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WHO WE ARE

Thanks to 2023 funding from the North Central Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Center and our friends at the University of Illinois, we've been able to assemble a QFN national board and begin to build organizational capacity in other exciting ways. You can learn more about the wonderful folks powering our work for the 2024 fiscal year below! 

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Ari Dolcine (she/her)

Steering Committee

I am a seed spreader, storyteller and story keeper. Everything I do, I do with love and passion. My focuses right now are growing Caribbean crops and other culturally relevant vegetables, herbs, and fruits; as well as bringing community together around these culturally important foods and building various earthen projects on the land. As a Haitian woman raised in south Florida, eating local food is deeply rooted within me. My culture is a big reason for my ambition  to grow the foods, herbs and medicine that natured and loved me. I'm currently farming with my partner in south Texas and organizing the first ever BIPOC QFC in the South this fall! 

Contact: ariana.dolcine@gmail.com 

Cyd (they/them)

Steering Committee

Cyd is a Black, queer, trans land steward born and raised on Chickasaw/Quapaw territory, also known as Memphis, TN.  Their curiosity and guidance from ancestors has led them down many paths, including urban farming, herbalism and birthwork. Forever a student of the Earth, their knowledge deepens with every growing season. Cyd finds enthusiasm in cooking meals for friends, making medicine, devouring books, spending time in their local state parks, and co-conspiring towards collective liberation. When not tending the land, they can be found dabbling in various hobbies and artforms, snuggling with their cat and wrangling their rambunctious kiddo.

Contact: cydnimoonflower@gmail.com // @justcallmecyd

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chalchiuhkoatl (they/them, elle en español)

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Steering Committee

chalchi is a transqueer two-spirit nepantleru of maaya, german and danish ascendance. they tend space at the inbetween as a healer, traditional bearthworker, parent and learner of el solar, le kool, y la huerta. they make home at minowakiing :: ancestral homelands of ho-chungra, bodewadmi, mamaceqtaw, and black liberator lands, colonially known as “milwaukee, wisconsin” :: and ma’ya’ab :: maaya ancestral homelands at what is often referred to as the yucatán peninsula. they are visionary steward of we have always been related (whabr), a kinship webwork of beloved intergenerational two-spirit, queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive BIPoC earthworKIN' regenerating healing and connection as we reclaim and embody our sacred traditional roles in our communities once again.

Contact: kinshipwebwork@gmail.com // @whabr_kin

Payge Solidago (any pronouns)

Steering Committee

Payge is a land steward, fermenter and medicine maker, writer, and dog dad. They have farmed and educated all around their home state of Mishigamaw (“great water” in Ojibwa, also known as Michigan). They now reside on the Black liberator lands and unceded lands of Anishinaabe peoples at Waawiyatanong (also known as Detroit). Here, she spends time stewarding vacant lots, shaking it out on the dancefloor, playing dress up, cleaning animal skulls, and bringing people together over good food. They believe in the power of nurturance, and love nothing more than co-creating spaces that foster collective magic. She is also an organizer who does policy advocacy work for the National Young Farmers Coalition, and treasury work for the West Michigan Farmers of Color Land Fund.

Contact: paygeann@gmail.com // @only__farms

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Taylor (Tig) Hartson (they/them)

Steering Committee

Tig is a Sociology PhD student, a goat-wrangling farmer, and a fiber and fermentation geek whose learning, teaching, and making happens primarily on the traditional homelands of the Haudenosaunee, Miami, Peoria, and the Pokagon Potawatomi (what is now known as South Bend, Indiana). Their dissertation work explores the ways that queer identity and queer orientations to the world help farmers, growers, agriculturalists, and land stewards rethink their relationships with more-than-human entities. They have almost a decade's experience conducting collaborative and independent academic research, several seasons growing vegetables and raising livestock, and a few years of organizing in community with the Hoosier Young Farmers Coalition and the Queer Farmer Network.

Contact: taylorhartson.com // taylorhartson@gmail.com // @taylorhartson

Anni Zylstra (they/them)

Coordinator

Anni is an organizer, convener, traditional folk artist, teacher, and smallscale agroforester living next to the trout and beavers of the the Kickapoo River, unceded homeland of the Ho-Chunk and Oceti Sakowin peoples (southwest 'Wisconsin'). A former rodeo kween from an intergenerational family of farmers, they love to reimagine the rural midwestern landscapes that shaped them, weave people and plants, and support fellow queer farmers via their 6 years of coordinating work for the QFN. They co-founded the QFN in 2018 in part as a response to their upbringing in hyper-homophobic rural farming culture as a closeted queer, and in part to try and find their fellow queer farmers farm "wives". 

Contact: anniezylstra@gmail.com // @zestinferna

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