March 24, 2021
Dear Friends:
Rooted joins our fellow Community Shares of Wisconsin member groups in speaking out against the targeted violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. At Troy Community Garden and Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, we have planted, grown, and harvested with our Southeast Asian neighbors and community members, and the landscapes of those spaces have long been defined and enhanced by Madison’s Southeast Asian communities. Our work is collaborative and we continue to grow with and learn from our partners, including Freedom, Inc. and the Bayview Foundation, as well as the many local food producers with whom we share land, food, and resources.
Rooted is committed to honest, safe, and fruitful collaborative relationships with all of our community members and partners. It is our job to call White Supremacy culture by its name and not allow it to take hold. Whether at home, at work, at school, on the land, or in our communities, there is no space for racism, hate, or White Supremacy, and we refuse to give it a chance to get comfortable.
We must work at this every day. Like gardeners and farmers, we need to weed out racism and nurture the growth of a strong and resilient community. Ignoring it is not an option.
Marcia Caton Campbell
Executive Director, Rooted
Ginny Hughes
Deputy Director, Operations
Hedi Rudd
Deputy Director, South Madison Programs
Sheena Tesch
Deputy Director, North Madison Programs
June 5, 2020
Dear Friends:
Madison has always been a Tale of Two Cities; at Rooted we acknowledge that. It’s why we brought two organizations together through merger, one in South Madison (Center for Resilient Cities) and one on the Northside (Community GroundWorks). While we saw that our South Madison work was centering communities of color and increasingly was led by the community, we also felt that our Northside work, while robust, had lost the voices of communities of color and that needed to change. We believe that healthy and resilient communities are made up of people who have roots in their community, and those aren’t easy for Black, Indigenious and People of Color (BIPOC) to grow in Madison. We are committed to centering their voices in our work and doing our part to change that.
Today, all of us in the United States are facing the backlash of years of not getting it right. Years of letting the Black community, in particular, not grow roots or a firm footing in our community or very few communities in our country. That must change. Though we don’t have all the answers, we have chosen as an organization to go in search of them and to do so with our BIPOC communities taking the lead.
The past two weeks have been extraordinarily difficult. We’re far from being out the other side. Besides the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve been coping with, we’re bumping up hard against the pandemic of structural racism and oppression on which this country was founded over 400 years ago. The two together have amplified and brought into sharp relief the daily and the extreme injustices and disparities that all people of color experience, but especially Black people. Each of us is feeling the hardship of these times. In different ways.This work is serious, deadly serious. At Rooted, we are committed to our antiracist journey, and we expect to be held accountable in that work.
We stand in solidarity with the Black-led organizations we have partnered with, including Freedom Inc., Urban Triage, Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, EQT by Design, YWCA Madison, Young Moms of Madison, Venus Inspires, EOTO, One City, and others. We deeply appreciate the opportunities we have had to work with them, while sharing knowledge, creating community, and breaking bread together. We urge you to support Madison’s Black-led organizations, get to know their work and the people they center in their work.
We also urge you to support local Black businesses. You can visit the Madison Black Chamber website for a directory or this link for a recently updated list. You can support many of these businesses this summer at the Badger Rock Community Market.
As the home to Badger Rock Middle School, Troy Kids Garden, and the Goodman Youth Farm, we recognize and uplift the voice of our youth in this movement as our work centers around them.
On behalf of all of us at Rooted,
Marcia Caton Campbell
Executive Director, Rooted
Hedi Rudd
Badger Rock Neighborhood Center Director