About
Zedé builds the systems movements run on.
Zedé Harut is a strategist, writer and the founder of Seeds Worth Sowing, a grassroots organization in South Minneapolis addressing homelessness and housing instability. It is one of the few organizations providing financial assistance. She created the Community Welfare System, a framework organizations use to build parallel systems of care that outlast any one leader.
She started organizing at 17, when she, her sister and their friends slept outside the Minnesota Governor's residence for three weeks. Those weeks showed her from the inside how movement spaces work and where they break. During the 2020 uprising, she drew attention for coordinating mutual aid relief programs for impacted families. That work became Seeds Worth Sowing, serving mothers and families across Minneapolis.
Her work draws on historical organized efforts such as Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Black Panther Party's survival programs and Ella Baker's Young Negroes' Cooperative League, which she argues are the best examples of parallel systems. She built the Community Welfare System from both her own experience doing the work and her study of these organizers. Today she consults with organizations on strategy, operations and storytelling, leads Building Parallel Systems: The Intensive, and writes about mutual aid and movement accountability for a community of 70K+ followers and subscribers. On Substack, she previews her first book, Building Parallel Systems, coming spring 2027. The book traces what these efforts built, where they fell short, and what it takes to build systems that last.
average monthly views on Instagram
years of organizing
followers across Instagram, TikTok and Substack
families served through Seeds Worth Sowing
What I bring
Strategy, systems and storytelling.
Zedé has spent ten years running programs, building teams and keeping organizations in good standing. She helps organizations restructure their leadership, programs and funding through the Community Welfare System, writes the processes, compliance systems and succession plans that keep the work from living in one person's head, and shapes the story of the work through copy, campaigns and social media. Every engagement starts with the people already doing the work.
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