Please consider donating to help us continue to offer this training after our federal grant funding ends. The true cost per trainee is $1,500 and we are committed to making this academy as accessible as possible!

What is The Calabash Academy?

The Calabash Academy is a 15-week vocational training program to learn both the strategic, technical, and soft-skills needed to support and develop food and land sovereignty projects.

We recruit cohorts with a wide variety of skills to find creative solutions to food sovereignty challenges. Past trainees have included farmers, foodworkers, researchers, teachers, students & recent grads, filmmakers, caseworkers, community organizers, government workers, and more.

Why the Academy Matters

The legacy of institutionalized racism within the US Department of Agriculture and across our food systems have resulted in major land and resource access disparities for Black and Brown farmers.

The current landscape is even more limited by the administration of Anti-DEI policies and federal disinvestment of local food infrastructure, affecting our collective capacity to cultivate thriving local food ecosystems.

Underserved farmers and growers continue to face barriers of entry into business development support, funding access, and sustainable markets, while these resources are consolidated by large corporate entities and other institutions with greater administrative capacity.

Conventional technical assistance and development programs often ignore or deny the political and structural barriers that Black and Brown farmers face and do not tend to the holistic and cooperative values of local farmers and producers in order to meet the needs of their communities.

The Calabash TA Academy and the Calabash Network were established to build a support system that centers cultural competence, cooperative values, and responsible strategies to support the various needs of new and established Black and Brown farmers & food producers.

Click here to learn more about our Calabash Academy

Calabash Academy Scholarship Fund