After George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately impacting people of color, Pertula George-Redd realized, “I want to channel my sadness and anger to do something for my community.” That year, George-Redd founded Acres4Change to “create a path to land ownership” for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) farmers through its Stewardship Program in Baltimore, Maryland. Before founding Acres4Change, George-Redd spent fifteen years “on the front lines of social justice,” leading and contributing to nationally recognized organizations that support sustainable agriculture, youth development, food sovereignty, and healthy food access.

The inspiration for Acres4Change was to “tackle the racial wealth gap,” George-Redd says, since property ownership is the “number one wealth builder,” and the history of racial injustice around property and land is “so stark, and in your face.” She points to the many millions of acres of land people of color have been “robbed of” for centuries, and how BIPOC families are still losing land in the United States today, through tenuous land leases and discriminatory real estate practices.

In the early stages of this new organization, George-Redd connected with the MPH Program’s “Public Health Planning” course, where student groups collaborate with real-world partners to develop grant proposals in their second semester. At first, she had imagined acquiring “as much land as possible” for Acres4Change through estate sales and land donations, but funders thought the idea was “too big” out of the gate. MPH students then developed a logic model and conducted market research to help narrow down the project’s scope and write a grant proposal, of which George-Redd used components to apply for multiple grants, including the 2021 Echoing Green Social Innovation Challenge awarded to Acres4Change in the economic justice category.

“MPH students put more time into building Acres4Change than almost anybody so far,” George- Redd insists. One of the students who helped to develop the grant proposal, Kristen Walsh, Cornell ’20, MPH ’22, has remained involved ever since. After the Planning course, Walsh continued to work with Acres4Change for her summer internship, and then joined another group of MPH students in the “Monitoring and Evaluation” course to develop a plan to measure mental health outcomes of the organization’s Stewardship Program. For her final capstone project, Walsh developed a stewardship handbook for the inaugural cohort.

“I think the short-term goal is a sense of community for people who have faced public health challenges as a result of historical oppression,” Walsh says. “There is a huge sense [among the Stewards] of the cultural importance of food, and making food security a part of community.” In the Stewardship Program’s pilot year in 2022, 45 people applied for just five spots available to qualifying BIPOC farmers. “That level of interest really emphasized the need,” says George-Redd.

The Stewardship Program provides professional mushroom cultivation workshops through a “freight farm” built inside of a retrofit cargo shipping container. At the end of the training program, Stewards will find land they want to purchase. George-Redd hopes the five Stewards, who have varied backgrounds ranging from herbalism to aquaponics, will “co-own the land together, as a cooperative.” Once the first cohort become land owners, says George-Redd, Acres4Change will “bring in a new cohort, and repeat.”

Written by Audrey Baker