Cornelius Blanding and Xernona Clayton

Federation of Southern Cooperatives  to hold 56th Annual Meeting-August 17-19 The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund will hold its 56th Annual Meeting in Birmingham and Epes, Alabama, from August 17 to 19, 2023.
On Friday, August 18th at the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center, there will be a workshop from 1:00 to 4:00 on the USDA 22007 Discrimination against Farmers Assistance Program (DFAP) for farmers to learn the latest information on this process.
The Federation is the oldest, largest, and most effective organization of Black farmers in the nation. The Federation aids and support Black and other family-size farmers in cooperative development, land retention and advocacy for public policies beneficial to farmers and other rural people living in distressed communities.
The meeting will begin on Thursday, August 17, 2023, in Birmingham at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. There will be roundtables with cooperative and land retention allies in the afternoon, followed by the Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Awards Banquet. The banquet is named in honor of the Manager of the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alberta (Gees Bend) Wilcox County, Alabama, who was also a founding member of the Federation in 1967.
The recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement award is Xernona Clayton of Atlanta.
Ms. Clayton is an American civil rights leader and broadcasting executive. During the Civil Rights Movement, she worked for the National Urban League and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she became involved in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and worked closely with him in press and public relations. Later, Clayton went into television, where she became the first African American from the southern United States to host a daily prime time talk show. She became corporate vice president for Turner Broadcasting.
Clayton created the Trumpet Foundation. She was instrumental in the development of the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame that was developed by the foundation to honor the achievements of African Americans and civil rights advocates. She convinced a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to denounce the Klan. Clayton has been honored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the city of Atlanta for her work.
On Saturday, the meeting shifts to the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center, near Epes, Alabama, which is the programmatic center of the organization of over 75 cooperatives and community development credit unions. At 10:00 AM there will be a panel of program leaders from the United States Department of Agriculture in credit, conservation, marketing, cooperative development, land retention and other areas of rural development explaining their programs, recent changes, and answer questions from the stakeholder audience.
On Saturday afternoon, from 1;00 to 4:00 PM, there will be a special workshop on the recently announced 22007 USDA Discrimination Farmers Assistance Program (DFAP) that provides an opportunity for farmers, who were discriminated against for any reason by USDA in farm lending, up to January 1, 2021. This process is similar to but different than the process in the prior Black farmers class action lawsuits. The Federation has been funded by USDA, as one of nine ‘cooperator organizations’ to provide technical assistance to farmers on the 40-page DFAP application.
Some Federation staff will be available during the Annual Meeting to help farmers with their DFAP applications and to make appointments or future one-on-one technical assistance sessions. The application is complicated, requires the submission of documents to provide evidence of discrimination and takes 4 to 5 hours and possibly more than one TA consultation to complete.
There will be other workshops on Friday afternoon on land retention, heirs property solutions, climate-smart agricultural practices, the upcoming Farm Bill advocacy and other topics.
There will be tours of the facility, focused on forestry and agroforestry demonstrations. The Saturday events will culminate in a fish fry and informal social and cultural gatherings.
Saturday morning will begin at 7:30AM with a prayer breakfast, which is named in honor of Ms. Mattie Mack, a small tobacco farmer from Kentucky, who served on the Federation Board of Directors for many years. Ms. Mack always wore fancy hats to the prayer breakfast, so women are encouraged to wear their finest hats for this occasion.
After the Prayer Breakfast, at 9:30 AM the Federation will hold its members-only business meeting and hear a report from its Board of Directors and Executive Director, Cornelius Blanding on the programmatic activities, financial status, and future plans of the organization. Members will meet in state caucuses to evaluate and comment on these reports and make suggestions for future work.
After lunch on Saturday, the Federation will award five $1000 scholarships to youth from the membership who are planning to attend college and other post-secondary educational programs. The scholarships are made possible by a generous donation from Sharing Inc. of Braintree, Massachusetts that holds a Good Friday Walk, each year, to raise funds for groups engaged in social change in the rural South.
Reports will be given from the state caucuses and the states of Georgia and South Carolina will elect members to the Federation’s Board of Directors.
Farmers and others interested in registering for the Federation’s Annual Meeting, may contact this website: http://www.federation.coop for details and fees. You may also call the Federation’s RTRC in. Epes at 205-652-9676 for more information.