Over the past 15 years social movements for community food security, food sovereignty, and food justice have organized to address the failures of the multinational, industrial food system to fairly and equitably distribute healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate real food. At the same time, these social movements, and research about them, re-inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege. We argue that in order to correct this pattern we must relocate our social movement goals and practices within a decolonizing and feminist leadership framework. This framework challenges movement leadership and scholarship by white people who uncritically assume a natural order of leadership based on academic achievement. We analyze critical points in our collaboration over the last four years using these frameworks. Doing so highlights the challenges and possibilities for a more inclusive food justice movement and more just scholarship.
Urban agriculture (UA) has emerged as a promising way to address many important issues, including growing food for local communities, preserving open space, promoting health, and developing local leaders. A worrying expectation, however, has developed that UA can meet these important and ambitious goals while also being financially sustainable without outside funding. We call this expectation the unattainable trifecta of urban agriculture: the myth that urban agriculture, without long-term funding investments, can a * Corresponding author: Sarita Daftary-Steel, project consultant with Food Dignity, Brooklyn, New York 11207 USA.Daftary-Steel can be contacted at 345 St. Johns Place;
Diversity of perspective makes for greater depth when painting a portrait of community life. But embracing the idea of representing true diversity in a formal research project is a whole lot easier than putting it into practice. The three dozen members of the Food Dignity action research team, now entering the fourth year of a five-year project, are intimately familiar with this challenge. In this article, four of the collaborators explore the intricacies of navigating what it means to bring together a genuine cross-section of community-based activists and academics in an effort to draw on one another’s professional and personal strengths to collect and disseminate research findings that represent the truth of a community’s experiences, and are ultimately disseminated in a way that brings tangible benefit to the heart and soul of that community. The authors include Food Dignity’s principal investigator (Porter) and three community organisers (Marshall, Herrera and Woodsum) in organisations that have partnered with Food Dignity. Two of the organisers (Herrera and Woodsum) also serve project-wide roles. These collaborators share their personal and professional hopes, struggles, concerns, successes and failures as participants in this cutting-edge effort to equalise community and university partnerships in research. Keywords: community-based participatory research (CBPR), food justice, equitable community-campus partnerships, food sovereignty, case study, action research
Many communities are tackling hunger, obesity, equity and other issues by expanding local engagement with and control of food systems. This paper examines the practice and potential of community‐driven approaches to food security through five case studies of community food system projects located in California, Wyoming and New York. The project coordinators are coauthors of this paper and team members of the Food Dignity action, research and education project (www.fooddignity.org). Research methods include interviews and narrative inquiry analysis, participation and observation, file coding, and Photovoice. Each project is working to build local control over and engagement with the food system. The actions, challenges, strategies and successes of these initiatives will be highlighted. We close with implications for the supportive roles nutrition professionals should play. Funding from USDA/NIFA/AFRI Competitive Grant no. 2011‐68004‐30074.
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