HOMECOMING HARVEST - Key Persons
Amber Akins, is the founder of Homecoming Harvest, LLC. She has a connection to growing food and land that started long before she was born. Growing up in South East Alabama she remembers hot sticky summer days sitting on her grandmother's porch shelling peas, shucking corn husks, picking greens and tasting native muscadines. She comes from a family of farming where her great-grandparents Griff and Dochie Johnson cultivated acres of farmland in rural Alabama before moving to the ‘city' to grow row crops in their backyard. Amber attended college at Tuskegee University nearly 25 miles from her hometown. Little did she know she would graduate with a business degree and move on from Alabama but remember the seeds planted in her spirit and journey back to the values and principles she learned at that land-grant institution.
Amber is no stranger to community activism and organizing. Her first experience in community service was volunteering at an annual march in high school to raise money for local causes. Frustrated with seeing the situations of the community not changing, she always wanted to find a grassroots organization to share her passion with that bridges the gap between service and equity - structural change. When her fingers are not in the soil you can find her with pens and clipboards registering voters and protecting the ballot all over Tennessee with The Equity Alliance based in Nashville, TN. Her passion for community extends as a volunteer for voter registration drives through the Tennessee Black Voter Project. She is experienced in utilizing community resources, relationships and has developed unique skills by participating in community initiatives. Organizing blossomed Amber in many different ways but the most important being her rootedness in the Black movement space.
As of November 2020, she was invited to participate in the inaugural Unlock Her Potential Mentorship Program founded by Sophia Chang selected to be mentored by Karen Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, professor, publisher and host of The Karen Hunter Show on Sirius XM Radio.