2025 Change Maker of the Year: Oceana Sawyer
By Nhatt Nichols
When it comes to loving her community deeply through her actions, Oceana Sawyer doesn’t mess around.
“I came here with one goal. I've set the same goal now for five years. I just want to live in a beautiful place with black and brown folks. That's the only reason I'm here,” Sawyer said, though that’s hardly the whole truth behind why she is one of our Change Makers of the Year.
The people who nominated her spoke of her dedication to feeding and bringing together People of the Global Majority in Jefferson County, and to her tirelessness in developing community resilience. Sawyer formed Nourishing Beloved Community (NBC) to bring together Black and Brown people to share food, initially as a potluck and then as a CSA program that purchases food from BIPOC food producers and distributes it to BIPOC people.
Her tirelessness for calling in community has been deeply fed by the relationships she’s made through her organizing. Sawyer credits meeting other organizers like Cendre Hunt with the success of NBC.
“I think people looked at me like, okay, sure, whatever you think you want to do. I hope it works out, and it does, because I just have that ethos: we can be community together. We can eat together. We can organize,” Sawyer said.
Like many of us, Sawyer has deep concerns about the future, and creating a cohesive community is her way of addressing those concerns.
“These systems that are cracking and failing were never meant for us,” Sawyer said. “We passed the tipping point for climate change. You're just seeing this thing unroll now. And what is there to do in the slow roll of death? What there is to do is do what we always did, party, you know, get together, have some food, have each other's back.”
The name Nourishing Beloved Community comes from Martin Luther King’s concept of “beloved community,” an idea that Sawyer believes needs to include more than just the people in your life that are easy to love.
“What he meant was something much broader; your beloved community has to include the people who are hard, oppositional, even otherwise,” Sawyer said. By expanding your idea of community, you isolate yourself too deeply during times that call for connection.
“For me, as I think about the larger collapses, I think about how we have to be sort of networked. So, in other words, I'm not looking for seats at tables, and some people are doing that. It's just not my cup of tea. I'm for making our own tables, and you make your table, and maybe our tables can, float down the river together somehow. You know, we can tie them together and we'll, we'll make it.”
