Dear Sisters,Thank you to everyone who made it out to our Cultivation: July Circle at the Bushwick Campus Farm in Brooklyn. A big shoutout to our sister Glenda and EcoStation:NY for granting us access to that beautiful space. We want to share a summary of the event in this e-mail. Soon, we will be sharing resources on our blog on self care that may be of interest to you and will send you an update when we do. If you did not make it, we hope that this e-mail will provide you with major points of the event and hope you can make our next circle!The aim of Cultivation: July Circle was to create a space for us to share and learn tools about self-care/communal care through food as medicine.We focused our discussion on ways to decolonize our diets, a practice that entails recognizing ancestral knowledge about growing food and nourishing our bodies and minds.For us, “decolonize your diet” means many things – one of those being the ability to take control of your own eating. It means uncovering the knowledge about foods that our ancestors ate and unpacking the reason why they are no longer available for us to eat. Decolonizing our diet requires recognizing that colonization and capitalism have destroyed our ability to collectively sustain ourselves, through displacement and systemic violence. Therefore, through the process of decolonizing our diet we are not only addressing access to nourishing foods but challenging a history of oppression and marginalization that still manifests itself today. We wanted to share the many ways to “decolonize your diet,” through personal reflections and story telling since not everyone has to make the same choices.

After our lively discussion, we went on an herbal identification tour to learn about different plants and their medicinal benefits available at the farm. Seeing how a whole “medicine cabinet” of herbs can flourish in Brooklyn solidified the possibility of taking care of our bodies and each other outside of the institutionalized healthcare system. We came back full circle with a discussion on self-care. Again, the resources we used for this discussion will be on here 0n website soon. The resources will include a packet on self-care that shares the importance of circles, a guide to self-empowerment and what support means, and a self care check list. We hope you gain as much as we have from this packet!

So this was what our circle was about! We hope you enjoy the email and we welcome you at our next one! If you have any questions or would like to be more involved, e-mail us at: sisterscirclecollective@gmail.com