Organization: Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust

Rooted by ancestors who tended mountainside maize and millet, Larisa “Lala” Jacobson is a farmer and story steward sowing seeds of transformation.

As Climate Justice & Policy Co-Director at the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, Lala advocates for connectedness, policy change, and leadership toward food and ecosystem sovereignty, land rematriation, reparations, and redefining relationship with Land.

Having begun farming over 25 years ago and with roots in community health and youth leadership, Lala previously served as Farm Director and Co-Executive Director of Soul Fire Farm, where she coordinated 100+ member weekly Solidarity Share food deliveries, incorporated many Afro-Indigenous practices and plants, co-hosted weeklong farmers immersion programs for hundreds of BIPOC land stewards, co-developed the inaugural Braiding Seeds Fellowship, created resource guides, produced the bilingual Liberation on Land Skillshare Video Series, and focused on relationship with the original land stewards, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican  Nation. Lala has worked alongside farmers in Ghana, Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala; reveled in tractor implement fabrication and welding; coordinated a school for youth on the autism spectrum; taught workshops ranging from crop planning, climate resilient farming, farm equipment, and soil love to uprooting racism in land-grant universities’ extension systems; amplified stories shared by Black and Brown youth pushed out of high school; organized for collective land reclamation by elders and youth growing food in public housing; collaborated with disabled community leaders demanding health care change; and managed a farm outside Boston offering land and culturally relevant food for migrant and refugee communities. With children and elders at its heart, Lala’s work seeks to support ancestral practices for calling carbon back into the soil during the age of climate crisis, and Black and Brown people reclaiming our sacred roles as mediators between soil and sky in the collective of beings we know as Land.