Our Partners
Foxfire Ranch
Foxfire Ranch is a Black-owned farm, retreat and entertainment venue in Northern Mississippi, that connects cultural heritage work and social justice movements. It is a beacon and sanctuary space for Black and people of color land stewardship in the region.
The collaboration between Foxfire Ranch and Open Architecture Collaborative builds a bridge between designers of the built environment and Black, Indigenous, and people of color agrarians in the North Mississippi Hill Country region.
Our vision creates the connected infrastructure for long term regional building projects on Black, Indigenous, and people of color controlled land, and trains design cohorts in community engagement and relationship driven design. It provides residencies on the land for practitioners to rest and invest in their design practices. And supports hubs across the region for building immersions and educational workshops, on topics ranging from heirs property rights to environmental stewardship and practices for climate change.
Please contact the OAC team to learn more and connect on this initiative. And learn more about Foxfire Ranch here.
Image Credit: Jai Williams
Daarna
Daarna empowers forcibly displaced people to rebuild their lives through resettlement resources and a refugee centered approach to architecture, urban planning, community engagement and political advocacy. We create community driven tools to ease transitions to new built environments, educate professionals of the built environment on equitable and just design, and collaborate with communities to advocate for and create vibrant lives.
Our partnership with Daarna grew from the 2023-2024 Equity in Practice Fellowship. We supported their traveling teach-in project, capturing the architectural and ethnographic history of Palestinian homes, while inviting participants to explore personal memories of comfort, safety and belonging. It shared the human impact of Israeli apartheid architecture, planning, and policy, and connects to unjust built environment practices in the U.S.
We commit to continuing to invite OAC’s network to Daarna’s regional teach-ins, sign-on to their partnership principles, and invite in deeper learning about the complicity of the built environment profession with U.S. domestic and global experiences of colonization.
Learn more about Daarna here, explore related learning resources here, and read our statement in solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Puerto Rico, and colonized people across the world.