Who is Black Farmer Fund?

As a community investment fund, Black Farmer Fund (BFF) provides accessible, favorable, and financial options for the Black food ecosystem in New York State. BFF’s mission aims to address the impact of structural racism on Black farmers. Focusing on farmers financially marginalized within the modern agriculture and food industry, BFF’s mission strives to widen the scope of social activism in New York State to be inclusive of Black farmers and their issues concerning sovereignty. Today, Black farmers seldom gain access to land, capital, and broader inclusion in the decision-making roles that influence sovereignty and policy.

BFF aspires to depend on the active engagement of community wealth builders: consumers and producers generating a democratized black food ecosystem. Governed by directly situated community members BFF looks and look to build wealth within the communities they represent. This vision is achieved by aligning Black farmers with the intellectual capital, technical assistance, and agency they need to succeed. Ultimately, the agency pays dividends to the communities it serves and represents.

BFF functions in three main ways. First, BFF invests in black farmers across New York State using blended capital. Second, BFF empowers their communities by equipping them with the financial literacy to invest and the tools to organize. Third, BFF collaborates with regional and national organizations and BIPOC farmers to develop policy campaigns that address the disparities concerning Black farmers. This triage of functionality is what allows BFF to flourish from a historical standpoint, and is the basis for their improvement of the future farming landscape. 

Our Team

 

Design Context

Selecting from a competitive pool of applicants in the fall and winter of 2021, BBF launched the first pilot fund for 8 black food businesses in New York. As a group of outside students asked to support BFF during the fall semester, our team initially focused on the funding announcement with several subsects. Through this initial funding campaign, BFF will establish a model and vision to help iterate what they do, and develop resources on how to get funding. They wanted to share what a BFF investment looks like, and offer the process for the next round of funding to recruit for future applicants.

In order to attract future investors and partners, BFF hopes to build credibility among investment funds through exposure on its funding cycle and transparency on the 8 businesses that they will be working with. Most importantly, the announcement sought to highlight the strengths of these 8 businesses, especially from a fiscal perspective. Our team posed the idea of potential mini-documentary series for each business after listening to the desires of BFF. As the main goal of this campaign, BFF emphasizes the idea that, ultimately, food is medicine, and any change in our food system must be analyzed as an imperative that affects public health. By targeting stakeholders such as black farmers, investors, donors, businesses, and the overall African American community, BFF aims to advocate for financial justice in the agricultural sector and reinforce such efforts at developing collective pipelines. These efforts extend beyond that of agriculture, of course, and relay a change in historicity, one necessary for understanding the past and reshaping the future. By empathizing appropriately in this context, it became increasingly clear how crucial this work is in cultivating an equal architecture for growth. 

Critical Design Process 

The text that we drew much of our inspiration from is the Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE:

  1. EMPATHIZE We decided to go through many of the original material that our contact at BFF, Onyx, gave us, which included their annual report, strategic goals, any media coverage, and many other resources about community investment funds.
  2. DEFINE After talking to our client, we have decided to pursue the Pilot Fund Announcement and contribute with content writing, website design, and also video editing with social media. 
  3. IDEATE We started ideating on that direction through brainstorming sessions, and looked into ways in which we can continue to test and get feedback from our target audience.
  4. PROTOTYPE We plan to mock-up the website with edits, start a conversation with our word of the day in terms of quick Instagram stories, and test other possibilities of media.
  5. TESTING We will try to test some of the material on potential stakeholders or future investors, because that is the main target audience. 

Deliverables 

We plan to offer our deliverables in four main parts.

  1. FINANCIAL LITERACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA We want to continue spreading financial literacy through social media, particularly Instagram, using the reels/stories function. In an attempt to continue BFF’s “Word of the Day”, we will define and present financial terms that can help connect our audience to BFF and the goals they work to achieve.
  2. MICRO-INFLUENCERS We want to spread our reach for BFF through micro-influencers: social media accounts possess anywhere between 10,000-50,000 followers. These accounts can help BFF get more funding and promotion throughout their announcement phases. We plan to target any influencer playing a part in the food chain, whether it be chefs, farmers, or suppliers within the local community.
  3. WEBSITE CONSULTATION We will be helping Onyx with website design consulting in support of targeting her main stakeholders; this deliverable will include layout, branding, and content writing.
  4. BLUE SKY TRANSMEDIA RESEARCH We want to capture the potential for transmedia knowledge and proper marketing through flyers, media, and presentation of BFF’s First Pilot Announcement. With the “blue sky” attempt to be as creative as possible, this has not been totally defined– but we cannot wait to get started and help BFF in their future endeavour.
    Micro-influencer strategy

    Website design consulting

Reframe

Understanding the role of our project team via the Reframe method, BFF aims to build a community of networks to support black farmers and promote financial equality. In order to spread awareness to people outside of the networks and attract new members, we researched a list of micro-influencers who have a high audience engagement rate to promote BFF on their social media. The communities there established will have a higher participation rate than those of “macro-influencers” (individuals with abnormally high engagement, e.g. celebrities).

As mentioned previously, another initiative seeks to improve people’s financial literacy by promoting “word of the day” on Instagram Reel. Emphasized in prior attempts at reaching macro-influencers, Instagram already proves to be a piece of media centralized by BFF’s approach. Yet, BFF acknowledges a tension between its reach and the subsequent limitations of these macro-influencers in developing a firm social media presence to a specific target audience. tool  BFF’s  The concept of “word of the day”, will involve a relevant concept for the BFF target demographic. This strategy specifically targets farmers and those seeking financial literacy from an agricultural perspective. By marketing to those in the agricultural space via social media, BFF will subsequently increase the relevance of financial literacy, in turn paying invaluable dividends to stakeholders, who are searching for financially-literate farms and individuals to invest in.

What is the purpose?

One of BFF’s main priorities focuses on making financial literacy accessible to Black farmers and empowering their agency to navigate capital. BFF’s campaign, “Word of the Week” focuses on educating black farmers on financial vocabulary. This reel features a skit between two people demonstrating the meaning of the chosen word that week. Along with background music, the reels will implement b-roll and other situational effects. The reels will seek to convey a comedic tone conjoined with educational elements geared towards financial literacy.  Through edits in Final Cut Pro, we created a tone and pace meant to align with social media trends, making the reel marketable and relatable. By the end of the semester, four of these reels will be created as well as a quality metric document to aid other groups in doing this project in future semesters. 

Word of the Day Reels

Moving Forward

Looking forward to our goals for the end of the semester, we worked with Onyx to decide on a specific deliverable: complete several reels that will have a script and offer final versions that convey separate financial terms (e.g. collateral, co-sign, and credit report). We understand these terms to play a fundamental role in the work and daily transactions conducted by BFF. In order to get to that point, we plan on producing draft reels for each of our final versions, and using the design process to iteratively ensure that each relates to both BFF’s values and objectives, as well as the financial terms we aimed to highlight.

The ultimate goal is to increase financial literacy amongst the black farmer community and BFF’s following. In addition, we plan on creating quality metrics as feedback for each reel once they are dispersed on different platforms, particularly Instagram; these metrics will allow Onyx to be able to identify how the reels are gaining traction and what is best to change. Through the analysis of various annual reports, specifically from non-profit funds, we can help align BFF with the communicative tools necessary for stakeholders. 

Final Presentation

On the final day of class, partners and teams presented their work to the other partners and teams, sharing their design process, key deliverables, and reflections on the semester-long collaboration, all recorded on video.