.png)
Also, just three days until our urban farming webinar... register now
Everything is Local Somewhere
Photo by Bob Benenson
I spent Thursday at a convening of food activists, organized by The Henry Ford and Clinton Global Initiative non-profit, who discussed many aspects of regenerative agriculture. I'll have much to say about this session over the coming days.
I'll also have lots of photos I took during tours the group was provided around the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. During Thursday's tour, we popped into Stand 44, the museum's recently created fast-casual restaurant, and as usual when I'm in a new restaurant, this sign of local vendors caught my eye. Love to see local being supported.
Join Our Webinar... You'll Be Inspired
Food is in Chicago's DNA. The city rose from the prairie as a center for marketing and distributing the Midwest's agriculture bounty. The nation's industrial food system was invented here in the 19th century; today, Chicago is a center for advocacy for a healthier, more sustainable, more humane and more equitable food system.
So it comes as no surprise that many leaders seeking to revitalize Chicago's underserved and underresourced communities are promoting the development, by people of color, of community gardens and urban farms.
These small growing projects are helping restore hope, jobs and opportunity to challenged communities, while helping residents who face food insecurity to feed themselves — as Chicago manifests what has become a powerful national movement under the banner of food sovereignty.
This is the topic of Local Food Forum's next "Better" Dialogues webinar, "Gardens in a City: Cultivating Hope in Chicago, which takes place on Monday, June 17 at 7 p.m. central time. The title references Chicago's official motto, Urbs in Horto, which translates from Latin as "city in a garden."
The program will focus on the work of Community Food Navigator, a Chicago non-profit launched in 2020. Its focus is on providing tools and resources to help people of color in underserved areas produce food for themselves and their communities — the core of the concept known as food sovereignty.
Our featured guest is Nick Davis, managing director of Community Food Navigator. As Nick told Local Food Forum for an article published earlier this year, “The purpose of the Community Food Navigator is really to build power amongst growers of color, build connections and relationships in our food system, and coordinate our food system a little bit better.”
He continued, “It's important that the community has a sense of how other people, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood and then the region, define that for themselves, and how we can start to organize and convene people and tighten up our relational networks so that we can actually move towards those definitions of visions of food sovereignty.”
Nick will be joined by these other leaders in the urban growing community that are aligned with Community Food Navigator's work.
Angela Taylor, whose work focuses on bringing the benefits of hyper-locally produced food to the underserved Garfield Park communities on Chicago's West Side.
Natasha Nicholes, a dynamic change-maker as founder and executive director of the We Sow. We Grow. urban farm in the West Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Join co-hosts Bob Benenson of Local Food Forum and Chef Sarah Stegner of suburban Chicago's Prairie Grass Cafe for this free webinar. There will be Q&A, so bring your questions.
Where in the World is That Veggie From?
So many items that we see in the produce sections of grocery stores and on tables at farmers markets arrived in the U.S. with our many waves of immigrants. Our friends at University of Illinois Extension and UI Health provided background on five of these in their latest contribution to Local Food Forum.
Thanks again to Bianca Bautista of UI Extension Cook County for the content, which is part of the Eat.Move.Save program.
Comments