About this Project

Letter from the Board

Dear Movement Leader:

How do we tell the story of Movement Ground Farm in a way that honors land, dignifies labor, and celebrates love? How do we tell the story of Movement Ground Farm (MGF) that is transparent about conflict, harm, and accountability? How do we tell the story of MGF in a way that can strengthen movement building during this critical juncture in history?

The MGF Board and staff grappled with these questions and more for quite some time before designing Harvesting Seed: Questions of Land & Liberation.  This process invited us to consider our governance role as something more than the culmination of quorum votes and financial reviews. We had to consider what it would mean to be good stewards of the effort, hope and the vision(s) that brought people together to build MGF.

Each person who has been part of the farm over these past years has their own set of experiences, their own story.  Being good stewards means that we tell this collective story, even as our experiences and understandings sometimes conflict with each other. We share this project with you with tenderness, in the hopes that the honest self-assessment of this project offers tools and lessons for the projects and movements we build together in the years ahead. As you navigate this interactive website, you may at times feel the echoes of movement heartbreak. We hope you will also feel the possibilities.

If you feel inspired to share resources, your thoughts, or your story about land and liberation, please reach out to us at harvestingforseed@gmail.com.

In Solidarity,

The Movement Ground Farm Board of Directors

from The founder

It’s been one year since we decided to sunset and hired a sunset project consultant. The transformation - for me on a personal level - has been liberating. A dear friend once said “How we end is as important as how we start, maybe even more so”.  Now I truly believe this, and wholeheartedly recommend this process for anyone, especially founders and ED’s, or any organization that wants to end in a way that lives into their values and carries the work forward.

Working on this project has required me to challenge some of my most instinctive reactions and even the memories I had constructed during the lifespan of the organization.  It required spaciousness and the passage of time to begin to let go of the hurt and defensive posturing that had so fiercely guarded my narrative.   


What resulted from all the processing was a growing awareness of my direct responsibility for what happened.  I had brought so many people and organizations together, who put in work and resources and believed in the vision. And because of this great burden, I have spent this past year thinking about what accountability looks like, both to myself, the people involved and to the movement and the vision behind MGF.  

A generative accountability should be the very purpose of our sunset, the board and I concluded, and to us it means that:

  • our failure, by itself, does not become fodder for an analysis that this work is impossible, that people are just bad and that collectives don’t work.

  • we try to understand the perspectives of those who had entirely different experiences 

  • we reject the demonization and victimization of portraying anyone as a “good” or a “bad” actor 

  • we avoid relegating what happened to larger societal trends and shifts - yes they matter, but no they are not to blame

  • we move beyond a feeling that what happened was baffling, unfathomable or incomprehensible, and on to an analysis that can break things down and critically identify and assess the steps, decision-points and the mishaps that occurred

  • we reflect on our mistakes for the purpose of carrying the work forward; because in the identification of precisely what went wrong, there is simultaneously a light cast on what can be done to make this work possible

  • we share this analysis not only with the MGF community but with organizers and movement leaders, and especially with those who are about to take their next big step in land-based justice work in order to strengthen our movement as a whole.  

Harvesting for Seed is what we’re sharing out to the world.


In deep gratitude,

Kohei Ishihara 


A note from the author

My name is Malka Roth (she/her), I am a white millennial based in the DC/Maryland area and joined Movement Ground Farm as a consultant in May 2024. I connected to the project through former co-workers who served on this last iteration of the board. My work with MGF has largely fallen into three categories: navigating the logistics of closing a nonprofit, providing weekly coaching support to the executive director, specifically around integrating multiple perspectives of what happened here, and compiling this resource that you now are about to embark on (or have just finished reading!).

I am not a trained journalist, scientist or researcher. I am an educator, herbalist, and organizer with a deep and intimate relationship to grief. I hold reverence for bringing ideas, projects and people towards their end. I am queer and Jewish, deeply informed by my anti zionist values. I have held this work in many ways, but the most profound of which was as a grief worker asking, how can we hospice this organization with dignity and in alignment with its values and vision? How do we support those involved with moving forward, rather than becoming stuck in the paralysis of shame, confusion, anger, or resentment that so often accompanies these types of endings? I am deeply and personally invested in the question of how we build collective, land-based projects toward liberation. It has been my honor to tend to this closing in hopes that the lessons here can support our visions for the future.

You can reach me by email at malkae.roth@gmail.com.