At Juneteenth Celebration, Nurturing Communities Through Food

By Renata Sago | Word In Black Overview: Black people make up a fraction of the nations; farmers, food industry workers, and food policy analysts. The Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo is trying to change that narrative. (WIB) – In 2016, when Jaime Swygert was preparing for the Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo, one of the largest in the U.S., she imagined she’d just be sitting at a table with vendors.  But the festival — one of the largest in the U.S. — became fertile ground for an idea she had: a way to meaningfully connect people of color to food.& An employee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time, “I found that there were all these job opportunities for young people to get into farming in the science side of it — soil science, engineering — all sorts of positions where students were coming back to work on their breaks,” says Swygert, a Black woman. “But I wasn’t seeing that any of them looked like us.”& RELATED:& The Truth About Being a Black Farmer Three years later, Swygert opened the Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion at the Juneteenth Festival of Buffalo as a space for the city’s Black communities to connect...