Regional & National Events

In collaboration with Senator Mark Montigny, and UMass Dartmouth, The Marion Institute will be hosting the 2021 Virtual Food Summit on October 13th, from 6:30 pm - 8 pm.  
 
The Marion Institute’s Southcoast Food Policy Council will present key findings from the newly completed 2021 Food System Assessment Report for Southeastern MA. Our distinguished list of panelists will discuss the role regional food assessments play in helping support and shape food policy and improve local food systems.

How can we shift power in our communities and center the work of young leaders of color? How can the food movement intersect with the racial justice movement? Join National Farm to School Network for a virtual Movement Meeting on Wednesday, Oct.14 from 1- 2:30 pm ET, featuring young leaders of color working to transform their community, for deep conversation and action-oriented reflection on how the next generation is working to intersect the food movement with racial justice, environmental justice, economic justice, and other key justice-centered movements. A crucial step towards our vision of a just food system for all is centering the voices of our next generation of leaders. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend this free event.

NPQ kicks off the 2021-22 season of our Remaking the Economy series in Indian Country. In partnership with the First Nations Development Institute (“First Nations”), we bring three leading Indigenous economic justice leaders who will speak to their work and the challenges they face in a discussion-style format. Our panelists are:

Heather Fleming (Navajo) is executive director of Change Labs, the only business incubator and accelerator on Navajo land. Fleming works with Hopi and Navajo (Diné) citizens to create a supportive business ecosystem for Native entrepreneurs.

Vanessa Roanhorse (Navajo) is CEO of Roanhorse Consulting, a firm co-designing a character-based lending program, with a vision of redesigning underwriting to meet Native community needs. She is also a cofounder of Native Women Lead.

Lakota Vogel (Cheyenne River Sioux) is CEO of Four Bands Community Loan Fund, a community development financial institution (CDFI) in South Dakota. The CDFI she leads is redesigning lending to enable Native residents to build homes on trust lands.

Operating a direct seafood business requires a wide range of skills and expertise. In many cases, seafood harvesters that participate in direct marketing also need to purchase additional permits, equipment, and insurance. These factors make direct marketing significantly different than selling to a middleman. To help new and established direct marketing businesses achieve their goals, the Local Catch Network is teaming up with Ecotrust to offer a cohort-based accelerator. 

Scale Your Local Catch (SYLC) is a nation-wide, producer-centered business accelerator developed to strengthen local and regional seafood systems by addressing challenges associated with direct marketing and by building the knowledge, skills, and networks needed for direct marketing seafood businesses to scale up their operations and increase their capacity and viability for long-term resilience. 

Register for the information session on October 15th from 1-2pm ET to learn more about Scale Your Local Catch. During this time, we will provide an overview of the program and address questions. 

Now in its 13th year, the Food Sovereignty Prize is given annually on or around World Food Day to grassroots organizations advancing food sovereignty – the right of all peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It stands in contrast to the World Food Prize, which perpetuates the myth that we can produce our way out of hunger.

This year’s honorees, FENSUAGRO and Eastern Woodlands Rematriation, have been growing food, defending territory, sharing knowledge and building power in the face of state violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and mounting climate chaos.

Join us in this Community of Practice – a space to explore and learn together about what it could mean to decolonize our work around networks

Always wanted to set up a food pantry on campus, but feeling overwhelmed on how to get started? Created a food pantry but not sure where to get the continued funding or staffing? Food pantries can be helpful for combating food insecurity on campus yet establishing one can feel daunting without the right buy-in, infrastructure, and support. Join speakers Nicole Reilly from University of Vermont and Annie Ciaraldi from UMass Lowell to learn strategies for effectively establishing your food pantry and sustaining it for the long term. From marketing to interdepartmental networking, establishing critical partnerships on campus and in the local community can greatly help your food pantry.

Join fellow travelers from October 25 through November 19 to practice "the art of being fully human in a time of crisis"

Four weeks to connect, share gifts, learn, and support one another in our work and our lives

Farmworkers and other agricultural laborers, such as those working in meat processing and packing facilities, are on the frontlines of toxic pesticide exposure and other human rights violations. Farm work is one of the most dangerous professions and continues a legacy of agricultural injustice and racism in the United States. When we participate in an industrial agricultural system, we participate in the oppression of farmworkers. Join us as we hear from Araceli and Elisa, two farmworker women, and Lariza Garzón, the Executive Director of the Episcopoal Farmworker Ministry as they share their experiences and ideas for creating change.

Join Indigenous Seed Keeper Rowen White and Black cook activist Jocelyn Jackson to dream into a food culture of liberation & care on November 4th, at the first Around The Table event of RFRS' new virtual series.

How can we reclaim our shared food culture to feed our collective care, healing, liberation, and joy? This is the question at the heart of Real Food Real Stories' (RFRS) November 4th virtual roundtable. Join celebrated food activists, Mohawk Seed Keeper and farmer Rowen White and Black culinary artist and Peoples Kitchen Collective co-founder Jocelyn Jackson, for an electrifying conversation on decolonizing mainstream food culture, and the role food culture plays in shaping our lives, stories, and dreams for the future.

A new virtual series, Around The Table events feature informal conversations with thought leaders, elders, organizers, and culture-bearers working at the intersection of food, culture, place, and power. Together, we take a deep dive––sinking our teeth into the juicy stories, live questions, and challenging conversations buzzing in our ecosystems.

Young Farmers 7th Annual National Leadership Convergence will be held virtually as the second half of a two-year event with the theme of “Achieving Equity Through Agriculture.“ In 2021 we will gather in a hybrid virtual and in-person format to move from learning to action to make equitable change in our own food and farming communities. 

Last Convergence four hundred farmers, ranchers, and supporters from across the country gathered virtually for a week in November to build a shared understanding of the racist histories of American agriculture, and how we came to have the food and farming systems we do today. 

Join us for another insightful conversation with Barbie Izquierdo, Jimmieka Mills, and Diane Sullivan on how and why organizations should engage people with lived and living experiences with hunger and poverty. 

During this conversation the team will welcome a special guest, Alissa Beers of the Center for Health Care Strategies, to highlight practical tips for centering the knowledge and perspectives of community members with lived and living experiences. The group will share learnings around how organizations can develop effective and sustainable partnerships and will hold time to address audience questions.

In honor of Native American Heritage Month, join the Norwalk Historical Society via Zoom on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 6:00pm for the virtual lecture, "Food Sovereignty in Native America", with guest presenter Rachel Sayet of the Mohegan Tribe.

Join Rachel Sayet of the Mohegan Tribe as she discusses her work with the Mohegan Tribe’s Cultural Department where she developed food sovereignty initiatives and continued her community-based research focused on promoting traditional foods. She will also explain her most recent project, the Native Food Discussion Group, created to bring community members into discussion about Native foodways and to record traditional knowledge about seasonal eating, harvesting, growing and fishing practices.

The Disparity to Parity project (see https://disparitytoparity.org/) has explored issues around agriculture and fairness in the United States, but we have always seen these issues in the broader international context of human rights, globalization and social movements that extend beyond national borders. The concept of parity is grounded in fair prices for farmers, but it extends beyond that to issues of environmental, cultural and social justice for producers and their communities. In this webinar, we will hear from partners around the world about what the concept of parity means in their context, as well as the international policies and agreements that need to be changed. The webinar will be held on the eve of the World Trade Organization Ministerial. It will also honor the successes of the Indian Farmer Protests, as well as plans for the November 26 General Strike in solidarity with the farmers’ demands. We hope it will serve as input for critical reflection on the failures of neoliberal globalization and the need for alternatives that advance food sovereignty and agroecology.

The webinar is hosted by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the American University Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, and the National Family Farm Coalition.

The Department of Agriculture's civil rights record is among the worst in the federal government. Black farmers have lost hundreds of billions in land and income since 1910 in large part due to federal policies—implemented by USDA—designed to drive them out of business. Despite sporadic attempts to reform the department's civil rights process, farmers, advocates, and reporters have continued to document widespread discrimination within the department in recent years. After Congress created a debt cancellation program for Black farmers in response to USDA's discriminatory lending practices, opposition groups brought the program to a halt through litigation. Our panelists will examine USDA's civil rights record, share their experiences in the fight for debt cancellation, and analyze the legal issues at stake, many of which will have important repercussions for public policy in the coming decades. Co-hosted by The Counter.

Join us for a deep dive into understanding how traditional philanthropic practices have negatively impacted movements led by people of color, specifically understanding “movement capture” and how participatory grantmaking practices aim to address those negative impacts.

Our sessions will feature BIPOC centered participatory processes, and how committee selection, orientation, committee support, and the deliberative process look like for these models.

Black farmers have a rich history and promising future in the United States, even though the Black history of agriculture is often reduced to slavery and cotton plantations. In Farming While Black (2018), Leah Penniman argues that justice for Black people, farmers and otherwise, requires learning about Black histories of agriculture, creating new experiences in the natural world, and getting in touch with our food systems. With a panel of Black scholars, farmers, and activists, in this webinar we explore what justice for Black farmers is today, what it has been in the past, and what it can be in the future.

Esteemed Panelists:
Maya Allen, PhD Candidate in Botany | The University of New Mexico
Teona Williams, PhD Candidate in History | Yale University
Ashley Gripper, PhD Candidate in Environmental Epidemiology | Harvard University
Laquanda Dobson, Chef and Farming Activist
Jayson Porter, PhD candidate in History | Northwestern University & Social Justice Intern | The Organic Center (Discussion Leader)

This webinar is open to all and will be recorded and made available on demand