HEAL Food Alliance

2021 School of Political Leadership

Team: Communities Uniting for Farmer Health & Justice

Vera Allen

Farmer Activist & Co-founder,
Midwest Farmers of Color Collective

There is a sacred kinship between the land and the grower; they trust one another, they speak to one another, they hear one another and both must be protected and uplifted. This is equity, this is justice.
Vera on what SoPL means to her

Meet Vera

Vera F. Allen is a Black Navajo, mother, partner, organizer, and farmer, who moonlights as a media and food system activist. She spends her time on issues affecting Indigenous peoples and all of our food. Although she has been a grower for most of her life, it was the Youth Farm and Market Project of Minneapolis that opened her world to food activism. Serving as the market coordinator and being guardian to a garden sewn by kids was a once in a lifetime experience that influences the work Vera chooses to do everyday. Vera is working on food policy projects, a food fellowship, and continues to look for ways to serve BIPOC people in the quest for land rematriation and food autonomy.

Vera's family owns a tree farm in Laporte, MN where she hopes to share land and time with new BIPOC growers looking to reconnect with old traditions and new techniques for food security and economic resilience. Ever the student of justice, Vera organizes toward a future of racial equity in farming and food.