Tag: Legacy

Release: Seventh Class of Cynthia Hayes Scholarship Recipients Honor Her Legacy

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| Sustainability

Washington, DC, June 26, 2025 – The Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network (SAAFON) and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) announced that three students have been awarded the Cynthia Hayes Memorial Scholarship.  The three student awardees: Vicki Mines, Alaina Parr, and Mikelanj Ajinaku were each presented with $ 5,000 to support their continued work in sustainable agriculture and bolster their commitments to promoting racial equity in food and farm systems.

The scholarship was created as a tribute to SAAFON’s former director, the late Cynthia Hayes. Cynthia filled a key need for connection when she co-founded SAAFON, the first network for African American organic farmers in the US, and dedicated her life to serving communities in California, the Caribbean, and, of course, the Southeast. 

NSAC is one of many nonprofits that Cynthia enriched. She was a key inspiration for NSAC’s …

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Healing Land and Legacy Through Urban Agriculture

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| Sustainability
Sanctuary Farms | Photo Credit: Ali Lapetina

Ask someone to imagine a “farm” and they will probably conjure a barn, a silo, rolling hills of crops, and pasture. That is, they will imagine rural areas.

But one of the fastest growing – and underutilized – forms of agriculture is happening in America’s cities and suburbs, neighborhoods surrounded by industry, infrastructure, and millions of people. 

Urban farms take on as many forms and faces as the residents who sustain them. Some are worked on by community members or local businesses. Others sit on rooftops or vacant lots. City growers are using the latest technologies and the collective hands of their neighbors. But no matter how urban farms are tended, they lead to stronger communities, healthier kids and families, and are good for the environment. We need Congress to deliver investments now …

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New EPA rules tell polluters in Great Lakes communities to clean up legacy coal waste

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| Pollution

When Dulce Ortiz wants to enjoy the beauty of Lake Michigan, walk in a green space, or see and touch the water, she has to leave her neighborhood, even though the second-largest of the Great Lakes is in her backyard. 

Ortiz lives in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago that has a lurid history of toxic waste. With a population of only 88,000, the city has five Superfund sites, many of them found along the Lake Michigan shoreline. 

And that’s not even counting the large pools of toxic materials leftover from decades of burning coal in Waukegan. Deep pits of hazardous sludge sit along the shores of Lake Michigan, the watershed for roughly 12 million people. 

Ortiz, co-chair of the local environmental justice organization Clean Power Lake County, calls these coal waste sites a …

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