plans for the future.
Upcoming Plans
We have exciting news that we will be caring for some raised beds in Glengall Community Gardens - stay tuned for more details in the coming month. We are looking forward to hosting open volunteering and growing sessions, as well as seasonal gatherings. We are also embracing the importance of rest and wellbeing, and looking forward to hosting spaces centering healing with collaborators dedicated to the intersections of rest and resistance. Finally, we hope to continue to expand our international solidarity work and collaborations with collectives and organisations who share our vision and values. We are focusing on developing our strategy around land and our long term plan and we will be sharing more information on how you can support us getting land soon.
Updates
We’re starting 2024 with a long overdue official introduction to our two most recent LION members! You may have already met them both at events we’ve hosted over the past year as Jamila joined the collective in July 2022, with Sumayyah joining in summer 2023. Jamila has been involved in organising events such as our Open Eve, BPOC Caucus 2022, the Cultivating Justice Wrap Party and Unsacrificed Terrains Workshop with Mirrored Fatality and has led on our Palestine Solidarity work. Sumayyah had a strong start with developing our organising structure, organising our Palestine Solidarity work and is working on a podcast series with Jamila. Read more about them on our Collective Page here.
Giant Puppet for Resistance Workshop
In December, we supported puppet-makers and artists Ash and Mallika in the first steps towards creating a Giant Puppet for Resistance! The first workshop focused on working with the LION community to imagine what a giant puppet could represent. Make sure to follow them for more details on their upcoming puppet workshops!
✨Winter Solstice Social✨
In December, we ended the year by welcoming some of our lovely community members to an evening of food, home-brewed drinks and conversation around a bonfire at Story Garden. After a year of internal growth and restructuring, it was lovely being able to spend time reconnecting with our community, and we’re looking forward to more seasonal gatherings in 2024!
ORFC 2024
For the 5th year running, the LION collective were at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. It was invigorating and a joy to see reparations continue to be on the agenda in the Justice Hub. Special thanks to the Seeding Reparations & Shared Assets constellation for their excellent programming in the Justice Hub. Check out the recorded sessions, including words from Dee Woods in the Opening Plenary, & other necessary voices in Land as Reparations, cost of profit crisis, Black Farmers Market, food sovereignty, diaspora black & brown community & Belonging to the Land.
Josina took part in “Repairing the Land: an enquiry into ecological, cultural and social repair” organised by Rachel Solnick with Mona Bani from Revoke chairing. We began and ended the session paying tribute with poems from Palestinian Rafaat Alareer and Bajan-Jamaican-Brummie Benjamin Zephaniah - both of whose lives have profound lessons for international solidarity in land justice movements. The session focused on our shared colonial history, reparations beyond financial redistribution. Rachel spoke of her time spent with black radical farmers in Detroit, and how exploring black radical stories has helped discover similar stories of diaspora Jewish heritage. Josina also spoke of connecting to ancestral stories & what a repair framework can look like. Holistic repair & wellbeing have always been part of LION'S ethos, & it was a blessing to share our intergenerational stories, for understanding the lineage of harm.
Newsletter Archive
Our newsletter has moved over to Substack! With TinyLetter shutting down, we’ve been researching various platforms and Substack currently seems to be the best option for our needs so we’ll be trialling it over the next few months. We know that Substack is just as extractive and permissive as the big social media platforms and we do not endorse their politics. We’re looking forward to experimenting with how our newsletter can fit into our other workstreams so hopefully that means more regular newsletters from us! For now, you can read through our previous newsletters in our archive here.
Palestine Solidarity
LION has always been unequivocal in our support of the freedom of oppressed folks, and our understanding of land justice is tied explicitly to racial justice and decolonisation. Please read our statement of solidarity with Palestine here. As the genocide has continued and violence has heightened in both Gaza and the West Bank, we have at the same time witnessed people taking personal action through Boycott & Divest Movements, protesting, educating themselves and widely sharing their knowledge. We remain hopeful that we as a collective, and a people, will continue to get stronger as we tighten our bonds of international solidarity.
We had a lovely banner making session facilitated by our beloved BlkMoodyBoi, we took to the streets with a million other people within the Joint Struggle Bloc, and organised film screenings. We collaborated with the incredible Other Cinemas to host a screening and open discussion of Jumana Manna’s “Foragers” (2022), a brilliant film that depicts how Israel’s legislation separates Palestinians from their land by illegalizing the foraging of natural herbs such as za’atar.
Saeed Taji Farouky joined us for an online screening and discussion of his beautiful but haunting film “Strange Cities are Familiar” (2017) which deals with the grief of exile and the impossibility of escaping our pasts.
Opportunities and Resources
Navigate Transformative Conflict & Justice Facilitator Training Programme
Navigate is opening applications for our in-depth Conflict & Justice Facilitation Training Programme, starting this Spring. This is a full training & ongoing support and mentoring programme in Mediation and Transformative Justice Facilitation. The Transformative Conflict & Justice (TCJ) Programme will be for people who are really committed to learning and practicing this work, ongoingly, in communities and movements working for social and environmental justice.
Read more about the course here - deadline for registration is February 18th 2024.
Year Long Seed Production Training by The Gaia Foundation
Are you a commercial or community food grower committed to Agroecological principles interested in learning how to save and distribute seeds? Gaia’s Seed Sovereignty Project is offering a year long training programme at a sliding scale starting from £200. Read more and send in your applications here. Deadline 19th Feb 2024.
Shado First Time Writers Mentorship
The programme is specifically for writers who have not had work published yet but are looking to gain experience in the media/journalism industry. The programme will equip writers with the tools needed to begin their career, including resource provision and upskilling opportunities on how/where to pitch as well as tailored mentoring on how to develop their unique voice and creative non-fiction abilities. Successful applicants will work closely with us to develop a piece of written content which will be published on their site. A fee of £100 will be given to each applicant.
The deadline is rolling up until 19th Feb and the form is HERE
SALT Graphic Designer Call out
Solidarity Across Land Trades is recruiting a graphic designer to help them find a logo and graphics for communicating better with the world. This is a paid opportunity at the day rate of £255.85 for 3-4 days of work. Click here for the design brief for more information about applying. Deadline 23rd Feb 2024.
SOAS Detainee Support Coordinator Job
SOAS Detainee Support attempts to break the isolation of immigration detention, and supports people to take control of their cases and resist their imprisonment and deportation. Our vision is a world with no borders or incarceration.
The role of the Coordinator is to facilitate the group’s support for individuals in immigration detention and strengthen the group’s impact in organizing against immigration detention and all forms of border violence.
This position is a job share, with the two coordinators working together and alternating tasks, and working in collaboration with the rest of the group. You will be joining a coordinator who has already been in the role for 1 year. Deadline 11th March 2024.
Merch
Thank you everyone who has supported our work by buying from our shop. We hadn’t really thought about what the funds would go towards but as we’ve been focusing on our aim to get land we decided that all the proceeds will go to our Land Pot. This pot will fund the buying of land as well as all the other infrastructures we will need on the land too. Get something from our shop here!
You can support our goal by donating directly to us, or purchasing a T-shirt, tote, zine or badge. We have a limited number of Huatli prints which goes directly to Red de Amaranto, a community network of agroecological amaranth growers, producers, vendors and consumers. They are working to develop a solidarity economy and healthier food system. Money raised will go towards their 'verano de la nutrición', a space for young people to gather, cook and enjoy amaranth together.
The proceeds of our collaborative zine, TransPlants will be split between LION and Out On The Land.
Soil Sistars Fundraiser
Our dear friends Soil Sistars led by Sandra of Go Grow With Love are fundraising to keep their growing site after their allotment site’s prices have massively increased. Please donate to support them keeping their land so they can continue to offer their grounding and nourishing learning opportunities to Black women. Read more about the fundraiser here
Sudan Fundraisers
Nas Al Sudan have been sharing useful resources on Sudan including a list of fundraisers you can support. We stand with the people of Sudan who have been terrorised by both the RSF and SAF. Money and aid is getting into Sudan so your support and money are reaching people who need them. Please support one of the fundraisers listed here.
We’ve been listening to some really interesting podcasts such as Farmerama’s latest series Less & Better (listen here) which looks at what a more sustainable relationship to meat can look like. We’ve also been learning more about the historical context and current situation in Palestine through Let’s Talk Palestine’s podcast here, and informing ourself on the war in Sudan in The Fire Next Time’s podcast here. We really love Shado Magazine’s podcast series which is already into its second series - listen to their episode about the global industrial food system and its many faults here.
There’s an amazing teach out coming up on 22nd February at 6pm GMT looking at “the structural links in-between Britain’s counter-terrorism structures and rising criminalisation of pro-Palestine protestors, to Israel’s carceral-colonial tools of apartheid and its massive escalation in the detention of Palestinians, in the context of its current genocide on Gaza” You can sign up here on Abolitionist Futures website.
Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom of this newsletter. We’ll be trying to send out regular updates via Substack so you have alternative means to follow us outside of Instagram. We stand with anticolonial resistance movements. From Palestine, to Congo, Haiti to Sudan, West Papua to Saharawi. Free the People, Free the Land.
Love and Rage,
Land In Our Names