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Cultivating Place: The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, with Brent Leggs

All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.
All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, I am so excited to be joined this week by Brent Leggs, Senior Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Executive Director of the Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, whose mission focuses on telling the full American story.

All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.
All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund holds a vision of preservation serving as a potential path for equity.

The fund is actively working to preserve the landscapes and buildings of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Historic Black Churches, the Washington Rosenwald Schools, as well as the homes and gardens of cultural icons such as Madame C.J. Walker, musicians John and Alice Coltrane, singer/songwriter Nina Simone, and Harlem Renaissance poet and gardener Anne Spencer.

The Action Fund is also partnering with community members in Akron, Ohio, on re-creating a public plaza space to preserve the historical activism of once-enslaved abolitionist and author Sojourner Truth, who delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in Akron in 1851.

This is a very personal conversation but also a universal love story of the heritage and history held in our places and the importance of that fullness to all of us. Listen In!

All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.
All images are courtesy of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and all rights are reserved.

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The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate.
Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ of experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.