e’re pleased to announce the return of our Conversations on Food Justice series with our upcoming session, “Facing the Housing Crisis: Keeping Americans Safe, Healthy, and Connected” on Monday, September 20th at 12:00pm EST.

Despite rising employment rates and the promise of economic recovery ahead, millions of Americans are still facing extraordinary financial hardship brought on by the pandemic. Americans collectively owe more than $57 billion in rent, and more than 11.5 million Americans are facing homelessness. The disproportionate impact of economic hardship on communities of color is nothing new, reflecting long standing racial inequities that create pockets of poverty across the United States.

In this session, we’ll dive deeper into our nation’s intersecting housing, hunger, and poverty crises. From housing affordability and income inequality to redlining and disinvestment in communities that leads to segregation, we’ll explore the systems and structures that contribute to housing inequality, all of which come with significant financial, educational, health, and opportunity costs for people of color. We’ll also put forth policies and practices that can move the needle on equitable housing and the redistribution of wealth and resources.

Join Seth Rolbein of the Cape Cod Fishermen’s Trust, a program under the umbrella of the Fishermen’s Alliance, and Mark Hayes of MIT Dining to learn how this project supports our local food system and fishermen, how they developed this chowder for institutional dining, and how the students, faculty and staff reacted! Whether you’re a dining director, food system advocate, fisherman, or interested in supporting regional food systems, you’ll come away from this webinar inspired by this story of innovation and collaboration.

Please join us for the launch of ActionAid USA’s new report “Bigger is Not Better: The High Cost of Agribusiness Consolidation.” In addition to sharing the findings of the report, there will be an in-depth discussion of how this consolidation impacts farmers, workers, rural communities, the food system as a whole, and the environment and how we can build a more resilient food system by investing in family farmers and acting on climate change. Following the presentations will be a Q&A session with the speakers.

Speakers:

Siena Chrisman, Report Author
Niaz Dorry, National Family Farm Coalition
Ben Lilliston, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Edgar Franks, Familias Unidas por la Justicia
Facilitated by Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, ActionAid USA

The UN has described its Food Systems Summit, an 18-month process culminating on September 23, 2021, as a “peoples’ summit,” bringing together food producers, Indigenous communities, youth activists, researchers, and business leaders to identify strategies to transform the global food system in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet hundreds of civil society organizations have chosen to boycott the Summit, claiming that it lacked transparency and accountability and privileged market-based, corporate solutions to food production and distribution over agroecological approaches grounded in food sovereignty and the right to food. 

In this month’s forum, Molly Anderson, the William R. Kenan Professor of Food Studies at Middlebury College, will discuss the evolution of the UN Food Systems Summit, the concerns voiced by civil society organizations and others, and potential strategies for more inclusive, democratic governance processes that empower small producers, frontline workers, and communities facing food insecurity and malnourishment. 

One of the greatest barriers to just agriculture is equitable access to land. Through a history of land grabs and forced migration, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have been separated from their land, worsening systemic inequities. Over the past 100 years, Black-owned farmland in the U.S. has declined by roughly 98 percent. Savi Horne, Executive Director of Land Loss Prevention Project, and Malik Yakini, Executive Director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, will talk about the impacts of land loss on rural and urban communities and what we can do to break down these barriers.