Preserve Culture.
Build Community.
Food Systems
Strategic Consulting
Health Equity & Community Wellbeing
Community & Civic Engagement
Storytelling
Charlotte & Pickens is social enterprise building infrastructure by preserving Black Southern culture and centering nature — backed by lived experience — to strengthen food systems, advance health equity, grow local economies, and create places where people belong. We transform cultural knowledge into practical solutions through strategic consulting, research, storytelling, education, public experiences, environmental stewardship, and entrepreneurship.
About Charlotte & Pickens
Charlotte & Pickens currently stewards the Center for Black Southern Culture, which seeks to be one of the South’s leading institutions dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and advancing Black Southern life, and Black Farmers’ Market Memphis, which is Memphis’ only farmers market explicitly addressing hunger by way of food apartheid and bringing awareness to the disparities against black farmers, producers, and makers, to influence equity within the food system, shift local policies, and eradicate harmful national narratives around the city’s poverty and hunger
Charlotte & Pickens in the News
Black Farmers’ Market Memphis Returns To South Memphis for 5th Season
Black Farmers’ Market kicks off the 5th market season in South Memphis, a neighborhood deeply stricken by food apartheid, bringing food and nutrition access and fostering joy.
Charlotte & Pickens kicks off Echoing Green’s Leader Lens for Juneteeth
Brittney Shelby Sessoms, founded Charlotte & Pickens with a mission of preserving and revitalizing African American agricultural traditions and building community food sovereignty. In a recent conversation, she spoke about her ongoing Echoing Green Fellowship experience.
Center for Black Southern Culture Pilots KEEP
Center for Black Southern Culture, in partnership with Charlotte & Pickens, piloted place-making at “The Juke” as part of its KEEP program, serving as a living canvas of the Delta and Memphis’s early traditions and spaces of pure, un-policed joy and sanctuary.
Charlotte & Pickens advances Black Southern land, food, health, culture, and economic opportunity.
The comfort of a southern home became activated by the ancestors, blues, traditional foods, and collective energy as Center for Black Southern Culture and community members gathered Memphians for “The Juke”, the opening event of KEEP made possible by Charlotte & Pickens.
