Session 1: 9:45am-11:00am
What Could Participation Look Like?
This workshop will explore tools and tactics for doing community-based participatory outreach, analysis and design with food insecure individuals. Attendees will learn about ways to create more inclusive spaces within their work, design creative strategies to gather feedback and implement that feedback within their programs and operations.
Anti-Hunger Advocacy and Racial Justice
African American and Latino communities are disproportionately impacted by hunger in the U.S. However, their voices are often ignored when it comes to defending anti-hunger programs with elected officials. This session will address barriers to racial equity and advocacy skills for sharing effective anti-hunger messages with legislators.
Structural Racism in the Emergency Food System
This workshop will provide an overview of how structural racism has contributed to disproportionate rates of food insecurity and hunger in communities of color. We will then look at the role emergency food providers’ play in perpetuating structural racism and then begin to explore ways of dismantling racism in our organizations.
Beyond Food: Equity Trainings for Partner Agencies
Learn about the impacts of Oregon Food Bank’s Partner Agency Training series which focuses on practicing equity and social justice. Discussions during workshops on Racial Justice, Community Leadership Development, LGBTQ Justice, Cultural Responsiveness, and other topics are reshaping our network. OFB staff will highlight the impacts of the series and two agencies will discuss the utility of the trainings in their agencies.
Alma Cena Sana: How to Build Sustainable Food Security with a Community Food Access Center
Alma Cena Sana (the healthy soul kitchen) is a place where the community can come together around helping each other be healthy with food. Find out how you can evolve your programming to create a space that can be a powerful engine for moving people out of (and keeping them out of) food insecurity.
Building Member Relationships: From Transactional to Reciprocal
Veggie Rx: Viva La Salud!
Come learn about Veggie Rx programs in Oregon that are building collaborative partnerships, infusing equity into their structure, & accessing innovative funding. This is a hands-on workshop about the cross section of food security & health. Please come ready to map, cook & contribute your lived experiences. Introductory to Specialized welcome!
Session 2: 1:15pm-2:30pm
Turning Over the Keys: Empowering Teens to Address Hunger
Teens experience hunger in unique ways and the strategies to ending hunger should fit those unique needs. Hear from a panel of youth who volunteer with various food programs throughout Oregon and gain insight in ways to engage youth and empower them to take the lead.
Civic Engagement for Food Bank Participants
Despite the stereotypes, living in poverty means often feeling hopeless, unable to plan for the future, and socially isolated. How can we facilitate effective civic engagement opportunities for food bank participants? This participatory workshop will expand your personal reflection on experiences with poverty and privilege, and impart principles for effective civic engagement that allow for people in poverty and their allies to meaningfully engage with public decision makers.
How the Law Can Yield a Harvest for Black Farmers
Land loss is a significant issue threatening the viability of Black farming and wealth-building of Black landowners. This session proposes a legal entity that collaborates with Black farmers and landowners to address land loss. The session will also discuss tools to apply this solution to various locations.
Sharing Leadership: Putting it into Practice Among Staff and Volunteers
What does sharing leadership mean in a non-profit organization committed to justice? We will discuss how we share decision-making and promote multiple leaders in running our 14 food bank sites. Come prepared to share what you are doing or would like to see at your organizations too!
The Art of Placemaking: Food Security through Farming, Black Food Sovereignty, and Community Connections
Unity Farm is a dynamic partnership between MudBone Grown and Oregon Food Bank. Though the principles of placemaking, we’ll share the evolution of this collaborative farm project, explore the role of small black-led agricultural enterprises in addressing food insecurity and examine how reclaiming urban spaces in the face of gentrification can foster community healing.
Engaging Culturally-Diverse Communities in Hunger Relief
This session will focus specifically on barriers faced by the refugee and immigrant community and cross sectional implications on race/ethnicity as understood by different cultures. By better understanding culturally-specific challenges, participants will be better positioned to identify and respond to inequities in service. We will share successful strategies that have worked for IRCO’s growing Hunger Relief program and innovative methods we have used to integrate the skills and knowledge of our clients and give them a central role in shaping services.
Fresh, Affordable, and Convenient: Building Partnerships with Communities, Physicians and Insurance Companies
This session will discuss how to promote food access programs to health care providers, insurance companies, and community members as an effective means of preventing and managing diet related illnesses. Focusing on a partnership between the Curbside Market and a family medicine practice in the city of Rochester, we will discuss the development of the program and strategies to adapt our model in communities across the country.
Session 3: 3:15pm-4:30pm
Faith Communities for Just Food
Many food assistance organizations across the United States are, or began as, faith-based. Although most major religions espouse justice and equity, our food ministries often reflect paternalistic models of charity. This workshop will be an inter-faith dialogue focused on making changes to shift from charity to justice in faith-based food system work.
The Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition in the United States
The Right to Food calls on governments to ensure that all people are free from hunger and that they have physical and economic access at all times to sufficient, nutritious food that is sustainably produced. Yet, nearly half a century into the food banking experiment, the US has failed to solve its hunger problem and reliance on “emergency” sources has become chronic. In this workshop we will explore the utility of the right to food framing to serve as an organizing tool and catalyst for building power for a fundamental shift in systems and policies that have shaped our current food system and leave 42.2 million Americans hungry.
Rezoning, Gentrification, Displacement, and Other Root Causes of Food Insecurity
How are rezoning, gentrification, and displacement related to food justice? Join us for an interactive workshop to learn about our organizing work in the South Bronx, create problem trees to identify the root causes of food insecurity, and discuss how we as a community can reframe food insecurity to better address its root causes.
Partnerships for Maximum Effect: Developing Inclusive, Client-Driven Food Bank Programming
This interactive session explores how community-academic partnerships and qualitative research can foster change-based, inclusive and client-driven programming at food banks. Discover how research might benefit your own organizational goals and strategies and gain hands-on advice about how to work with qualitative data, and initiate and maintain successful partnerships.
Art as a Form of Resistance in the Food Movement
Come experience the power of spoken word poetry and other forms of “pop-education” as a means of resistance and self-expression in the food movement of America. Participants will be equipped with “pop-ed” exercises to bring home to their communities as a creative and safe means to explore such intangible and scary topics like white supremacy, privilege in America, and capitalism in relation to our food systems. The session will end with a “safe-space” for participants to share their own stories and decompress from the session’s exercises.
Food Justice & Latinos: How Do We Create Community-level Change?
Health programming has long focused on nutrition education and individual-level behavior. But achieving healthier Latino communities requires a shift in focus to systemic and environmental factors. Presenters will share their food justice work with Latinos and then participants will discuss key themes and ideas for action.
Session 4: 9:45am-11:00am
Innovative Collaborations to Address Community Food Security on the Olympic Peninsula
Building community food security requires interdisciplinary solutions that engage partners across all sectors of the food system – from farmers to food recovery organizations. Participants of this session will learn innovative methods for linking community efforts and building partnerships between groups engaged in all aspects of food systems work. Case studies include successful projects on the North Olympic Peninsula with small farms, tribal and low-income communities.
Wait, Whose Movement Is This?: Agency and Non-Exploitative Storytelling
How do we ensure the stories we tell through our organizations are truthful without being unintentionally exploitative? How can we involve food-insecure people in the decision-making processes they are directly affected by? Consider these questions and more as we work towards a future of true collaboration as allies.
Threats to Immigrants and Refugees: Responses from Emergency Food Providers
Fear of deportation is keeping people away from food pantries. What can we do to ensure that immigrants and refugees have access to food? How can we create safe spaces without becoming targets? How can we protect client data? Join us for a lively discussion and to share strategies for successfully supporting immigrant communities.
Enamored with Evaluation: Learning to Love Data
Dip your toes into the pool of evaluation tools and data to support your work. Think through how to better match long term goals with evaluation metrics. Learn about tools to measure your work through storytelling, mapping and assessment. Finally, share challenges and strategies for improving evaluation with peer organizations
Flowers and Bullets: Barrio-based Solutions
Flowers & Bullets Collective organizes their neighborhood to create alternatives to the health disparities in their barrio. Although this community lacks resources and is restricted by city zoning, F&B leverages social capital to reclaim a closed school in their neighborhood. In this session you will learn how F&B uses food and community organizing to connect with their neighbors.
Community Engagement in Diverse Neighborhoods: Successes, Challenges, and Tools
City Harvest Community Engagement Managers will offer methods for food justice based community engagement by highlighting each of their distinct community organizing strategies through City Harvest’s Healthy Neighborhood Initiative. Participants will then break into groups to develop community engagement strategies for fictional neighborhoods with very real, yet unique, profiles.
Addressing Food Access Through Community-Centered Initiatives and Inclusive Policy
This session will guide participants to develop strategies that address the environmental and economic racism that has shaped our food system and utilize a community centered approach to address health disparities. Participants will go through a process of exploration into their communities’ food accessibility beyond physical proximity to food retail.