community organizing

 Posted by Kristin

Back in October, around fifty representatives from the New York City area attended the Second Annual Growing Food and Justice Gathering in Milwaukee. On the first night of the conference, author and food activist Bryant Terry hosted a Grub dinner, meant to promote conversation on food justice topics over healthy, mostly local food.  Now East New York Farms! has brought the concept back to Brooklyn, and is hosting its own version of a Grub potluck to promote conversations and relationships.

The potluck, which is also BYOU (Bring Your Own Utensils, Plate and Cup), will be held at the United Community Centers, also the home of East New York Farms! (613 New Lots Ave).  The event is co-sponsored by Jin's Journey, Food Security Roundtable, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Brooklyn Food Coalition.  Any and all urban farmers, gardeners, cooks, chefs, food activists, food bloggers and foodies of Brooklyn are invited to meet fellow food enthusiasts, build new relationships and learn about the food related initiatives taking place in Brooklyn.

The food will center around local and seasonal dishes brought by the guests.  Organizers are hoping to compile recipes from contributed food, so if you are interested in attending, write your recipe on an index card and bring it along.

Where?

Take 3 train to Van Siclen Avenue

You can RSVP here with the dish you would like to contribute:  https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGg1QXRjTDVrd05pbjJTYmJ...

Lynn Fredericks of Family Cook Productions interviewed Nancy Romer, the General Coordinator of the Brooklyn Food Coalition, on behalf of FSNYC.

LF: How do you see the BFC working in collaboration as part of the greater overall and healthy and sustainable food systems movement in NYC?

NR: Well, I want to start off by saying that the BFC stands on the shoulders of all the really important work that FSNYC partners and others have done over the years. We wouldn't be here without the research, education, organization and advocacy that came before we started organizing.

The BFC's structure lends itself particularly well to connecting grassroots activists with the existing food justice movement, and enlarging it. Our structure is like a hub with spokes -- each spoke heads into a different Brooklyn neighborhood (currently, there are twelve "spokes" for the 12 neighborhoods we are working in). Because each neighborhood spoke has a lot of autonomy, each neighborhood organization decides whom and how to partner with folks working on our issues. So those could be community organizations, businesses, community gardens, schools, houses of worship as well as, of course, food justice organizations. The hub part of the structure allows people to know what their fellow activists in other neighborhoods are doing, share ideas and best practices, and work borough-wide. We see ourselves as bringing people, most already active in improving their communities, together to see that we're all in the same movement. We also are a space for new activists looking for an organization that they have an effect in, that they can influence its direction.

While others ask how to build a more inclusive good food movement, Henry Harris has an answer: beets.

As a primary organizer of the Food Security Roundtable, Henry has recently worked with Mothers on the Move of the South Bronx to bring a ton of fresh organic vegetables, including over three hundred pounds of beets, straight from farmers in Vermont to communities where such quality produce can be difficult to find.

And now he is turning his energy to another innovative collaboration, working with staff and volunteers from Just Food and other organizations to build a diverse delegation from New York to attend the Growing Food and Justice Initiative (GFJI) conference in Milwaukee at the end of October.

The Growing Food and Justice Initiative came about through the work of Growing Power, Will Allen’s national non-profit. As the successes of Allen and his organization are being lauded by everyone from Bill Clinton to the Macarthur Foundation, this year’s conference will focus on building cross-cultural understanding for systems change.

Posted by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions 

When the issue of making a healthy school lunch available to public school children comes up this fall for congressional reauthorization of the USDA legislation known as Child Nutrition, a more grassroots ‘citizens’ campaign has also been unleashed by Slow Food USA.

Cross-posted by Paula Crossfield, www.civileats.com On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond. Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding. According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to "bring Brooklynites together to demand -- and participate in creating -- a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone." By my assessment, that is just what's begun to happen. Kicking off the day, Dan Barber gave a chef's perspective on sustainability (speech text here) through a story about two fish he has served, each labeled 'sustainable.' He found out the first fish was receiving chicken in its feed, which the grower thought sustainable because they were taking advantage of the waste produced by the chicken industry. Grossed out, Barber began to use the second instead, which grew as a part of the recuperation of an entire ecosystem, "a farm that doesn’t feed its animals and measures its success by the health of its predators." He warned, “We are on the verge of an ecological credit crisis, and it’s going to make this economic credit crisis a walk in the park.” In order to reverse this, he seemed to say, we have to rebuild farms and communities.

Posted by Kerry Trueman, eatingliberally.orgThe Real Food Challenge is a nationwide network of college and university students who are campaigning to bring food that’s local, fair, ecologically sound, and humane to their campus dining halls. With colleges and universities spending some $4 billion annually on food, the students leading the RFC see a tremendous opportunity to leverage that purchasing power to effect real change in our food system.According to the RFC’s website, there are already at least 300 institutions with college farms, fair trade initiatives, or farm-to-cafeteria programs, and other campuses are following suit. I asked the RFC’s Northeast Regional Coordinator, Sam Lipschultz, how the RFC is progressing in its goal of increasing the availability of fresh, fair foods in campus cafeterias:KT: Your organization, The Real Food Challenge, is essentially seeking to reintroduce pure, unadulterated, healthy foods at colleges and universities all over the country by enlisting your fellow students to demand more locally sourced and sustainably grown foods on their campuses. This entails, in part, working with huge food distribution companies who’ve traditionally relied on a centralized, industrialized approach to supplying their clients. Are you and your RFC colleagues persuading these corporations to alter their buying habits?SL: Students across the country are working, often in alliance with faculty and administrators, to demand that their food services procure and serve real food--and they're winning. The beauty of a national initiative like the Real Food Challenge is that it shows the food service provider at a given school that thousands of students and allies have the back of the student advocates on that campus.

Posted by Jeff Heehs

Dismantling racism in the food system, within and by way of sustainable food projects, was the focus of a gathering of around 150 community food activists from all over the U.S. and Canada from September 18 to 21 in Milwaukee. Group trainings and discussions provided “safe space” for participants to share a challenging, emotional process of understanding and confronting racial privilege and oppression in ourselves and our communities, amid workshops and talks on food justice and sustainability initiatives.

The conference was the product of planning by the Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative (GFJI), an outgrowth of activities initiated within the Community Food Security Coalition. Milwaukee’s urban farming non-profit Growing Power organized and sponsored the event. Just two days after the conference adjourned we were all thrilled by the announcement that Will Allen, the towering founder of Growing Power and host of the Gathering, was named recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant for his pioneering work in urban agriculture and community building.

Prior to the main gathering a core group of facilitators attended an intensive leadership training program on interpersonal methods to understand and challenge racial inequities in general and in the food system. These facilitators then conducted workshops, called Dismantling Racism 101, for others attending the Gathering. Using techniques of non-verbal interaction resembling games or silent theater among mixed groups, followed by open discussion, the workshops were a powerful, revealing experience.

Other workshop leaders presented on topics including:
- projects promoting food sovereignty and self determination among groups of Native Americans, immigrant farm workers, rural latino communities, urban communities of color and others