2021 Voqal Fellowship Spotlight: Jazmin Martinez

Picture of Jazmin Martinez

Creating a truly socially equitable world requires supporting innovative individuals from a wide array of backgrounds. The Voqal Fellowship acknowledges this need by investing in people as individuals and budding entrepreneurs. It is an opportunity for those often overlooked by traditional funders to enact their visions at center stage. In our penultimate look at the 2021 Voqal Fellowship cohort, we highlight Jazmin Martinez and their project, Land in the Hands of BIPOC Farmers.

Jazmin’s project, Land in the Hands of BIPOC Farmers, seeks to put land back in the hands of BIPOC farmers as a means of survival, especially during the current climate crisis, and as a strategy for collective change that dismantles the current systems of oppression and violence.

Jazmin is a farmer from La Villita/Little Village neighborhood in Chicago. They are an owner-worker of Catatumbo Cooperative Farm in South Chicago. Jazmin has previous experience working in social services providing crisis and trauma-informed support and connecting individuals and families to resources. Additionally, Jazmin has experience organizing within the immigrant rights movement. Through this work, Jazmin recognized a need to create economic opportunities for historically excluded communities. They were drawn to urban farming, particularly within a worker-cooperative model. They are committed to connecting urban agriculture with broader social justice movements.

Jazmin draws on the strength, energy, resilience, love, and support of those that sustain them and their lineage. They come from a lineage of campesinos who for decades worked and lived off the land in Mexico.

Interested in learning more about the Voqal Fellowship? Visit our fellowships page.