Cultivating creative activism

Thanks to funding from the Parents’ Council, Zoe Scruggs interned recently at a farm that advocates for environmental and social justice.

“I want to be involved in the growing community of black women starting farms,” says Zoe Scruggs 19 PT, who earned a RISD Parents’ Council Internship Award to work with Harmony Homestead & Wholeness Center in Hillsdale, NY over the summer. The farm-based organization “facilitates racial harmony and reparations to members of the underserved global majority.”

This type of work is important to me because women of color push forward environmental justice movements.

“I am attracted to how these young women farmers work to rekindle black and brown people’s relationship with nature,” says the Painting senior, who adds that there’s “a lot of trauma tied to land and nature because of slavery and the genocide of native peoples, along with environmental justice issues like the Flint [MI] water crisis.”

Scruggs’ internship experience has given her the confidence to dream big. “This type of work is important to me,” she says, “because women of color push forward environmental justice movements.” Hoping to create a similar space, she wants “to grow food and house all of my friends and family—and have it be a place for art and activism,” Scruggs says. “There are not enough institutions supporting black creation of art in the context of the land.”