by Krysten Aguilar

An hour before sunrise on the island of Kauai, two dozen food and farming justice leaders gathered in the inky twilight of March’s new moon, wading silently, waist-deep into an ocean bay tucked alongside a sacred salt pond. As light peeked over the horizon, we reemerged from the sea, and local educator and organizer Malia Chun invited us into ceremony: an unbroken chant to welcome the sun and an invocation to the ancestors as we spoke around the circle.

The salt water cleanse and the ancestral welcome posed two important questions to these leaders, many of whom had flown thousands of miles from their families and communities, putting their growing seasons and programs on hold:

What do you need to let go of to be the leader you want to be?
What do you want to invite in to make your visions for change more powerful?

Castanea Fellows are some of the nation’s boldest and most creative luminaries changing the way we eat, fish, and farm. Among them are James Beard Award winners, activist farmers, Executive Directors, and elders beloved by their communities. Yet, many take on the title of ‘leader’ reluctantly, sensing that our movements need a different kind of leader or a need to redefine leadership for a new age.

Countless pages and billions of dollars have been spent trying to pin down the essence of an effective leader. At the Castanea Fellowship, we’re more interested in creating the conditions that allow leaders to cultivate freedom and wholeness within themselves, and in turn, to unleash the power, wisdom, and connection present in their collective organizations and communities.

Liberatory leadership comes closest to the potential we see in today’s food and climate leaders. The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation defines liberation as “the experience of wholeness, freedom, justice, and thriving,” and liberatory leadership as an approach and way of being that centers this vision and allows its practitioners to “invite in power-building based on community, equity, and self-determination.” For Castanea Fellows, a liberatory mindset opens up new possibilities to address the entrenched problems in our food system. The scale of the climate crisis, the opportunities to shift the flow of capital and the direction of legislation, to improve the lives of workers and restore ancestral well-being—all require leaders to hold a vision of wholeness and, to quote futurist Ruha Benjamin, “to make justice irresistible.”

How do you create the conditions for liberatory leaders to grow and thrive? For us, community and land-based immersion experiences are key to sparking true transformation. Far more than a retreat or a site visit, an immersion is an experience co-created with frontline groups around the world. A successful immersion is one part intentional community building, two parts cross-movement and cross-diaspora strategizing, and copious amounts of joy.

On the back of our boat gliding past the Napali Coast later that day, fellows gathered to witness a pod of spinner dolphins following us in play. One fellow began to hum in response. Another joined with a rhythmic tap, and soon after, a jarana  appeared - a stringed instrument from southern Mexico, linking fellows and their lineages across distances. A song erupted from the group, as the fellows chanted in unison the words of a poem they created that morning about their shared leadership vision: “rhizomatic resilience is the way…”

The lifelong bond of Castanea Fellows doesn’t emerge by chance. Fellowship cohorts are made up of leaders that are rooted in their communities and are selected from across the nation with care. Our current cohort weaves together Bay Area entrepreneurs with Puerto Rican agroecologists, farmworker organizers with philanthropic disruptors, artists with traditional healers, cutting across culture, class, and gender identity. Chosen as much for what they offer the collective as for their individual accomplishments back home, cohorts offer and model the sense of true belonging that can feel sorely missing from our organizations and movements. As one fellow confessed, who felt worn down by her fight to reclaim vacant land to grow food in the urban Midwest, “here is where I feel myself, where I’ve found my people.”

If liberated leaders are those who belong, liberating leaders infuse that belonging into their communities and organizations, into the very bones of their work. For leaders in our food system, this means building political power and narrative alignment in a world beset by colonialism and exploitation. It requires the gathering of allies where land, labor, and culture intersect.

During our visits to Native Hawaiian sovereignty organizations like Mālama Hūleʻia and Hui Makaʻainana, we learned that the taro plant is more than a food staple; it embodies the deep sense of reciprocity and reverence required to build movement partnerships. Native Hawaiians see taro as an ancestor, a plant whose sacred personhood and ecological niche teaches us how to care for land and water and to feed communities sustainably. Many of our fellows saw their own ancestral ingenuity reflected back: many of their cultures has a taro tradition. Each of their diasporas is fighting to reclaim the future of food from corporate domination and a changing climate.

The road to food sovereignty is long and winding. In our leaders, we look for signs of hope and strength. But leaders can only help us build our communal resilience once they’ve nourished their own. The much-reported burnout crisis and glass cliff facing impact leaders are all too real for our fellows. That’s why we design Castanea’s place-based immersions to be about more than just solidarity and strategy; they also encourage rest. Rest seems like a four-letter word these days when the crises we face as leaders are urgent and never-ending. But as one fellow said, “rest is a weapon. If you’re tired, you lose sight of the goal in front of you.” When rest is a tool and relationship is the strategy, leadership becomes something that sets us free to achieve the change that exists in our wildest and sweetest dreams.

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Applications are open from August 1-31, 2024, for Cohort 4. Find out more here.