Who do you hold the door for?

Who do you hold the door for?

A CSW66 Parallel Event

Earlier this year, in March, we held a virtual discussion for the 66th session on the Commission of the Status of Women through the United Nations. We presented "Food Sovereignty Between Power and Politics" that dove into the many aspects women all over the world face with farming; having access to good, clean food; and solutions to these issues.

Amber Tamm

Dee Woods

Leonida Odongo

Bridget Magambi

Dr.Dimah Mahmoud

Tracy Lloyd McCurty

The first question:

Our board member and the host of the event, Dr.Dimah Mahmoud, started the event off with a question: "Who do you hold the door for?" 

When we come together and we create these spaces for people - our people and those who are consistently left out of these important conversations - who do you help create this space for? Who are holding that seat for so that they may one day join the conversation or benefit from it?

"I'm holding that door for those that are black and mixed, and are tokenized for being black and mixed. I'm calling them in to utilize their priviliges for the movement. I'm holding the door for all of the ghetto youth that are constantly forgotten. I'm holding the door for me and all of those who are younger. I'm holding the coordinate for the real weaving of black land and land back between black and indigenous communities. I'm holding the vision of parks departments utilizing their land for food sovereignty." -Amber Tamm

"The people I hold the door for are the small scale farmers, indigenous women, pasteurized fisher folk, and of course, all of us who consume food and who desire to have good food -and that includes myself." -Bridget Magambi

"I am holding the door for all people who feel disconnected & dislocated, because we've been uprooted and planted in places where we shouldn't be. I'm holding the door especially for our young people who find themselves lost and feel that they don't belong anywhere. And I'm saying that you do belong and you have the right to grow roots wherever you are." -Dee Woods

"I hold the door for every one of our women; our young women and our elders, who know that this is our time. - Who know what it means to hold the other half of the sky." -Dr.Dimah Mahmoud

"The space that I'm holding is to challenge the narrative that exists- that "Africans are poor", that "Africans are beggars", and actually show that there is something good that can come from the continent. We try to connect the North and the South to try and change this narrative." -Leonida Odongo

"I'm opening the door for ancestor, Thomas Sankara. He spoke fiercely on the colonial origin of debt. I also hold this space for thousands of black farmers who organized in 1999 to bring a lawsuit against the USDA for decades of anti-black racism. I definitely hold this space for all the ancestral wisdom, because they knew that debt was a way to dispossess & dislocate us from our lands and the pathway to liberation." -Tracy Lloyd McCurty

We invite you to watch the entire presentation on our YouTube!

Follow us to continue the conversation:

And we pass the question off to you: Who do you hold the door for?