It happened again. I ran into a WFAN member at an in-person conference, and: 

“Oh my gosh, you’re that Jules! I’ve only ever seen you on a screen. I love WFAN! The work you’ve – well, that we’ve - been doing these past couple of years has been awesome. I feel so seen and have learned so much.”

The encounters I’ve had with WFAN members over the past year have been the highlight of my nascent venture back into the “real” world. These connections are important reminders that we are in community, and that collective liberation is a shared vision that requires our grace, patience, and support of each other.

As we approach the end of another remarkable year at the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network, I want to express our deepest gratitude for your support. Your commitment to our mission has been instrumental in advancing women and nonbinary people in agriculture and in fostering just and ecological food and farming systems. Today, I am reaching out to you with both excitement and urgency, as we embark on a historic endeavor that requires your continued generosity.

To ensure the continued success and expansion of our programs, we are setting an ambitious goal of raising $75,000 in our end-of-year fundraising campaign. This is the largest end-of-year donation request in the history of WFAN, and it requires the collective support of individuals like you who believe in the transformative power of women and nonbinary people leading in agriculture. We want your investment in WFAN to represent a trust in our mission, vision, and values as well as confidence that funds will be ethically stewarded and appropriately spent. 

What a busy year for our Women Caring for the Land program, which has branched off into many exciting projects over the past few years! 

• We wrapped up our Pollinator Habitat learning circle project.
• On Earth Day, 2023, we hosted a pollinator workshop and field day at Chicory Grove Urban Farm with Sarah Nizzi of Xerces Society
• In this IDALS-funded project we partnered with Pheasants Forever (Allie Barth), Xerces Society (Sarah Nizzi), and the wonderful Jean Eells. Allie and Sarah helped almost two dozen participants create new habitat plans, many of which are currently underway! 
• WFAN Stewardship Ambassadors hosted and spoke at over 30 events in 2023, collectively reaching 1000+ people! 
• Through the Stewardship Ambassador Program, we have worked with some amazing partner organizations to recruit land stewards across the Midwest to tell their stories and deepen engagement with conservation work in their communities.
• We presented a poster on this project during the Soil and Water Conservation Society conference this past summer. Thank you to the USDA Conservation Innovation Grant for supporting this work!

• In partnership with the City of Cedar Rapids, Linn County Conservation, and Floyd County SWCD, we hosted our first two in-person learning circles since the start of the pandemic! 
  • In 2024, we will continue to host virtual and in-person Women’s Learning Circles in the Cedar River watershed, stay tuned!
• Our Stories of the Seasons ecological calendar project launched. 
  • In 2022, we hosted listening sessions for farmers and landowners to discuss their concerns about climate change. We were able to capture a few of the stories from women land stewards who shared about their efforts to make Iowa agriculture more sustainable. 
  • Our Stories of the Seasons project, funded through the American Farmland Trust and with support from Dr. Linda Shenk, will convene a cohort of women and non-binary land stewards over 2024 to gather our collective ecological wisdom into tools that can help us all cope with climate unpredictability. 

2023 was an exciting year for Harvesting Our Potential, WFAN's farm mentorship program! This year, 17 women, genderqueer, and non-binary mentees completed the program, working with mentors across six states to grow the skills, confidence, and networks they need to be successful producers.

“I came into the mentorship program with no previous experience in farming and only a rudimentary knowledge about growing vegetables for family consumption, in our backyard. I had no clear idea about where and how to begin the journey towards establishing my farm. Thanks to the HOP mentorship program and my mentor, Linda Hezel of Prairie Birthday Farm, I have acquired an understanding of farming and its many risks and challenges. With her guidance, I have taken my first step, developing a business plan.”

               -Sunanda Roy, Iowa HOP Mentee

Other exciting updates from the 2023 HOP season:

• We brought on six new mentors in 2023! 
• We hosted training workshops for our HOP mentors, focused on growing collective capacity to create inclusive, supportive mentorships and to take care of their well-being throughout the year.
• We partnered with HOP mentor Hannah Breckbill and her farming partner Emily Fagan to host a seed-saving field day at their cooperatively owned farm, Humble Hands Harvest. Over 40 people joined us to learn about saving seeds for regional climate adaptation and additional farm revenue! 
• We successfully secured new funding from the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, adding welcome financial continuity for the Harvesting Our Potential program for the next three years!

Thank you to our Harvesting Our Potential funders: CERES Trust, North Central and Western SARE, the Cornell Douglas Foundation, Patagonia, and the USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. And to WFAN’s wonderful donors, who make programming like this possible!

In 2023, we put our advocacy energy into education about the possibilities of an inclusive, just Farm Bill and hosted workshops mapping community power during our 2023 Conference this fall. 

• Building a Better Farm Bill Together 
  • We hosted 9 guest speakers across 4 sessions and engaged over 250 registrants in conversations about farm labor rights, conservation, agroforestry, soil health, environmental justice, and so much more.
  • If you weren’t able to join us, you can still tune in on our YouTube page, where we have shared all of the recordings from our summer series. We are still waiting on legislation to pass a new Farm Bill (slated for 2024), and there is no time like the present to educate yourself on the possibilities of the next Farm Bill!
• Advocacy Training at the 2023 WFAN Conference
  • WFAN board members past and present, Ahna Kruzic, Patti Naylor, and Angie Carter facilitated a training at our fall Conference where they taught participants to map community power. Conference attendees identified stakeholders and proposed solutions to real problems in their own food systems like land access, nutrition assistance funding, seed saving, and more. 

This fall, we hosted our first in-person WFAN conference since 2018! With this gathering, we set out to create restful, connective spaces for WFAN members following the tumult of the past few years. We convened 60 WFAN members, board, staff, and longtime co-conspirators for three days of regeneration through field tours, breakout sessions, and schemes to save the world hosted around the dinner table. A memorable moment for all of us: the end of the conference reflection circle, led by WFAN Founding Mother Danielle Wirth. We are incredibly grateful to all who had a hand in the planning, calling together, and sharing of their gifts at the conference. We built a container, and you filled it with meaning, passion, and light to carry us all through the next season. Thank you.

“I love the power of our in-person conference! I appreciate so much that WFAN's conference has always been about connection to place, to people, and a more just future. It's a space to share and find new friends, reconvene with old friends, and learn some things together -- and that is powerful!”

- 2023 Conference Attendee

Together, we are re-forming relationships to time and place. We are practicing old forms of attention and drawing close to the earth and the seasons. What magic will happen we share our noticings with one another? What truths will emerge from our collective voice? Let's find out.

The Community Poem is an ongoing project beginning in 2024. Participation is simple: sign up to contribute at least one line for one day of the year.

For each date you choose, you will be asked to write a one-sentence observation about your day.

By the end of 2024, we will have created a 366-line poem that expresses the shared life of our community.

Sending you hope and abundance as we move into 2024,

Your WFAN Team (Jules, Stephanie, Piper, Becky, & Amie)