coordinating food/farm justice work

[Will Gusakov]

Hi folks,

Combing through recent emails and google group postings, seems there
are at least 4 separate groups working on food/farming justice work,
connected to OWS in NYC:

-Food Justice subgroup of the Sustainability WG
-Occupy Farms
-Feed the Movement
-Radical Food Distribution

Then there are myriad different projects like the Occupy Farms bus
tour, Occupy the Food System, Food Bank of America, etc. etc. etc.

And though there's crossover, we don't all know what others are
working on. Everybody goes to too many meetings, but may I suggest
that we try to hold a general coordinating meeting between folks from
these different groups, so we can all hear about what the other folks
are doing, and thus better collaborate when appropriate? We can do it
over dinner.

Or maybe we can just send out concise descriptions of what each group
is up to, via this email thread. For the groups I'm part of:

-Feed the Movement is a network of farmers and volunteers in VT and
MA, who were organizing the delivery of truckloads of donated produce
from small farms to the occupy kitchens in Boston and NY throughout
the fall. We also made some videos of farmers speaking on political
ag/food issues. after the evictions, our work tailed off, but we still
have our netweork of folks who'd be ready to participate in new
initiatives. feedthemovement.wordpress.com, open google group 'feed
the movement'

-Radical Food program - this is just starting, the idea being to
partner with community-based org.s in NYC to distribute food (cooked
or whole produce) to urban communities as part of OWS-related
political outreach and solidarity-building. Also hope to organize
gleaning teams from cities to farms, and organizing trainings for
rural farmers in the city. Harnessing the power of food to foster
relationships between rural and urban communities, and do OWS outreach
to urban communities. Partners so far - O4O, Occupy Faith, Mothers on
the Move, Wassaic Farm, Feed the Movement. Many more being reached out
to. Email me to be invited to the google group.

Those who are so motivated, please be in touch about trying to set up
a (fun, food) coordinating meeting, or post a concise description of
what yer group is working on to this list.

Food and solidarity,
Will
(Paula or Alec, could you pass on this email to the Food Justice WG
list? Thanks)

[Paula Winograd]

Thanks Will... sounds like a good idea to me...Ill pass this along to Food Justice Listserve. Also.. FIY food justice is its own wg.

[Devin Balkind]

I updated the Occupy Farms wiki layout a bit with menus up top and some more categories.  There's a lot of great info there about the work Occupy Farms has been engaging in, info about partners, etc: http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/Occupy_Farms

One of the best ways to start an effective multi-group collaboration is by building a common set of information resources.  That's the idea behind wiki.occupy.net and it should work for the farm/food community within occupy as well.

 I've added the organizations you mentioned as 'collaborators' on the home page.  Feed the Movement already has a page on the wiki but the other three don't.  It'd be great if people built pages for them at categorized them as [[Category:Food]], [[Category:Group]].  It would also be nice if someone went through the resource section and built out pages for other important organizations and categorized them appropriately, at least with the [[Category:Food]] tag.  That will make it easier for people to find these pages because they'll be listed under the 'Food' category.

I get back to New York tomorrow and would like to connect with folks interested in information management and farms.  Leah has been doing a great job on the wiki'ing and we need more people to get involved.

Good information helps produce good food. :)

--
Beware the stabbing carrot of food justice!

--
Devin Balkind
Director, Sarapis Foundation

de...@sarapisfoundation.org
@devinbalkind