NRFF In The News
In the first growing season at Princeton University’s Seed Farm, Nate Kleinman, co-founder and co-director of the Experimental Farm Network cooperative in Elmer, asked Seed Farm Director Tessa Desmond to grow Nanticoke squash—a highly diverse winter squash that Kleinman has been refining over the past decade by saving and replanting seeds from the most flavorful squash of each year’s crop. Although Kleinman got his original Nanticoke seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, the squash’s ancestral home is with the Nanticoke people, an Indigenous tribe in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay regions who, today, live primarily in Delaware and Southern New Jersey.
When Desmond asked about traditional practices for harvesting the Nanticoke squash seeds, Kleinman suggested they request guidance from Courtney Streett, co-founder, president, and executive director of Native Roots Farm Foundation, a Nanticoke-led nonprofit working to reconnect Indigenous people with aspects of their heritage, including crops and foodways.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden: “We Are Still Here”: Courtney Streett on Native Plants & Indigenous Knowledge
Courtney Streett (Nanticoke Indian Tribe) is the cofounder of Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF), a nonprofit that aims to restore Native relationships to the land while recognizing and sharing Indigenous ecological knowledge with the wider public.
Streett, who delivers the keynote address at this year’s Making Brooklyn Bloom, is a former news producer whose career shift was sparked by a desire to save the family farm in Delaware. We spoke with Streett about her journey into nonprofit work, NRFF’s vision for a public Hakihakàn (the Lenape word for farm or garden), and the plant stories, and names, that should be common knowledge.
Mid Atlantic Arts: Folk & Traditional Community Projects Grants Announced
Folk and Traditional Arts Community Projects Grants to Support 27 Organizations in 2023-2024
Mid Atlantic Arts has announced $123,570 in grants through the 2023-2024 Folk and Traditional Arts Community Projects Grants program. Funds will support 27 projects in 9 states and jurisdictions in the mid-Atlantic region.
Mid Atlantic Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Community Projects grants fund projects designed to support the vitality of traditional arts and cultural communities in the mid-Atlantic region…Community Projects Grants for 2023-2024 include Delaware-based Indigenous beadwork and tanning;
The Starbucks Foundation: Strengthening Communities Through The Starbucks Foundation Neighborhood Grants
The Starbucks Foundation recently announced it is awarding 1,900 grants totaling $2.5 million to organizations nominated by partners. These grants will support organizations that are empowering youth, fighting hunger, uplifting families and promoting environmental stewardship. See the latest list of grant recipients here.
This year, the Delaware Community Foundation (DCF) awarded $95,670 in specific interest grants to 15 nonprofit organizations around the state.
Specific interest funds – created by donors to support issues they are particularly passionate about – provide grants for nonprofits and programs that work within specific areas of activity or populations and currently focus on small grants for the arts, fulfillment of terminally ill children’s wishes and support animals and animal welfare.
A Native American and member of the Nanticoke tribe, Courtney Streett ’09 has fond memories of attending powwows as a child. Her family operated a fried bread stand at the Tribe’s annual Delaware event. Courtney would chase bees away from the cinnamon and sugar toppings table and watch in awe as smoke and jingle dancers performed to drumbeats.
Four years ago, after powwow, she and her husband took a detour on the way home to New York and drove by the lower Delaware farm her great-grandparents bought in the early 1900s. At the time, it was rare for people of color to own property. Her family grew and sold crops including tomatoes, peas, and strawberries. When Courtney and her husband arrived at the nearly 100-acre farm, they noticed a “for sale” sign…
Justice Outside: 2022 Liberated Paths Grantmaking Program Grantee Partners
In 2022, we awarded over $2.5 million to 116 grantees, and we don’t plan to stop there!
Our ability to implement the bold vision of Liberated Paths is made possible by our community. Justice Outside continues to be humbled by your support, your commitment to advancing racial justice in the outdoor and environmental movement, and your trust in our vision for a just and joyful world.
In 2022, through the support of our funding partners, we awarded $574,900 to 30 new grantee partners in the Nanticoke/Siconese/Lenni Lenape Whittuck/Delaware River Watershed region!
…There are still billions of American chestnuts but the vast majority are less than one inch in diameter and they die and resprout in a repetitive cycle.
“They are these tiny diseased things,’’ says Sara Fitzsimmons of the American Chestnut Foundation.
But the Delaware tree, estimated to be about 60 years old, is about 65 feet high with an 18-inch diameter. Fitzsimmons says it’s larger than 95% of the roughly 500 chestnuts her group has documented. The largest in the group’s database are in Maine. One is 112 feet tall; another is 40 inches in diameter…
On September 24, the Camilla Chandler Frost ’47 Center for the Environment hosted the 2022 Project Handprint Symposium, which brought Wellesley students, faculty, and alums together to focus on the theme of health and environmental justice.
Erich Hatala Matthes, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Frost Center, and President Paula A. Johnson kicked off the symposium, last hosted in 2013, with a call to action. As important as it is to minimize our environmental footprint, Johnson said, “it is equally important that we spend time examining the ways we can make a positive impact on the environment. That is the idea behind the term ‘handprint.’”…
Courtney Streett ’09 gave a tour of the Edible Ecosystem Teaching Garden through an Indigenous knowledge lens.
In 2018, Courtney Streett ‘09 drove by her family farm, a nearly hundred-acres of fertile land historically owned by people of color, and saw that it was for sale. At that moment, Streett, who had been working as a journalist in NYC, decided to find a way to protect the farm. She couldn’t afford to buy it, but she gathered a team to build a plan and develop community, and created Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF). NRFF is focused on “recognizing the stories of tribal communities, protect[ing] open space, and increas[ing] food security for people in lower Delaware”. Streett has always been inspired by her Caribbean and Nanticoke Indian heritage. Now, all of it has come full circle in a massive effort to save the family farm and foster a rich community.
A Delaware native and member of the Nanticoke tribe, Courtney Streett ‘09 is currently the President and Executive Director of the Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF). NRFF is a non-profit organization “dedicated to celebrating Native American cultures, protecting open space, cultivating a public garden, and practicing sustainable agriculture.” Prior to founding NRFF, Courtney was previously an associate producer at CBS News working on both the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes and was also a senior news producer for the Business Insider.
I was super excited to catch up with my friend and classmate about her exciting new work with the NRFF.
By partnering with generous people like you, the Delaware Community Foundation (DCF) actively supports donors’ unique charitable interests in Delaware and around the country. This report shares some of our donors’ inspiring stories and the impact they’re making in their communities…
Friends of Native Roots Farm Foundation Fund
Courtney Streett and her husband John Reynolds founded Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF), a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating Native American cultures. NRFF is working to preserve open space, cultivate a public garden for native plants used in tribal communities, and implement Indigenous agricultural practices to feed the community and support the environment....
Last Saturday, November 13, St. Andrew’s welcomed Delaware’s Native Roots Farm Foundation (NRFF)—and its co-founders Courtney Streett ’05 and John Reynolds ’06—to campus in recognition of Native American Heritage Month…
Streett and Reynolds connected with students and faculty over dinner and a movie. Ms. Streett collaborated with SAGE Dining Services to create a seasonal and local dinner menu in the Dining Hall that was a modern version of what Eastern Indigenous tribes eat around this time of the year. The menu included venison stew, vegetable stew, the Three Sisters—the three main agricultural crops of Indigenous people in North America: winter squash, maize, and climbing beans—and cranberry cookies for dessert…
CBS New York: Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebrated Across Tri-State Area (10/11/2021)
“I saw so much land disappearing in my own community, the Nanticoke people in Delaware, that I said I have to do something,” said Courtney Streett of the Native Roots Farm Foundation…
“For indigenous communities, the grass under our feet, the trees, the air, the stones, the water, they are our relatives. To see so much happening to them, that is not good. It hurts,” Streett said…
…Courtney Streett, who co-founded Native Roots Farm Foundation, similarly spoke about her goal of establishing a sustainable farm and public garden in Delaware. She said the land has been inhabited by Nanticoke and Lenape peoples for generations. She hopes to provide the agricultural community an alternative to selling land to developers.
“Where my ancestors are from, the Nanticoke community, is one of the fastest developing regions in the country. And a lot of the farms are being turned into big box stores, and parking lots and houses,” said Streett.
Streett was selling fresh strawberry juice made with maple syrup from the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine and strawberries, a fruit native to North America.
