Renee Bellis, Feedback Labs | September 25th, 2024
This year, Feedback Labs has been gathering stories in the form of interviews from past Crash Course participants about their experience in the Feedback Crash Course and feedback loops at their organization. We recently spoke with Michelle A.T. Hughes, the Co-Executive Director at the National Young Farmers Coalition. She attended Crash Course held at the Feedback+Atlanta Summit and was a 2023 Feedback Champion. Michelle has served in several roles at the National Young Farmers Coalition (Young Farmers), including as the Equity and Organizational Change Director.
About National Young Farmers Coalition
Young Farmers is a grassroots organization that works on turning bold legislation into practical and material support for young farmers, especially young Black, Latinx, and Indigenous farmers. The organization has two main areas of work: an organizing branch works to organize young farmers around issues related to land access, student debt, racial justice, and workers rights among other things, and a policy branch that looks to shape legislation and policies at the federal level at USDA. Young Farmers provides leadership opportunities to influence policy by training farmers in advocacy and holding fly-ins to Washington, DC for farmers to talk directly with legislators and policy makers.
Feedback to Inform Young Farmer’s Racial Equity Transformation
Michelle told us about Young Farmers’ Racial Equity Transformation, which was embedded in the Strategic Planning Process and represented a significant shift in the goals and work of the organization toward prioritizing racial justice in agriculture. Young Farmers had received feedback from Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) young farmers that Young Farmers did not feel like a place for them. Michelle and her colleagues wanted to know if staff of color and partner organizations felt similarly.
Multi-Stakeholder Feedback Collection
Michelle and the Young Farmers team collected data from staff, partner organizations, and farmers through one-on-one interviews and surveys. Two kinds of town hall forums were held for farmer members based on region and racial identity as part of Young Farmers strategic planning process.
Analysis and Reporting Back
Michelle carried out a thematic analysis of the surveys to bring out key findings, which were shared publicly in an Accountability Report. The report acknowledged the racial equity issues faced at Young Farmers and surfaced issues to inform a new Strategic Plan that incorporated racial equity principles into internal goals for the organization and external goals for farmer facing programming conducted in collaboration with partner organizations.
Successes & Challenges of Centering Equity in Course Correction
The Racial Equity Transformation at Young Farmers came with some benefits and challenges.
- At the initiation of the Racial Equity Transformation, Young Farmers had five staff identified as people of color out of 25 staff members. Now, the organization has grown to 50 full and part-time staff, 60% of whom identify as people of color. The change in demographics has led people to feel more comfortable at Young Farmers and the organization is now considered multicultural instead of predominantly white.
- The Racial Equity Transformation allowed Young Farmers to pivot its work to center BIPOC farmers in the organization’s programming. It was a bold change that happened much more quickly than diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts often do at other organizations where the work is less central to the organization’s mission.
- The pace of the racial equity change at Young Farmers, while necessary, did create some challenges. Michelle told us that, “people want to shift power until it is power from themselves.” Not all stakeholders were satisfied with the change and some partner organizations and farmers did leave the network.
- Change takes time and money. A big strategic shift at a nonprofit takes a lot of staff time to make changes. Michelle shared that it can be hard for organizations to find funders who are willing to provide operational support funding for this kind of DEI effort. Staff have to be trained in the new theory of change and in the language being used so they can become leaders in the change work.
Crash Course Takeaways
To wrap up the interview, Feedback Labs asked Michelle what impact the Crash Course and Feedback Champion Fellowship had on her work with feedback loops at Young Farmers. Michelle found it helpful to have conversations with other people who are as passionate as she is about feedback. Other participants in the Crash Course were able to help her identify feedback loops that already exist within the organization and could be uplifted to publish a second iteration of the Accountability Report now that programs have been re-designed based on the first report. Michelle’s biggest takeaway from her participation with Feedback Labs was a reminder that she is most accountable to the people her organization serves – young farmers.
The interview with Michelle reminded us at Feedback Labs that feedback loops can have a big impact on the internal structures and programs of an organization, and that the work of one organization can have a lasting impact on the organizations in its ecosystem. When an organization makes large internal shifts in mission and DEI efforts, it has a ripple effect on everyone in their network – funders, partner organizations, and even farmers. Because of this work, Michelle was appointed to the USDA Equity Commision that has published a report of 66 recommendations that the USDA could include in its DEI strategic planning process to address the legacy of discrimination against farmers of color. That report is based on the lived experience and feedback of many members of the BIPOC farming community. It’s incredible to see the shift in focus to collecting feedback at one organization can have on an entire ecosystem of related organizations and a government agency.
Michelle is a former hog farmer from New Haven, Connecticut, with a background in agriculture policy. Before serving as Co-Executive Director, Michelle has served in a number of roles at the Coalition beginning as a Farm Bill Organizer in the summer of 2017. From there, Michelle served on the federal policy team as Federal Policy Associate after the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill. Working on federal farm policy reinforced Michelle’s desire for equitable change for young farmers and inspired her to design a framework for the organization’s racial equity transformation. As Equity and Organizational Change Director, Michelle conducted a comprehensive racial equity impact assessment of the organization’s internal workflows and external programming, which identified gaps in our programs, policies, systems, structures, and practices. Michelle’s leadership on this work created space for our organization to rethink and redesign the way we provide service to our farmer network as we finalized our strategic plan, including our guiding principles and organizational values. To learn more about our racial equity transformation, check out the Young Farmers Accountability Report. In her most previous role as Operations and Impact Director, Michelle worked with Young Farmers leadership to develop long-term operations strategy and evaluation plans to successfully continue our work to become an anti-racist organization from the inside. Michelle has recently extended her work on internal structure reform with USDA in her appointment to the Department’s Equity Commission, Agriculture Subcommittee. Alongside a number of revolutionary leaders in agriculture, Michelle’s work on the Subcommittee will work to address a history of discrimination at USDA by providing recommendations to the Department to better serve young farmers of color today. For more information on the Equity Commission and the intention we’re setting for our involvement, see our blog post “USDA awards a seat at the table to Young Farmers on its newly formed Equity Commission’s Subcommittee on Agriculture.” Prior to completing her M.A. in Food Studies at New York University in 2019, Michelle worked in swine reproduction at the University of Pennsylvania and with a number of food and farm non-profits and start-ups in NYC and the Hudson Valley, and served on a program evaluation team for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy.
