Say Hello To
“We believe when we see the earth as sacred, we begin to see ourselves—and one another—as sacred too.”
Rooted in Justice.
Growing with Intention.
Founded by Valerie Hill Rawls, EWISE reconnects women and girls to the earth across three interconnected pillars: Leadership, Self-Recovery, and Advocacy.
Land is the foundation for shelter, livelihood, and climate resilience. It is central to power, identity, and survival. For African American women, reclaiming land ownership is a pathway to gender justice, economic stability, and community empowerment.
Key Objectives
This initiative is grounded in three interconnected objectives.
- Land Justice. We aim to address historical inequalities through land reclamation and stewardship.
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Sustainability. We will establish renewable energy systems, sustainable food networks, and eco-friendly infrastructure.
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Community Empowerment. We seek to create new opportunities for education, training, and economic mobility for Black women and girls in MS, and local regional Black Belt communities.
The Issue We FACE
Land Lost.
Futures Threatened.
Over the twentieth century, Black families lost roughly 90% of their farmland, and 98% of Black farmers were pushed off the land entirely, through systemic discrimination, dispossession, and violence. Black-owned farmland fell from about 16 million acres in 1910 to 2.9 million by 2017.
The harm did not end with the land. Black women still rarely receive equitable access to farming education, tools, capital, or credit, and climate change widens the gap further for the small, under-resourced farms that remain. Land isn't just property. It is power, security, and endurance. Reclaiming it is the heart of EWISE's advocacy.
“We believe when we see the earth as sacred, we begin to see ourselves—and one another—as sacred too.”
- bell hooks
Rooted in Justice.
Growing with Intention.
Founded by Valerie Hill Rawls, EWISE reconnects women and girls to the earth across three interconnected pillars: Leadership, Self-Recovery, and Advocacy.
Land is the foundation for shelter, livelihood, and climate resilience. It is central to power, identity, and survival. For African American women, reclaiming land ownership is a pathway to gender justice, economic stability, and community empowerment.
Key Objectives
This initiative is grounded in three interconnected objectives.
Land Justice.
We aim to address historical inequalities through land
reclamation and stewardship.
Sustainability.
We will establish renewable energy systems, sustainable food networks, and eco-friendly infrastructure.
Community Empowerment
We seek to create new opportunities for education, training, and economic mobility for Black women and girls in MS, and local regional Black Belt communities.
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Our Response
A Bold Step Toward Black Agricultural Restoration
Supporting Black women farmers through land stewardship, business development, and leadership cultivation, Black Restorative Agriculture Incubator & Development (BRAID) equips participants with the training, tools, and support to reclaim their agricultural legacy and build thriving, sustainable farm-based businesses. Addressing the reality that Black women make up just 1% of U.S. farmers, BRAID prepares women to be well-rounded as they scale, strengthening farms and communities across the South.
Paired with the Hill Eco Renaissance campus, the land where this work will live, BRAID becomes program and place working as one. BRAID grows the farmers. HER grows the ground beneath them — a permanent home where restorative practice, community, and ownership take root together. Together, they turn loss into legacy.
Why The
Southeast
HER responds directly to the overlapping crises of land loss, poverty, climate disruption, and poor health outcomes that fall hardest on Black women and rural communities. Nowhere do these crises converge more sharply than in the Southern Black Belt, a region named for its dark, fertile soil, once the source of immense wealth extracted from enslaved labor, and today marked by persistent poverty and underinvestment. It is also home to some of the deepest reservoirs of resilience, wisdom, and spiritual power in the country. To build where the need is greatest, and where renewal can take deepest root, is to begin here. The data makes the case plain.
POVERTY
1 in 5
rural Black Belt residents live in poverty
MATERNAL HEALTH
up to
50%
higher maternal-mortality risk for rural women
FOOD ACCESS
82%
of the nation’s highest-hunger counties are in the South
LAND LOSS
$326B
in Black farmland value lost since 1920
These figures are only the outline of a fuller picture. The Black Belt is where these conditions run deepest, which is exactly why it's where HER chooses to build. Mississippi, where Black land loss and poor health outcomes meet at their starkest, stands as one example; the broader region holds many more.
Underlying all of it is the land itself. This is where the need is most concentrated, and the same conditions that make this region the hardest hit make it the place where building matters most. HER meets that opportunity directly, reclaiming land where it changes the most, led by the women most capable of putting it to work.
OUR VISION
The Hill Eco Renaissance (HER) Campus
The Hill Eco Renaissance campus will be a national demonstration site in the rural Southeast Black Belt for holistic, woman-led development, a replicable model designed to reverse historic land dispossession, restore rural community health and wealth, and show what becomes possible when land is reclaimed as a sacred inheritance.
Designed with cultural relevance and sustainability at its core, the campus is envisioned as six interconnected, revenue-generating units that work together as a living ecosystem: education and training, agriculture and land stewardship, sacred space and healing, enterprise and innovation, residential and community, and renewable energy and sustainability.
Together, these units make HER a self-sustaining model of restorative development, woman-led, community-rooted, and built to endure. Not only a place of reclamation, but a blueprint the region can build on for generations.
Sow Into the Soil.
Invest in the Future.
The Hill Eco Renaissance represents a paradigm shift, a revival of the ecological, cultural, and spiritual practices that have long sustained Black communities in the South. It is more than a project. It is a return to wholeness, rooted in the leadership of Black women and grounded in a vision of liberated land, people, and possibility.
To invest in HER is to invest in that future, reclaiming land, rebuilding systems, and restoring a sacred inheritance across the Deep South.
“Slim, if you ever get back home, get some land and do good.”
Marshall Hill
Son of a Mississippi Sharecropper
Father of EWISE Founder Valerie Hill Rawls
The Hill Eco Renaissance (HER) is a bold initiative led by the EcoWomanist Institute Southeast (EWISE) to reclaim and restore the relationship between Black women, their communities, and the land of the Deep South. Centered on the acquisition and revitalization of land in the rural Southeast Black Belt, HER will become a national demonstration site for holistic, woman-led development, a living model of what becomes possible when land is reclaimed as a sacred inheritance.
This is where EWISE's mission takes physical form, its guiding pillars lived out on the land, and BRAID, its signature program, having a permanent home to grow. Together, program and place answer three converging crises that have shaped the region for generations: historic land loss, climate vulnerability, and chronic underinvestment. Through regenerative agriculture, sustainable food systems, hands-on training, and community-rooted enterprise, HER turns inheritance into a foundation for lasting power, health, and wealth.