A Black elder stood in her doorway, a place the Sun Fresh closure on 31st & Prospect had rendered a boundary between her and dignity, and held the weight of what our people have always known: that when the state abandons you, you must build your own infrastructure.
“We are so deeply grateful for y’all,” she told us yesterday as we made our first delivery, her voice carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who has been failed by every institution designed to catch her. “We’re struggling real bad right now. Our SNAP is going to be cut and we just don’t know what we’re going to do. God bless y’all.”
This was October 28, 2025. The Hamer Free Food Program was conducting its second distribution to Black families within a one-mile radius of 31st and Prospect, the same stretch of geography that the capitalist food system had already written off as unprofitable, unworthy, disposable. The same corner where the last full-service grocery store for miles had shuttered its doors mere months ago, leaving thousands of people without accessible fresh food. The same neighborhood where, come November 1st, the federal government will yank SNAP benefits from over 650,000 Missourians, a deliberate choice, wrapped in the language of “shutdown,” but what it really is: starvation as policy.
But when we spoke with her she wasn’t thinking about policy yesterday. She was thinking about the next month. About her grandbaby’s nutrition. About survival in a nation that has made survival itself radical.
The Prophecy of Black Food Justice Leaders
The fact of the matter is: Black farmers, Black organizers, and everyday Black folks saw this coming for months.
Back in August—two months before Sun Fresh closed—when KC Black Urban Growers, The Defender & Ivanhoe began laying the groundwork for the Hamer Free Food Program, we were refusing the crisis before it arrived. We were looking at the historical pattern of divestment in Black neighborhoods, the strangulation of SNAP benefits under right-wing administrations, the systematic dismantling of food access as a tool of social control (and even warfare), and we asked: What infrastructure do our people need to survive what’s coming?
And then we built it.
For the first time in Kansas City history, every major Black farmer came together to build a new food sovereignty network.
Young Family Farm KC. Global One Urban Farming. Sankara Farm. Ophelia’s Blue Vine Farm. Pearl Family Farm. These are people who have been laboring in soil, literally and figuratively. Now they were the infrastructure and leadership to our people’s self-sustainability and self-determination.
KC Black Urban Growers coordinated. Ivanhoe Neighborhood Association—with their decades of feeding thousands annually—brought institutional knowledge. The Defender brought logistics, political education, and amplification utilizing our various media platforms.
What 60 Volunteers Learned in a Month
Between August and September, something extraordinary happened in the soil.
The Defender organized over 60 Community Food Leaders and volunteers—all Black—who showed up at these farms to learn how to harvest, how to pack, how to feed your own people. They learned the skill set of survival. They learned that agricultural knowledge is revolutionary knowledge.
By September, the first distribution happened. Then yesterday—just as the Trump administration’s government shutdown entered its fourth week and the USDA’s warning echoed through every food desert in America: “the well has run dry”—those same volunteers, those same farmers, those same community leaders handed boxes of nutrient-dense, fresh produce to their neighbors.
This is what Black elders know. People who survived enslavement. People who lived through Jim Crow. People who watched institutions abandon them so many times they stopped counting. Black revolutionaries and socialists (such as the Black Panther Party free breakfast for children program) who understood decades ago what we’re re-learning now: that a right-wing extremist, oligarchical, white-supremacist regime will never feed us, that capitalist markets are designed to starve us, that waiting is a luxury we cannot afford.
Thus, when markets abandon us, the earth is still there. And when institutions collapse, there is no next election cycle to wait for. There is only now. There is only us.
The Panic Outside, The Provision Inside
The timing is not incidental.
As the Hamer team coordinated yesterday’s distribution, the entire city was gripped by what can only be described as food panic. News alerts screaming about SNAP cuts. Mothers calculating how many more days their benefits would stretch. Elders making impossible choices between medication and meals. Churches receiving desperate calls. Every mutual aid network in the city working overtime to absorb the shock of state abandonment.
In response to this crisis—other organizations were also launching new and inspiring food programs.
KC Tenants launched WE FEED US, an emergency free grocery program for their tenant union members. Peach Tree Restaurant, a beloved Black-owned establishment that has served the community for 29 years, launched a free children’s meals program—and within days, they were organizing a GoFundMe to expand to free adult meals because the need was so visible, so urgent, so undeniable.
Ivanhoe continued their decades-long work of feeding thousands monthly.
This is what it looks like when a community stops waiting and starts building.
The Hamer Free Food Program is the first phase in the construction of a new Black food sovereignty model in Kansas city, infrastructure designed to make our people less dependent on a system that has proven itself genocidal in its indifference.
The mechanics are radical in their simplicity: First The Defender raised donations through our media platform. Then the program purchased produce directly from Black farmers at market-rate prices per pound. This enabled us to inject direct, reliable cash-flow into Black growers’ income. We then provide doorstep access for elders and low-mobility neighbors. And Community Food Leaders—young people and mutual aid organizers—learn agricultural skills and build important relationships with other Black neighbors.
And inside each box at our first distribution we included the first ever exclusive print edition of The Kansas City Defender filled with revolutionary political education, food justice information, Black farmer stories, and ways to plug into the movement.
What Comes Next
On November 1st, when SNAP benefits vanish for over 650,000 Missourians, the real test begins.
The Hamer Free Food Program plans to scale in 2026. The WE FEED US programs will expand. Peach Tree will serve more meals. Ivanhoe will continue. And thousands of volunteers will show up
The food boxes are just the beginning.
The real revolution is what happens next—when every Black neighborhood in KC understands that we don’t have to ask for permission to feed ourselves. When every Black farmer recognizes themselves as part of a movement. When every young person packing those boxes realizes they’re not volunteers but organizers securing our people’s future.
When we understand that food is freedom, and we’re building both.
For those asking how to Donate:
The Hamer Free Food Program is named in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1969 founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative—because our ancestors knew what we’re just remembering: that food sovereignty is the foundation of all liberation.
