C.M.D. CHIIMEH
Inter-Community Coordinator & Independent Crop Consultant
B.S. Sustainable Plant Systems & Agronomy
This cycle of dilapidation, improper land acquisition, curtailing, and displacement exposes the leading root causes of many symptomatic issues facing our communities. These issues: economic poverty, food insecurity, high crime, malnutrition, urban pollution, mass-incarceration, mental health crises, physical health crises, over-policing, and poor education systems all have a mutually symbiotic relationship with the aforementioned environmental issues.
It’s this sentiment that has led my work with Black and Brown families, low-income neighborhoods, local farmers, youth programming, returning citizens, and grassroot organizations where I discuss matters of environmental racism, develop curriculum and workshops to train for skills in agriculture, and ultimately build community on principles of land sovereignty.
I am here to collaborate with any creatives, tradespeople, contractors, educators, local businesses, community activists and organizers that share the same trajectory. My only priorities are family, community and land. It it ain’t that, I ain’t with it.
“Inter-Community Coordinator” can be most simplified as organizing communication of ideas and strategies between different internal groups found within a broader community. When I was a kid, I had a passion for getting involved all throughout the Southside of Chicago because I always had an interest in the building of communities, which continued into my background with education and writing. Although it wasn’t until what felt like later in my life, that I’d explore a passion for agriculture and plant science.
This passion would extend to furthering my study into the relationship land (and lack thereof) has had with often low-income communities of color within a historical and global analysis. This is what initially appeared in my research, but it then became clear that this existed in my own neighborhood, however normalized. Land has been forcefully cultivated by, stolen from, co-opted from, denied from, and ultimately used against people who look like me perennially, time and time again in the same cycle.
The environmental movement waged against these issues, have long been carried on the backs of the folks affected by them the most, although the narrative has been largely absorbed by white-washed images of animal rights activists, forest preservers, and hipster cliches. Don’t get me wrong, these efforts are most def’ virtuous, but as the late Hazel M. Johnson countered “such global initiatives don’t even begin to impact communities inhabited by people of color.”
I am able to conduct this work through A Midwest Movement Project, which I use as a vehicle for my independent consultation and contracts. AMMP is strongly in belief that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” as proclaimed by Audre Lorde. So this organization secures my ability to apply tools implanted in skills, Blackness, the urban Midwest, and hip-hop culture.
– CMD Chiimeh
