At this Vermont farm, BIPOC find refuge from a hostile world and reconnect with nature
For over twenty years, Knoll Farm has provided weeklong retreats for people of color to find healing outside the confines of society.
Participants of the Better Selves Fellowship at Knoll Farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. The fellowship allows BIPOC and their allies to spend a week on the farm to rest and recover. Knoll Farm gifts the week to attendees thanks to grants and donations. Photo courtesy of Knoll Farm.
"The most important thing I can tell you tonight is that you belong here."
It’s the opening statement Peter Forbes of Knoll Farm made to hundreds of guests of the farm at their 2022 annual benefit concert. This simple sentence sums up everything about his philosophy for living, which he calls “radical hospitality.”
While the 160 acres he and his partner Helen Whybrow farm in Waitsfield are technically theirs, ownership is the last thing they claim. It's rooted in their belief that nature has the capacity to heal and that everyone should have access to that healing.
“The primary relationship every human being has is with nature and other human beings. Part of what consumerism and Western society does is dissolve both of those primary forms of relationship,” Forbes explained.
In particular, lack of access to nature is common for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), known as the nature gap. It’s the result of living in a world where racism, inequality, and the resulting trauma are still pervasive.
But, in the hills of Vermont, at Knoll Farm sits an inspiring example of community building amongst BIPOC and their allies, deeply rooted in a desire to create systemic change.
“More than ever before, our country is sustained by individuals working against all odds without breaks or benefits, sometimes without a paycheck confronting systems that are much bigger than themselves day after day because they couldn’t do anything otherwise,” Forbes said. “We created a fellowship for them….we give them encouragement to do their best work but, most importantly, time to renew and recommit.”
This dream comes to life in the form of the farm’s weeklong Better Selves Fellowship, where vulnerable communities find spaces for solace and progress outside the confines of oppressive social systems. Funded by grants and donations, the weeklong opportunity for renewal is completely free to BIPOC leaders and their allies working for environmental and social change.
“We have people of color and their allies from all over the U.S. come here, and they are strangers to each other. Through basic human kindness and reconnection to a beautiful, healthy working farm, everyone softens. Everyone is able to see each other and relate to each other differently,” Forbes said.
Dálida Rocha, a Better Selves Fellow, speaks at Knoll Farm at the 2022 Annual Benefit Concert. Proceeds go toward the Better Selves Fellowship; a weeklong retreat for BIPOC and their allies in the hills of Vermont.
Dálida Finds Her Light
Dálida Rocha, of Boston, Massachusetts, stayed at the farm for a week in the summer of 2022 as part of the fellowship program.
“I was realizing that I needed to slow down and focus on my mental health and really be able to teach my children that they are entitled to rest. That there is something else out there besides going and going and chasing and chasing,” Rocha said.
Originally from Cape Verde on the West Coast of Africa, Rocha is a mother of three and the executive director of Renew U.S., an organization building state-based, multi-racial grassroots power to combat our overlapping crises of climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice.
Rocha says feelings of burnout and a disconnect with her inner self led her to therapy, though she says something was still missing.
“You get to a point in your healing journey, and it just gets really sticky, and it’s hurting you, and you know there is light on the other side, but you aren’t sure you are going to get through it, and I was stuck there,” Rocha recalled of her feelings before coming to Knoll Farm. “I was trying to tell my therapist all the right things thinking she wanted to hear because I was afraid to push through that moment and that tension.
She decided to come to Knoll Farm to rest. After only one night at the farm, she began to feel a shift in her thinking.
“I was in the bathhouse, and there was a quote. It said, ‘What is to give light must endure burning,’ and that was the answer. I was just like, ‘Wow, it took just one good night of sleep and knowing I was going to be able to rest and feel safe,’” Rocha recalled of the life-changing moment. “I realized that I needed to allow my light to shine to bring me out of the darkness. I also needed to allow my light to shine to allow others to get out of the darkness.”
Rocha says her ability to find clarity and honesty with herself wouldn’t have been possible without access to the sanctuary of Knoll Farm.
“Now, instead of trying to look for the right words to tell my therapist, I’m actually being myself…less of doing and more of being,” Rocha said. “This land will continue to bring so much healing to so many folks who otherwise wouldn’t be able to find the time to just be.”
The 2022 Benefit Concert at Knoll Farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. Proceeds fund a weeklong retreat for BIPOC leaders and their allies working toward environmental and social justice. Photo by Laura Hardie.
Participants of the Better Selves Fellowship pose for a group photo at the farm with Knoll Farm staff. Third from the right is Knoll Farm co-owner, Peter Forbes. Photo courtesy of Knoll Farm.
Over 20 Years of Radical Hospitality
Since 2000, Knoll Farm has welcomed more than 4,000 people, like Rocha, to spend a week at the farm, completely free, during the summer. It’s a concept Forbes calls “making refuge.”
“Making refuge means a lot of different things. It is the practice of growing really healthy food. It’s also the practice of welcoming strangers to our home and giving them food, bed, and safety,” Forbes said.
Forbes says the idea of the farm as a place of refuge didn’t begin with him, Helen, or any one person. It’s something that emanates from the land itself.
“We've never had a context of farming as simply producing food,” Forbes explained.
This idea makes sense when you see the farm. When you arrive, you feel like you’ve been transported to a place where nothing can hurt you. The farm sits on a 1,200-foot hillside where thousands of sheep have been raised, and blueberries are prolific. It’s so big you can’t see the bottom from the top. The hill looks out over a deep valley below that seems like a moat protecting the farm. Surrounding the valley is a wall of impenetrable-looking mountains standing guard.
Forbes says in the 1970s and 80s, Ann Day, one of the stewards of the farm for over 50 years, made Knoll Farm into a stop on the modern-day underground railroad for Central Americans as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans fled north from civil war, repression, and economic devastation.
“A lot of people fleeing were not given asylum in the U.S., and to get to Canada, they had to make their way through the United States,” Forbes said. “Knoll Farm is two hours from the Canadian border. It’s always been part of the DNA of the land to provide refuge, and Helen and I are just coming into attunement with the land.”
Forbes explains that the ability of the land to be a place of refuge is deeply linked with the trauma that has occurred there. From the refugees that fled there to the displacement of Abenaki people when the farm was settled in 1804 to the trauma that often comes with the harsh realities of farming.
“Almost every piece of land has both trauma and healing on it. And we refer to that as seeds and ashes….it’s not just a metaphor; it's very much a real thing,” Forbes said. “You cannot have organic agriculture without birth and death, and you cannot have a process of healing without the presence of trauma.”
Better Selves Fellowship co-facilitator Lawrence Barriner II leads a workshop with fellows. Photo courtesy of Knoll Farm.
A Glacier Sweeping Across the Country
When Forbes talks about refuge at the farm, he says the origin is rooted in the geological Latin term refugium.
Refugium, Latin for refuge, are places that were untouched by glacial activity during the ice age, making the survival of flora and fauna possible.
“These untouched places became the seed beds for all biotic life that we know in New England. And so literally refugia are pockets of hope, pockets of seeds, of life, of opportunity, of health, and in opposition to a glaciation that is sweeping across a landscape.” Forbes said.
He described a modern-day glacier destroying pockets of hope.
“Twelve thousand years ago, it was literally ice. Today it’s capitalism, it's consumerism, it's hyper-nationalism, it's everything that’s anti-community. Extremism is its own form of a glacier that is sweeping across the country,” Forbes described.
Forbes says places that provide sanctuary from extremism, like Knoll Farm, are glacial refugium, trying to survive a cultural disaster and grow the connections people have to the earth and each other.
“It's the relationship to nature that enables us to have a better relationship with people. If you want to cure or address the fundamental tensions between human beings,” Forbes said, “start by connecting them to nature and then connect them to each other; we do that every single week.”
Nia Witherspoon (center), a Black Queer theatre maker, vocalist, composer, and cultural worker, performs in Vermont for the first time alongside Moira Smiley and friends at Knoll Farm’s 2022 annual benefit concert to fund the Better Selves Fellowship. Photo courtesy of Knoll Farm.
The 2022 Annual Benefit concert at Knoll Farm. Photo courtesy of Knoll Farm.
Community-Funded Fellowship: An Act of Healing
Each year, Knoll Farm raises funds for the Better Selves Fellowship by applying for grants and seeking donations. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the farm’s products also funds Better Selves.
In 2022, the farm raised $153,000 from 248 donors to support the healing journey for BIPOC in 2023.
One of the farm’s biggest fundraising events is its annual benefit concert.
Lawrence Barriner II, a Better Selves fellow in 2017 and now co-facilitator, summed up the lasting impact of the fellowship and Knoll Farm’s purpose at the 2022 concert.
“When we are running, it’s really hard to dream,” Barriner said. “And having time here on this land to rest has given me new access to my dreams. And we see it week after week. People leave here, and they see, find, and know [how to] access to their dreams.”
Moira Smiley and over a dozen other musicians curated a set that highlighted Knoll Farm’s vision, particularly Smiley’s song ‘Refugee.’
In your world, I'm a refugee
In your world, danger all around me,
All around me, all around me
In your world, I'm not free, I must flee, I must flee
Bring me shelter, I will not harm you
Bring me shelter, please
Bring me shelter, I will not harm you
‘Black Girls Sing,’ by Nia Witherspoon, performed alongside Smiley and her band, brought an empowering, radical energy to the hillside.
…Trauma bonding calling it love. I think it’s getting old.
I come from the galaxy. I come from black holes.
They might have sold this body, but my spirit is old.
Multiply for generations, I’m a trickster playing games. I’m an eternal flame.
Ding a ling ling, wake up and sing.
America, America so colonizing.
Amidst the music, Forbes’ delivered a clear message to the largely white crowd at the concert: Healing can be reciprocal for those who make the Better Selves Fellowship possible.
“In these fellowships, Black, Brown, and indigenous leaders and their allies are welcomed into a white space with care and service. They are given joyful experiences to recover, heal, and propel themselves forward. All of us involved in that have the potential to be healed by that,” Forbes said.
• • • •
If you are seeking a place of peace or connection, stop by Knoll Farm at 700 Bragg Hill in Waitsfield. Their new Habibis Cafe serves hot drinks, homemade soups, bread, and treats every Friday from noon to 6 p.m.
To donate to Knoll Farm, visit: www.knollfarm.org/donate
Photo by Laura Hardie.
