Fostering Formal Learning in the Food Dignity Project

Abstract

This short essay summarizes our formal higher education work in the Food Dignity project, with some initial reflections and questions that this work raised for me, and for many of our collaborators.' Food Dignity was a five-year action research collaboration dedicated to building community food systems that provide food security, sustainability, and equity. It was proposed and funded as an integrated program of research, extension, and education, under the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture's (USDA NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) competitive grant program for food security. Five food justice community-based organizations (CBOs) and four institutions of higher education collaborated on this project in California, Wyoming, and New York (see, for example, Porter, 2018, this issue).We had nearly US\$5 million over five years, which we extended to seven (2011-2018), to complete our proposed blend of action research. We used about 17-20\% of our total effort and budget to invest in higher education programs centered around sustainable food systems (Porter \& Wechsler, 2018, this issue). The goal of our education plan was, to quote our proposal narrative, to prepare ``the next generation of graduates from multiple disciplines (e.g., anthropology, animal science, planning) to incorporate SFS {[}sustainable food system] priorities and principles into their work.{''} Our action plans for doi ng this included developing sustainable food system undergraduate minors, funding several graduate students, paying for student internships in food system work, supporting community-university coordination, and developing guided learning content online. Like everything else we did together in the Food Dignity project, many of us were guided by our shared values in this education work (see Food Dignity \& Hargraves, 2018, this issue), and especially on the academic side were struggling to live up to them. Unlike what we have laid out in most of the other papers in this issue, we have not yet unpacked much of that struggle; we will wait to attempt that in future publications addressing what we learned during the Food Dignity project. More simply, the next sections discuss our activities within each of our formal education arenas of action. The closing section ponders a few crosscutting issues that emerged from our education work.