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!