Building New Worlds

Our year in review

As 2024 comes to a close, we’ve reflected on the threads that have woven our work into the wider struggles for sovereignty, freedom, and autonomy around the world. This year has exposed the insidiousness of institutional gaslighting amidst genocide, corporate consolidation, ecological collapse, land grabbing, and many other symptoms of a sick, dying paradigm.

At A Growing Culture (AGC), we believe in food sovereignty as a unifying pathway to liberation and that storytelling is both a battleground and a tool for liberation. We remain committed to being at the service of the communities and territories that not only feed us but also steward life, culture and memory. — it’s through food that we can connect to:

• reframe narratives that enable injustice, replacing them with stories that inspire hope and ignite action.

• reimagine ways of living that cultivate solidarity across struggles, borders, and generations.

• reclaim our agency over the systems that nourish all life, to build a future rooted in liberation and care.

2024: OUR YEAR IN REVIEW

This year, we focused on amplifying the immense potential of food sovereignty as a tool for liberation and a guide for transitioning out of extractive paradigms. Through collaborations with our growing network of movement partners and AGCs positionality, we worked to bridge worlds and resource transformations.

Uprooting dominant narratives

Through collaborative action and strategic communications, we worked to disrupt narrow, one-dimensional narratives. This included:

• Partnering with key food sovereignty actors to challenge the dominant narratives surrounding technology’s role in food sovereignty, one result of which was a publication on The Politics of Technology, offering a politically informed framework for engaging with technology in food systems.

• Co-developing media toolkits like Cotton at the Source to challenge oversimplified narratives about cotton and sustainability, and recenter communities in storytelling.

Sowing alternative pathways
From launching campaigns to supporting press placements in legacy and alternative media, we contributed to shaping bolder narratives. This included:

• Amplifying partner-led campaigns, such as the impactful Block Corporate Salmon, with over 150 printed copies of the ‘Honoring Salmon, Honoring Life’ zine distributed at local and international conferences. The work and struggle had a resolution this December, successfully shutting down AquaBonty’s last facility in the U.S. – a paramount victory for the Salmon People and a testament to their relentless organising work.

• Supporting emergent press needs to place urgent stories in outlets like In These Times, Forbes, and Atmos.

• Building our own storytelling capacity through our first Substack series, a social media campaign throughout COP29, and in-depth reflections, connecting diverse audiences with movement-driven narratives.

Cultivating Solidarity

Through strategic collaborations and a deep commitment to solidarity, we worked to build bridges across struggles, borders, and generations. This included:

• Collaborating with grassroots movements from around the world to facilitate virtual exchanges and an in-person convening in Bangkok, to share knowledge and strategies around the crucial care work embedded in their struggles and explore how care serves as radical resistance to capitalism, patriarchy, and the climate crisis. More to come in 2025!

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FOR 2025

As we step into 2025, our work will remain rooted in holding contradictions, embracing nuance, and building collective power with food (seed, territory, and community) as a bridge. What relationships can strengthen the work we do and the vision we hold? How can we grow the food sovereignty ecosystem in harmony with the hopes and goals of other liberatory movements? At AGC, we believe compartmentalised struggles hinder the birth of transformative futures.

Charting New Territories
Through various initiatives, we will explore critical areas, such as:

• Debunking Myths: Through partnerships and new projects, we will connect academia with the press to challenge harmful narratives, and equip communities with the tools to reclaim their truth.

• Bridging Realities: Using food and storytelling to connect across divides and resource those who need it most. Where fear has governed policy and social dynamics, we will centre hope and action.

• Centering Care in Organising: Alongside partners, we worked to restore the value of care as resistance, and how to weave it into the work of social movements at the forefront of the world’s multiple crises to ensure these principles are not just part of the conversation but central pillars for action.

• Elevating Movement Building: By supporting efforts like the Global Nyéléni Forum, which will bring together diverse movements from all over the world to India in 2025. We are committed to building a strong, united movement for food sovereignty by strategising, sharing knowledge, and strengthening solidarity across intersectional struggles.

In these efforts, we aspire to navigate 2025 as the year where we are all reminded of our collective power: the power to reimagine and reclaim our future for generations to come. The year where we centre hope as a vessel; as an open, fertile space where uncertainty sprouts solidarity.

We have over 14,700 people in our Substack community, and 114 of you have decided to become paid subscribers. Upgrading to paid isn’t just about supporting this newsletter, but also resourcing all of our other work to resource movements around the world. If you have found value in these words and ideas, and you are in a position to become a paid subscriber or to donate directly to our organisation, we would be so grateful for your support. As always, thank you for reading.