Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer in South End Albany, New York and a co-founder of Soul Fire Farms which is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. She grew up close to nature and inherently loving farming, but as a Black woman she rarely saw people like her in the food and farm space. Fighting against an overpowering narrative that Black people don’t belong on the land because of the recent history of oppression and enslavement tied to that position, she is often heard to say that “some people mistake the scene of the crime with the crime itself.” Her work at Soul Fire farm is changing that narrative that kept pushing her away from the land, to one that connects with the ancestral knowledge of Black and Indigenous people as well as providing the tools for future activist farmers to be successful —emotionally and financially.