Celebrating How Women Shape Black Fiber Futures
Out of the 73 bftn members in 2025, 89% identified as women-led businesses or individual women entrepreneurs. This is not a coincidence. The practices of tending to the land, cultural preservation, and collective creativity are practices that women and femme bodies have carried and preserved over generations. Our work of reclamation, intentional stewardship, and community resilience is heralded by Black women across the diaspora. Throughout history, women have carried cultural legacies through migration, displacement, and forced movement. Textile and craft practices often articulate these specific cultural traditions—whether through coded patterns in West African fabrics or spiritual symbolism in African American quilts.
Our members are farmers, natural dyers, artists, mothers, practitioners, designers, emerging manufacturers, cultural preservationists, and innovators. When statistics come out about the underfunding and lack of investment in Black businesses, this does not always account for how this reality is compounded for women-led businesses. Although Black women are the highest educated demographic in the United States and are starting businesses at higher rates than other groups, the support and funding available to sustain our businesses is still not nearly enough.
Studies also show that when you increase the livelihood of a Black / African woman, you increase the economic stability of the broader community. Women are more likely to spread their income throughout their communities, rather than hoard it for themselves and their families. When we say that bftn supports the “livelihoods and lifeways” of fiber and dye practitioners, we recognize that we are doing this with and for Black women.
Our staff is made up of women, and our board is composed mostly of women. Our experience spans sustainable farming, upcycling, research and academia, environmentalism, manufacturing, activism, and culturally relevant practices. So much of bftn is Black women, which also shows how diverse and multifaceted we are. Within our members and staff there is a range of expertise, experiences, geographies, identities, and roles. While we are united by the title of Women, we also value our individuality and the ways we each choose to be part of a collective rooted in shared values and visions—not simply shared gender.
Women’s History Month is a reminder to honor women’s contributions and their often overlooked impact on our world. In this organization, that notion is inherent. Rather than simply acknowledging the contributions of our women members, our work is to support, uplift, and celebrate the ways they do this on a daily basis in their businesses, farming, and art. Every month—but this month especially—we are honoring and celebrating the women who are creating Black Fiber Futures.
