Virtual Lunchbox Talk: Stirring the Heart of Community: People/Plant Stories of NC Indigenous Communities

Virtual Lunchbox Talk: Stirring the Heart of Community: People/Plant Stories of NC Indigenous Communities

Speaker: Randi Byrd, Professional Affiliate of the UVM Leadership for Sustainability Masters Program

Thursday, February 24

12-1 p.m. EST

Zoom webinar
Free, $5 suggested fee

Register in advance to get the Zoom link: https://bit.ly/3gO3Fis

::::: DETAILS :::::
This talk will celebrate transformative highlights of the Healthy Native North Carolinians Network, comprised of North Carolina’s tribes and urban Indian organizations. The stories will go beyond the community gardens and plants and into the connective tissue of the evolving relationships between people and places. We will share some of the broad reaching impacts that revitalizing those relationships have had and continue to have in NC’s tribal communities, and explore implications for the broader community.

::::: ABOUT THE SPEAKER :::::
Randi R. Byrd is a Professional Affiliate of the University of Vermont’s Leadership for Sustainability Master’s Program. She has over a decade of community engagement experience within indigenous communities in North Carolina and nationally around health and wellness practices through holistic communal approaches, community grassroots organizing that values indigenous ways of knowing and practices, affirming tribal self-determination in sustainable planning and fostering mutually beneficial partnerships that strategically and meaningfully strengthen communities.
She is also a giant pumpkin grower and horticultural therapist, utilizing plants and ecosystems to show/remind us of tending relationships and offer old/new ways of seeing pathways through the teachings of nature. She is the former Senior Program Officer for Community Engagement for the American Indian Center at UNC Chapel Hill and has an active leadership role in the North Carolina Native American Ethnobotany Project, which reaffirms relationships with native wild plant relatives, encourages remembering and relearning medicinal and cultural value of native wild plants, and documents and disseminates collective cultural knowledge about native wild plants in meaningful ways.

This event is hosted in partnership between UNC American Indian Center and the North Carolina Botanical Garden, with support from Triangle Community Foundation.