TANNER BECK

Tanner Beck is an attorney, activist, and agricultural educator from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee whose work exists at the intersection of law, rural life, civic advocacy, and agriculture. A graduate of Lawrence County High School, Tanner later became a double alumnus of the University of Tennessee, earning both his B.A. in Political Science and his Juris Doctor.

He has dedicated his legal career to public interest law, representing underserved and underrepresented people in courthouses throughout Tennessee. Tanner’s work has always been about access: access to institutions, access to rights, access to help, and most importantly, access to dignity. He believes representation is about more than legal outcomes. It is about being heard, being taken seriously, and being treated with respect. Good advocates speak up, but great advocates listen.

Tanner was selected as a Fellow in the Reaching Rural: Advancing Collaborative Solutions initiative, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the State Justice Institute. Alongside leaders from rural communities stretching from Hawaii and Alaska to Maine and Florida, he studied collaborative approaches to addressing substance abuse and what it does, and continues to do, to rural areas.

Outside of his legal work, Tanner and his husband own Rhinestone Ridge Farms, a small agricultural project rooted in permaculture, sustainability, and ethical livestock stewardship. Through the farm itself, Tanner explores the history of domesticated animals, selective breeding, and the ways agriculture, in many ways, created human civilization. Access to land, food, knowledge, and self-sufficiency will always be tied to power.

Growing up queer in the rural South, Tanner grew up in a time when there were few examples and even fewer visible futures. That experience taught him the power of visibility and the importance of becoming the example he never had. Sometimes the most powerful thing a person can do is stay, exist openly, and refuse to disappear.