About Us
Our Mission
Drinking Gourd is a Black-led community church committed to faith-based programs for land stewardship, food justice, and spiritual restoration.
Through farming, ceremony, and community care, we work to grow and share healthy food with communities in Oakland that have historically been excluded from access to nourishing food. At the same time, we cultivate spaces where people can reconnect with land, plants, ancestors, and the healing wisdom of the natural world.
Our work centers communities that rarely have access to rest, retreat, or land-based healing spaces.
Vision
We envision a world where our people — our children, elders, artists, healers, and rising ones — stand rooted and unshaken, nourished by land we steward, by community we honor, and by spirit we embody. At Drinking Gourd, we commit to this vision in four heartbeats:
Land as Sacred Trust: We reclaim land not only as a resource, but as temple–a living classroom, a home for ancestors and futures alike.
Food as Ceremony: We affirm that culturally grounded nourishment is not charity–it is sovereignty; not sustenance only–it is medicine for body, mind, and soul.
Liberation through Practice: We engage in healing, organizing, and creating to dismantle the vestiges of captivity. We believe our freedom is bound to the freedom of the earth, and our release is collective.
Intergenerational Sacredity: We plant for the children’s children–so that the harvest they gather will not come at the cost of someone else’s uprooting. We build not for today alone, but for the many dawns ahead.
Our Team
We are a community of earth keepers, memory-holders, and future builders rooted in ancestral wisdom and the soils of our liberation. In this place, the land is teacher; the wind holds our song; and our hands shape the future.
