concreteness

To continue with the concreteness: I would really like to present as part of our presentation our guiding principles, Louis' report about how students are into supporting real food, and what the RFC is. There's more... I know there is but that's all I got for now.

Thanks for sharing your feelings Maggie! I love it.

This is not the first time I have run into the problem of short institutional memory due to high turnover rate of students. I am not sure how to deal with it either- it's tricky. I think that people like MVH who have been around for a while and seen it all are really important and invaluable resources for helping with the institutional memory problem. After all, he's been working on these issues since the formation of the Student Farm. And staying in contact with the people who have been there and done it, like the STARS writers and Luis.

"the finger should be pointing at whatever it is that is working on such a huge scale that it can't accommodate sustainability." YES- I totally agree that the problems are extremely large-scale and complex and beyond our local reach. This brings up a tension I run into all the time in my thinking about activism and social change- the tension between structure and agency. That is, problems are operating at a structural level, they are built into our systems, they are a result of national policies and globalization and unfettered capitalist economics and neoliberalism. But then there's agency- that is, the ability of individuals and groups of people to affect real change on their own situations. And if we give all the power to the structures and discount our own power, our own agency, then we'll never get anywhere. So I guess it's about recognizing the power of the structural barriers while not being so daunted as to believe we can't make change?


On a more concrete note, here would be my goals for the stakeholder meeting:

• get people to know each other a little better
• build a common understanding of the barriers each individual/group is facing
• strategize a little on how to overcome these barriers
• build some mutual trust and communication that can continue beyond the meeting (this is I think the big one)

So an agenda might look something like this:

• an icebreaker/introductions
• presentation on where we're at and what we're working towards and why, including examples of what other campuses are doing, and our thoughts on guiding principles
  
• going around and talking about each person's role in the food system and what they perceive as barriers to more sustainable food purchasing
  
• brainstorming on solutions (SMART if possible- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound- but not getting hung up on this)
  
• next steps/action items, including creating a forum for future communication
  

Alright back to my mountains of reading.... see you all soon!

Overwhelm

I'm having some feelings so as part of our processing, I'm writing them down. 

I started watching the Star's report video of their project in order to gain a better understanding of the process which I'm a part of and what has been done already. Here is what I felt:

1. The extreme difficulty of working with the transience of understanding due to the fact that we are all students. Watching the video, I saw that a huge amount of work had been put into it and a huge amount of knowledge and networking had been generated. Yet all that information and all those relationships have not smoothly transferred to this working group. I am so so so thankful for the documentation done by the previous Stars group and the fact that I have the technological ability to communicate with them currently. As I move forward, I feel an obligation to the future students to create some sort of cohesive body/timeline of the activities and thoughts that have gone before them.

2. I feel a sort of impossibility in trying to get UCD to have a sustainable food systems. Everyone talks about the scaleability of different sustainable solutions and I would argue that rather than question the validity of the solution based on it's ability to scale up, the finger should be pointing at whatever it is that is working on such a huge scale that it can't accommodate sustainability. 

3. I'm still feeling that I would like more time to plan our upcoming stakeholder meeting on the "How?" of sustainable food systems. I think we need to have a conversation with one of the former Stars and possibly Gail F. to make sure that we are not repeating something that has already been done and that we get the best info possible to make it useful. I'm going to write Navina now to ask her about her recommendations. 

4. Despite the worry you may hear in the above writing I still feel that this is important work and am committed to facilitating a conversation between stakeholders because I feel that the students are the best players to be bringing the other stakeholders together.

5. Finally, I was thinking as a goal/objective of our meeting to speak about the importance of the meeting as a safe space. Recognizing that there are huge pressures on each stakeholder regarding time, money, and energy and that these forces should not be taken personally by the others.

That's all for now. Whew! I do feel better :) 

Some thoughts....

1. Our food system is not very transparent. Even working here on this very local scale, it is really hard to get solid information about where our food comes from. I had the idea it would be pretty easy to run the numbers on the "Real Food Calculator"- just get the info on where our food comes from, plug it in, and voila! Turns out that no one really knows where our food comes from- the people at Sodexho don't know because the people at the distribution company don't know, so no one can tell us. This is frustrating. But also interesting. And problematic.

2. The Sodexho people were very nice, and expressed interest in working on sustainability, but they perceive some barriers, such as cost, consumer expectations, and the necessity of meeting certain standardizations, as being insurmountable. Rather than start with sustainability as being a thing that needs to happen and working from there, they are starting with cost, consumer expectations, etc, and trying to do as much as they can within those parameters, instead of rethinking and reworking the barriers. I think there is only so much we can do if that's the mindset... it will take some mind-changing and paradigm-shifting in order to accomplish our goals. They also see themselves as already doing a lot for sustainability, because of the waste reduction efforts etc, and can't quite get why we want them to do more- I think they see themselves as already doing their part, whereas we see it as drastically in need of improvement.

3. Umm.. out of thoughts for now. More later. Thanks for the blog Liz! keep em coming folks!

Meeting Frustration

We are feeling stuck! Or at least I am. How do we work within such oppressive systems as capitalism and everything tied to it and still do important work to make change?! It is so hard to stay inspired. Inspire us, world!