Hunger Comes Home for the Holidays

Donation opportunity open till Dec8th!!

NEST (Northeast Storytelling) has established a Social Justice Initiative that includes three working committees developing social justice themed concert programming, social justice advocacy training, and online educational resources on a wide variety of contemporary social justice issues. The Hunger Comes Home for the Holidays concert is the premiere storytelling event of this initiative and focuses on the theme of food equity.

The concert on November 30^th will benefit Long Island Cares-the Harry Chapin Regional Food Bank. All proceeds after expenses will be donated to this food equity organization established by Harry Chapin in 1980. Long Island Cares provides food and support services for a network of more than 374 community-based member agencies, including food pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, child care programs, disability organizations, veterans’ services programs and more. Its goal is to improve food security for families, sponsor programs that help families achieve self-sufficiency, and educate the general public about the root causes and consequences of hunger.  https://www.licares.org/

The Hunger Comes Home for the Holidays concert features Dovie Thomason,  Heather Forest, Gabrielle E.W. Carter,  Dr. Ray Christian, Mathew Raiford and is emceed by Milbre Burch. The concert will be recorded and the recording will be made available for ticket holders to watch for two weeks after the concert..

About the Storytellers

The show is hosted by Milbre Burch, a GRAMMY-nominated performer who is a nationally recognized touring and teaching artist, storyteller, published writer and produced playwright, An accidental archivist of the American storytelling revival, she has been featured at festivals across America, in Europe and Asia, and now online. 

 The stellar line-up of performers are:

 Heather Forest: An award-winning, internationally recognized storyteller and recording artist, she is Co-executive director of the Long Island Community Agriculture Network (LICAN), and founder and executive director of Story Arts, a cultural arts organization in Huntington, NY that presents storytelling concerts and workshops in schools, theaters and community centers in the Long Island and New York area. 

 Gabrielle E. W. Carter: A Multi-disciplinary Artist, Cultural Preservationist and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Black Farmer CSW, Tall Grass Food Box - a platform to support and encourage the sustainability of Black farmers, increase their visibility and secure space for them in the local marketplace. She has done cooking demonstrations for the Culinary Institute of America and Race Forward, and was featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Kitchen, and The Smithsonian, and in the newly-released Netflix series High On The Hog. Her works utilizes oral history, cooking and agriculture to engage audiences and as a vehicle to reimagine wealth, marginalized food systems and inheritance.

 Ray Christian: A retired Army paratrooper who escaped inner city poverty and found himself moving from ghetto kid, to career soldier, to university professor, he is a 12-time Moth Story Slam Champion and the winner of the 2016 National Storytelling Festival Story Slam. His stories have been featured in Readers Digest, The Moth Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, Backstory, RISK!  and The Confessional podcast, among many others. His podcast What’s Ray Saying uses storytelling, history and commentary to explore Black culture from a unique perspective.   

 Dovie Thomason, a featured performer at the 2021 National Storytelling Festival and the Remembrance and Renewal Storytelling Festival at the University of North Carolina is a storyteller of Lakota, Apache and Scot Traveller descent who weaves history, life experiences, the lessons of listening, and random musings to provoke thoughtful questioning and envision paths of respect and reciprocity with all who share this good Earth, where she loves to garden.

 Matthew Raiford, the author of Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes From A Sixth-Generation Farmer, has a Culinary Arts degree from The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY and certificates in Ecological Horticulture from UC Santa Cruz and The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. He is a sixth generation farmer at Gilliard Farms, a sibling-run sustainable farm in Brunswick, GA that has been owned and operated by his family since 1874.