Individual Artist Project Grant

More importantly than positively impacting my personal career, this project will benefit our community of local farmers by revealing their stories and labor to a wider audience. The videos will cultivate respect and honor for our local food leaders who live close to the ground to feed our community. While the whole of the series will weave a narrative of collective community strength and communal well-being, each video will also have the potential to be used by the individual farm featured as a way to market their business and grow support for their unique efforts. To my knowledge there is no body of artistic or documentary work that tells the collective story of our local farmers around Duluth. Through this project I am trying to create a living body of work that holds up the stories of our local farmers in perpetuity. The outcome will be six videos, which will be the start of a series that will continue to grow as our local food geography deepens and expands. In 2017, the United States identified that beginning farmers accounted for 27% of the country's 3.4 million producers (https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2021/06/16/allure-farming-irresistible). This number is growing, and institutions such as the Minnesota Department of Agriculture have identified that improving access for women and BIPOC communities is a priority for our future farmers. This project is trying to demonstrate that our local food system is ahead of the curve on that one, and to maintain the trend we need to support the community of farmers that are rising to the occasion. Years of honing my artistic craft and connecting with my community have prepared me well to create work such as this series. I have deep connections within our local food system as a food justice organizer, farmers market manager and member of the local chapter of the National Young Farmers Coalition. As trusted friends and collaborators, I feel confident in authentically capturing the stories of the farmers to be featured in this series. In fact, the planning for this project began before I was aware of ARAC's artists grants. With previously established connections to many of the farmers being interviewed in the series and planning already underway, my commitment to see the project through is unwavering and additional support from ARAC will be a welcomed support to see the project's end.One way of knowing this project is a success is seeing all six videos completed and published online. Altogether, I hope to see all 6 videos receive 500 online views by the end of 2022, amounting to 3,000 total views for the overall project. While posting the series on my YouTube channel will be one way to capture metrics on viewership, I also plan to follow up with each farmer 3-6 months after airing the videos to collect feedback they have received on their individual videos. This qualitative feedback will be treated as equally valuable to the quantitative metrics of online views. This project is a success not only if these stories are heard by many but also if those, even if they are few, are truly moved by what they see and hear.