Daily Archives: October 11, 2021

Oct. 10Julia "Judy" Kahrl, a lifelong reproductive rights champion and an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, has made a very public break with Pathfinder International, the global reproductive health charity founded by her father 64 years ago.

Kahrl, who lives in Arrowsic, and her brother Walter Gamble resigned from Pathfinder's board Sept. 27 over what they regard as its failure to fully disclose and reckon with the legacy of their father, Dr. Clarence Gamble, who promoted eugenics an early-20th-century movement that sought to prevent poor people, disabled people, racial minorities and others from reproducing as well as concerns about Pathfinder's management, which has presided over record turnover while paying out six-figure severance packages.

"We have lost faith in the organization's current leadership and are gravely concerned about the organization's lack of transparency," the two wrote in a letter to senior stakeholders. "We are withdrawing all financial support of Pathfinder and urging all Gamble family members to do the same."

Pathfinder has contested their description of events as "wholly inaccurate and unfounded," and board chair Roslyn Watson issued a statement Sept. 28 insinuating that Kahrl and Gamble had left because they were opposed to exposing their father's eugenicist legacy. When pressed in an interview, however, she conceded that the two had wanted greater exposure than the board believed prudent for the organization, whose reproductive rights work faces aggressive opponents at home and in many of the 20 countries it has permanent programs in.

"We do highly controversial work in countries that have strife, our abortion work was targeted by the Trump administration, and this kind of data (from our archives) could be used against our organization in ways that we cannot even imagine if it were freely available to anybody who would want it," Watson told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

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LIFELONG COMMITMENT

The break is particularly dramatic given the 87-year old Kahrl's longstanding commitment to reproductive rights and Pathfinder.

Her parents were early activists for legalizing and destigmatizing contraception radical positions in the 1920s and family planning, birth control and reproductive health were commonplace dinner table conversations while she was growing up in the 1930s and '40s. Her father, physician Clarence Gamble, and mother, Sarah, were close allies of contraception pioneer Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and helped her overturn federal laws preventing the mailing of birth control materials and literature. When they founded Pathfinder in 1957, Judy joined the board, and her eldest brother, Richard, ran the organization until stepping down in 1985.

The organization promotes access to reproductive health services for women across the developing world and today receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. In its public tax returns for 2019 it reported 177 employees, a budget of $121 million and a $2.4 million operating deficit for the year, primarily due to reduced grant revenues compared with 2018.

While traveling to see Pathfinder's work in low-income parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, she has said she saw how women were empowered to improve their lives and their families' prospects by having access to comprehensive reproductive health services. She later brought her own children and then grandchildren on these trips. Her son Ben Kahrl joined the Pathfinder board in 1988.

They have close ties to Maine. Kahrl has been summering in Arrowsic since 1952. The broader Gamble family has spent summers at a cottage in Georgetown since 1960, and in his final days in 1966, Clarence Gamble was transported by ambulance from his home in Milton, Massachusetts, so he could die there. Judy Kahrl, a counselor, moved to neighboring Arrowsic full-time in 1996, and, alarmed over the growing challenge to Roe v. Wade, founded the Maine-based national advocacy group Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights (or GRR!) in 2013.

But in recent years Kahrl said she had grown increasingly concerned about the leadership at Pathfinder. The organization has experienced a 100 percent turnover in U.S. personnel in the five years it has been led by CEO Lois Quam. Several senior staff members had departed with six-figure severance packages in exchange for signing nondisclosure agreements disallowing them from speaking to board members about the circumstances of their departure, including the chief human resources officer, who Kahrl says received $216,000 after just four years on the job.

When Kahrl and her son tried to access a comprehensive outside review of Quam's job performance, they were blocked by the board's executive committee, which also declined to share the reasoning or wording of the NDAs departing staff members had signed.

"All of these things raised red flags for us and yet getting more information was a nonstarter," Ben Kahrl said in an interview with the Press Herald. "So people say, 'Do you have any evidence of malfeasance,' and the answer is that we're not sure, because we can't get the information to do proper board oversight."

Cate Lane, a former Pathfinder employee who left without signing an NDA, and who served under Quam as a technical adviser for youth and adolescents from 2017 to 2019, told the Press Herald she left because of Quam's "toxic" leadership style. She said experienced people had been systematically driven out of the organization in favor of cheaper, less capable replacements, undermining capacity and morale. "Unless somebody takes Lois out, I think Pathfinder is on a slide to irrelevance," Lane said.

Then there was the issue of Judy's father.

AN UGLY PAST

Like Margaret Sanger, Clarence Gamble had been a devotee of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which sought to improve humanity's genetic stock by preventing people with allegedly undesirable qualities from reproducing, sometimes via forced sterilization. Undesirables typically included poor people, disabled people, those alleged to have low intelligence, and people of color. Adolf Hitler would become the most infamous of eugenicists, but prior to the Holocaust such views were broadly held among the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of the U.S. and U.K., championed by Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gamble co-founded the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947 to promote eugenic sterilization under a now-notorious state law that allowed social workers to designate people as "defective" and encourage their sterilization at state expense. Of the 7,600 people sterilized under the state's program, 85 percent were female and 40 percent were minorities. The state later negotiated reparations for survivors.

"For a million years, Dame Nature found she could develop her people only by selecting for survival the most prolific, the toughest and smartest," Gamble and a co-author wrote in a 1950 pamphlet. "In our time, notwithstanding the rapidly mounting world-wide burdens of overpopulation which are increased by limiting epidemics and salvaging weaklings, our organized efforts toward fostering breeding for quality rather than quantity can show only three decades of active development."

Judy and Ben Kahrl told the Press Herald they were highly supportive of the Pathfinder board's decision, after the police killing of George Floyd last year, to hire independent researchers to exhume Clarence's legacy from the organization's archives, including any lasting imprint his eugenicist views may have left. But they became concerned when, one year later, the archives remained sealed from view by either the board or the public.

The outside consultant's reports which the Kahrls shared with the Press Herald provided surprisingly little new information on Gamble. At one point, instead of relying on the archives, it cites a report by an anti-abortion activist group, the Population Research Institute. At another point they attribute to Clarence Gamble a note on an office memo from 1972, six years after he'd died.

"It was embarrassing, a pretty bad report," Kahrl said. "I don't know a better word than 'junk.'" The reports were never discussed by the board, she said, and even after they were submitted they were told they could not see the company archives.

Judy's nephew, Jim Epstein a grandchild of Clarence Gamble who served on the Pathfinder board through the 1980s said he shared her disappointment. "There needs to be a full reckoning," he said. "That's an essential part of the process. Our sense is that the organization has been slow-walking it."

Ben Kahrl said he was voted off the board last month after he pushed for fuller disclosure of both the documents related to his grandfather and the internal review of CEO Quam's tenure. His removal was the final straw prompting his mother and uncle Walter the only other Gamble family members on the 19-person board to resign. "I pray that there will be healing, but I feel I had done all I could do from the inside," Judy Kahrl said.

DISCLOSURE AND TRANSPARENCY

Board chair Roslyn Watson, one of Boston's leading African-American businesswomen, initially responded to the resignations with a statement suggesting the Gambles had left because they were uncomfortable with wider disclosure of their ancestor's legacy. It noted their pride in their efforts to recruit a more diverse board and address Clarence's "racially biased and unscientific personal beliefs through an independent review free from family influence." She noted they had resigned in the wake of such efforts and said they sought to "distract us from fulfilling our mission," including "commitments to racial and gender equality."

When questioned by the Press Herald, Watson conceded that the Gambles had been pushing for greater disclosure than the board wanted, including the public release of 30 boxes of documents from the 1950s and 1960s locked in the company archives.

"We're not a research organization. We have an operating responsibility for over $100 million in programs each year, and we need to safeguard that and make sure that nothing gets in the way of providing those services," said Watson, a prominent investor in Boston and Paris real estate and past general manager of the powerful Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan Airport. "Spending the majority of our time trying to protect ourselves from the raw materials out in the international sphere wouldn't serve the organization and its mission."

She said Pathfinder had to have "a forward-looking lens" and "not get stuck in a kind of rabbit warren hole of debating past behavior and what it means." She also expressed full confidence in Quam, the consultant's reports on the Gamble legacy and the state of the organization. Annual turnover is not unusually high for the international development nonprofit sector, employee satisfaction is good and fundraising is healthy, she said.

She also said the nonprofit's use of nondisclosures and severance packages is appropriate and that the Kahrls had been denied access to the independent review of Quam in accordance with board policies restricting access to the executive committee. Ben Kahrl, she said, had been voted off the board because "for two years he consistently behaved in a way that was inappropriate and undermined the board and CEO and organization." Examples, she said, included contacting country officers directly to push a personal agenda and implying to staff members that he disagreed with policy decisions made by the board and CEO.

She noted the organization is amid a strategic pivot to give more power and autonomy to individual country offices, which are staffed by people from those countries, and reduce the influence of Pathfinder's headquarters staff in Watertown, Massachusetts. She said Quam a former official at The Nature Conservancy who headed the Obama administration's Global Health Initiative had been "an exemplary leader."

Quam, whose 2018 compensation was $438,066, did not respond to an interview request made via Pathfinder's spokesperson. Pathfinder has a solid 86.7 out of 100 rating from the independent nonprofit rating service Charity Navigator, which reported 89.6 percent of Pathfinder's total expenses in 2019 went to programs.

Judy Kahrl said she's diverting her attention to other initiatives such as Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and that Pathfinder is now in her past after more than six decades of board service.

"I resigned because I wanted more transparency," she said, "and I wanted to make a strong statement that we are absolutely opposed to eugenics and that board members need to be given the information they need to make responsible, accountable decisions."

Read the original here:

Maine philanthropist's resignation shakes global reproductive rights charity founded by her father - Yahoo News

The histories of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender diversity are filled with incredible pain and enormous pride, of overwhelming repression and victorious rejoicing, of stifling invisibility and dazzling illumination. Throughout the ages, same-sex love and relationships and gender non-conformity have been called many things: from sins, sicknesses, and crimes to orientations, identities, and even gifts from God.

From the Eugenics Movement of the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century CE and beyond, medical and psychological professions have often proposed and addressed, in starkly medical terms, the alleged deficiencies and mental diseases of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

During what has come to be known as the Eugenics movement in science (coined by Francis Galton in England in 1883 from the Greek word meaning well-born or of good origins or breeding in which the socially constructed hierarchical concept of race was codified), some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex as constituting a distinct biological or racial type those who could be distinguished from normal people through anatomical markers.

For example, Dr. G. Frank Lydston, U. S. urologist, surgeon, and professor from Chicago, in 1889 delivered a lecture at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago in which he referred to homosexuals as sexual perverts who are physically abnormal.

the unfortunate class of individuals who are characterized by perverted sexuality have been viewed in the light of their moral responsibility rather than as the victims of a physical and incidentally of a mental defect.Even to the moralist, there should be much satisfaction in the thought that a large class of sexual perverts are physically abnormal rather than morally leprous.

Also, the American medical doctor, Allan McLane Hamilton, wrote in 1896 that the [female homosexual] is usually of a masculine type, or if she presented none of the characteristics of the male, was a subject of pelvic disorder, with scanty menstruation, and was more or less hysterical and insane.

Physician, Perry M. Lichtenstein, published in 1921 that: A physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris (p. 372).

And in 1857 in France, Ambroise Tardieu wrote that: This degeneracy is evidenced in men who engage in same-sex eroticism by their underdeveloped, tapered penis resembling that of a dog, and a naturally smooth anus lacking in radial folds.

In addition, rather than considering homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender diversity merely as emotional, gender, and sexual differences along a broad spectrum of human potential, some sectors of the medical and psychological communities forced pathologizing language onto people with same-sex and bisexual attractions, and those who cross traditional constructions of gender identities and expressions.

Dr. Sigmund Freud, for example, saw homosexuality as a developmental disorder, a fixation at one of the intermediate pregenital stages. He believed this was caused, at least in part, by an incomplete resolution in males of the Oedipal complex.

Freud wrote in a 1935 letter to a mother who had asked him to treat her sons homosexuality:

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development (Freud in Lewes, 1988).

The Swiss physician, August Forel, wrote in 1905:

The [sexual] excesses of female inverts exceed those of the male,and this is their one thought night and day, almost without interruption. [Male inverts] feel the need for passive submissionand occupy themselves with feminine pursuits. Nearly all [female and male] inverts are in more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics.

Educational opportunities for primarily middle-class women improved somewhat during the mid-19th century in the United States. Often locked out of most institutions of higher learning, several womens colleges were founded, such as Mt. Holyoke College, Vassar, Smith College, Wellesley College, and Bryn Mawr.

There were, however, many conservative critics who attacked this new trend warning that educated women would be unfit to fill traditional roles in society, and others, like Dr. Edward Clarke, in 1873 warning that study would interfere with womens fertility, causing them chronic uterine disease.

And Dr. Havelock Ellis concluded that

Womens colleges are the great breeding ground of lesbianism. When young women are thrown together, they manifest an increasing affection by the usual tokens. They kiss each other fondly on every occasionThey learn the pleasure of direct contactand after this, the normal sex act fails to satisfy them (quoted in Faderman, 1991, p. 49).

Ellis posited that female homosexuality was increasing because of the rise of feminism, which taught women to be independent of men.

All of this has resulted in members of the medical professions committing lesbians, gay males, bisexuals, and those who transgress so-called normative gender identities and expressions (often against their will) to hospitals, mental institutions, jails, and penitentiaries, and forced pre-frontal lobotomies, electroshock, castration, and sterilization. We have been made to endure aversion therapy, reparative therapy, Christian counseling, hormonal castration, and genetic counseling.

Under this backdrop, the National Public Broadcasting (PBS) premieres for a national audience the documentary film Cured on Monday, October 11, 2021, at 10/9c (check local listings) on its Independent Lens series.

This film by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer profiles the development, expansion, and eventual victory of activists both outside and inside the ranks of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its manual of mental illnesses, its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and the often-contentious debate surrounding the change.

The film begins from a context in which conservative religious denominations defined homosexuals as sinful, government prosecuted homosexuals as criminal, and the psychiatric profession judged them as sick.

Interviewing key eyewitnesses, including Charles Silverstein, Rev. Magora Kennedy, Kay Lahusen, and Frank Kameny, combined with rare archival footage, this important film unearthed the history of how a relatively small group of committed and fervent activists stood up to demand one of the central tenets of liberation: the freedom to define themselves.

One of the antagonists in this drama includes physician Irving Bieber who co-authored a study in 1962, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals sponsored by the New York Society of Psychoanalysts, in which he concluded that homosexuality constituted a psychopathology that could be cured or prevented with psychoanalysis.

Bieber later was quoted in 1973 saying: A homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim (Biebers 1973 quote from New York Times, August 28, 1991).

In addition, the psychiatrist Charles Socarides, founder of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), argued that homosexuality is an illness, a neurosis, possibly caused by an over-attachment to the mother, which he too argued could be treated. Bieber and Socrarides became the authoritative and often-referenced researchers in the area of causation and treatment of homosexuality.

Cured profiles the street activism including when I and my compatriots of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay May Day collective, friends from the Mattachine Society, and members of the newly-formed Gay Activists Alliance stormed the APA convention in May 1971 at the Shorham Hotel in Washington DC as Franklin Kameny of Mattachine DC leapt upon the stage and declared war on the psychiatric profession.

The year following, APA held its next annual conference in Dallas, Texas. Barbara Gittings and Franklin Kameny again presented their views and facilitated a workshop discussion, this time joined by Dr. H. Anonymous (a.k.a. psychiatrist Dr. John E. Fryer) wearing a costume mask to hide his identity who discussed his experiences as a gay psychiatrist and member of the APA.

By 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had finally changed its designation of homosexuality for those comfortable with their sexual orientation, now asserting that it does not constitute a disorder: [H]omosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities.

Two years later, in 1975, the American Psychological Association followed suit and urged mental health professionals to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with homosexual orientations.

The American Psychiatric Association announced in its 2013 DSM-V that the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which the manual has imposed upon transgender people since it published DSM-III in 1980, underwent what the APA subcommittee deciding on the change considered as a more neutral designation, gender dysphoria, which they saw as descriptive rather than diagnostic and pathologizing.

In the case of LGBTQ people, the scientific community has consistently deployed the medical model to investigate and pathologize the other. In so doing, heteronormativity and cissupremacy (oppression and colonization against trans people), therefore, become perceived as unremarkable or normal, unquestioned hegemonic norms against which all others are judged.

This medicalization of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender non-conformity only served to strengthen oppression and heterosexual and cisgender privilege through its relative invisibility. Given this invisibility, issues of oppression and privilege were neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor confronted by members of the dominant group.

Cured makes clear, however, the truth in Margaret Mead, the American cultural anthropologists statement: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, its the only thing that ever has.

References

Bieber, I. (1973, Dec. 23). In The A.P.A. ruling on homosexuality. An interview with two psychiatrists, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer and Dr. Irving Bieber, The New York Times.

Ellis, H. (1939). Psychology of sex. London: William Heinemann

Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. New York: Penguin.

Forel, A. (1905). La Question sexuelle (traduit dans de nombreuses langues), rdit en 2012: La question sexuelle expose aux adultes cultivs, prface de Christophe Granger, diteur : AUTREMENT

Freud, S. (1986) The essentials of psycho-analysis: Selected by Anna Freud. NYC: Penguin Books.

Hamilton, A. M. (1896). The civil responsibility of sexual perverts. American Journal of

Insanity, 52:503-09.

Lewes, K. (1988), The psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality, New York: New American Library.

Lichtenstein, P. (1921). The fairy and the lady lover. Medical Review of Reviews, 27.

Lydston, G. F. (1889, Sept. 7). Clinical Lecture: Sexual Perversion, Satyriasas, and Nymphomania. Medical and Surgical Reporter, LXI(10), 553-557.

Socarides, C. (1968). The overt homosexual. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, Inc.

Tardieu, A. (1857). Etude medico-lgale sur les attentats aux moeurs. Paris: J.-B. Baillire.

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Excerpt from:

PBS to Nationally Premiered Cured Profiling the Battle of Homosexuals To Define Themselves in Psychiatry - The Good Men Project

Never thought Id see a doctor testify in an Assembly hearing that we should limit abortion because too few kids are being born with down syndrome these days, but here we are -Justin Bielinski

Democratic state legislators and some of their top aides are revealing what they REALLY think about kids with disabilities as they push back against Assembly bills protecting them.

The Assembly is pushing a slew of bills, many against abortion. One bill would seem to be a no-brainer: It would ban sex-selective, disability-selective, and other selective abortions, meaning it would ban abortions being undertaken solely on the basis of gender, race or disability. Who would oppose that? Democrats oppose even that bill, which is essentially just banning eugenics.

Oh, by the way, October is Down Syndrome Awareness month.

The most odious Democratic reaction came from a top aide to a prominent Democratic state Senator, whose tweet indicated he doesnt value the lives of kids with Down Syndrome.

AB 594 would require doctors who do a test for a congenital condition to refer the patient to a website created by DHS that would connect them to support and accurate resources. Democrats dont like that, either. AB 595 would prohibit aborting a child based on any discriminatory characteristics including a congenital diagnosis and race.

Never thought Id see a doctor testify in an Assembly hearing that we should limit abortion because too few kids are being born with down syndrome these days, but here we are, tweeted Justin Bielinski, the director of Communications and campaign manager for Democratic state Sen. Chris Larson. Justin Bielinski, who previously worked for Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, later deleted the tweet.

What a truly awful thought to have, let alone tweet out, wrote Republican State Sen. John Jagler.

Jagler shared photos of his daughter.

He wrote to Bielinski, I get that best case scenario you dont value her as a person. Worse case..you dont think she should have been born. But shes here. Shes thriving and is loved. I wonder. Does your boss, @SenChrisLarson, share your thoughts that the world would be a better place without Grace and people like her?

Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, held a media availability before the hearing complaining about all of the bills eroding womens health. She is a former executive director at abortion provider NARAL.

The efforts last week by Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature included the following bills: AB 593, related to: informed consent regarding a certain abortion-inducing drug regimen and reporting requirements for induced abortions (Vos/Kapenga) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 539, related to: prohibiting discrimination in organ transplantation on the basis of disability (Born/Jagler); AB 36,related to: permitting pharmacists to prescribe certain contraceptives (Kitchens/Felzkowski) [passed through the Assembly last session but not taken up by the Senate before COVID hit]; AB 594 relating to: congenital condition education resources (Dittrich/Testin); AB 595, related to: sex-selective, disability-selective, and other selective abortions [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 6, relating to requirements forchildren born alive following abortion or attempted abortion (Steineke/Roth) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 493, relating to: certification of abortion providers under the Medical Assistance program (Dittrich/Stroebel) [vetoed by Evers last session]; AB 262, relating to: induced abortion reporting (Wichgers/Jacque); AB 528, relating to certification of abortion providers under the Medical Assistance program (Brandtjen/Jacque).

The hearing included testimony from Tom Kulczewski, whose son, Malix, was later found to have a heart defect after being born with Down Syndrome. Kulzczewski was accompanied by his wife and four children and testified that his doctor told them that Malix would never be eligible for a heart transplant, despite exhausting so many attempts to repair his heart condition, because he has Down Syndrome.

Two other individuals with Down Syndrome and another with autism testified in support of AB 539, asserting their right to the necessary health treatment, regardless of their disability.

Those advocating for pro-life legislation were criticized by pro-abortion committee members Sara Rodriguez (D Brookfield), and Subeck (D Madison). Committee Chair, Rep. Joe Sanfelippo had to gavel down Rodriguez, demanding that committee members return to decorum rather than attacks on those testifying such as Micah Pearce of Wisconsin Family Action.

Mainstream media never reported these details of the committee. They focused onRep. Subeck and pro-abortion doctors, revealing bias towards promoting abortion.

The following bills are scheduled to be passed through an Executive Committee Hearingof the Assembly Committee on Health next Thursday, 10/14/21: AB 6, AB 36, AB 128, AB262, AB 493, AB 528, AB 539, AB 593, AB 594, and AB 595. Also scheduled to be passed through that same Executive Committee Hearing but not heard in the 10/7/21 hearing are AB 128, AB 281, AB 290, AB 295, AB 296, AB 337, and AB 358. All bills can beaccessed by typing in their number here.

Excerpt from:

What Wisconsin Democratics Think About Disabled Kids - Wisconsin Right Now

Farm swaps cows for goats amid changing industry

Fluctuating milk prices and rising costs have driven some small family farms to either go big or leave the industry. Two brothers operating their familys dairy farm in Vermont made the drastic decision to give up hundreds of cows for goats. (July 20)

AP

BURLINGTON, Vt. Out of the nearly 7,000 farms in Vermont, only 17 are Black-owned, according to the 2017 U.S. agriculture census. A $2 million fundis seeking to expand access to farm land ownership in Vermont for people who have been historically denied land based on their race.

The design and governance of this "land sovereignty" fund will bedetermined byBlack, Indigenous, and other people of color. Itis part of a broader$6 million initiative by theHigh Meadows Fund, Vermont Community Foundation, and Vermont Land Trust to promote the economic viability, sustainability, and diversity of farming in Vermont.

"The historic Clemmons farm is one of the few Black-owned farms remaining in the state and nation.We look forward to joining hands with others to support the important work ahead," said Lydia Clemmons,executive director of the Clemmons Family Farm in Charlotte.

The Vermont Land Trust permanently restricts development of land using a legal tool called conservation easement. Since 1977, they have conserved 11% of the state's land, over 590,000 acres, most of which is actively farmed or managed for timber by private owners.

Nationally, Black land ownership has declined by nearly 90% over the last century, resulting in a total loss of36.7 million acres,according to Census of Agriculture data. Investigations by Mother Jones and The Atlantic attribute this decline toracist government policies,discriminatory lendingpractices, white vigilantism, and police violence.

Indigenous people have lost 1.5 billion acres of land since the founding of the U.S., according toUniversity of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt.

"Indigenous communities, once the sole stewards of Vermonts land, have been diminished and marginalized by centuries of displacement and discrimination, including the eugenics movement in Vermont in the early 20th century," the High Meadows Fund wrotein a press release about the new grant.

Contact April Fisher at amfisher@freepressmedia.com. Followher on Twitter: @AMFisherMedia

See more here:

In Vermont, just 17 of the 7,000 farms are Black-owned. A new grant seeks to expand access. - USA TODAY