Pesticides are the antithesis of food justice. By continuing to use them, we are harming the land on which we live, contaminating our waterways, and subjecting everyone near the fields to toxic chemical exposure. The Center for Farmworker Families and the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) from Watsonville have partnered with a UCSC student to bring our community together and foster action towards halting pesticide use worldwide, starting with Watsonville. This workshop will encompass writing letters to Driscoll’s and making colorful signs for the Watsonville community to use at the next pesticide protest. This will be an educational and uplifting workshop, creating a collective step towards a future of food justice. 

Anyone attending will also be offered volunteer and UCSC independent study opportunities with the Center for Farmworker Families and the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture. Please visit our website (https://farmworkerfamily.org/cora) if you are interested in learning more, and email satrigue@ucsc.edu with any questions!

Land is Life - Lupa ay Buhay is a workshop that will educate our community on the ways in which Filipino women reclaim agrarian land through bungkalan. Bungkalan refers to a social movement amongst peasants and farmers in the Philippines who reclaim and cultivate idle and disputed lands as a form of resistance against landlessness. In this workshop, you will learn about the history and practices of bungkalan.

Led by student facilitators Vivian Zalunardo and Amelia Pinto (Cowell Coffee Shop and Berkeley Student Farms), our cross-campus collaborative workshop will spotlight seeds in relation to food sovereignty and land distribution. We will lead a conversation on seed saving and sharing, and explore seeds as a way to build relationships with each other, land that we are occupying, and land that we have severed relationships with in cultural diasporas. We will further explore the "Seed to Stomach" approach as taken on by sites such as Cowell Coffee Shop, which provides students facing food insecurity with full, nutritious meals utilizing produce grown by students on our very own on-campus farm. Participants will get to map their own stories alongside various seeds and take home seed bombs to distribute within their communities.

In this workshop we will uncover the typically invisible labor, costs and activities of a traditional food supply chain by mapping it out on large poster board via the audiences full collective personal experience and story.. Then we will map out a new localized food system based on life-enhancing principles and values for all. For the second map we will first identify our shared values and practice filtering major decisions through several conceptual design and re-building tools.These two exercises will allow us to more clearly identify how a common wasteful corporate-benefiting food supply chain works now while also seeing more clearly how we must each step into the food supply chain in order to take action from our respective places, tor re-build and obtain fair results for all beings.

Where does the food served in our dining halls come from, and who makes decisions around them? In this workshop, Real Food Challenge will explore campus food procurement, including: how universities source food, who profits, and who gets left out. We'll explore the corporate supply chains behind institutional food service, why procurement decisions matter for workers, farmers, and communities, and what levers students actually have to push for change.

Together, we'll investigate the corporate supply chains behind institutional food service, why procurement decisions matter for workers, farmers, and communities, and where students have real power to push for change. Through supply chain mapping, procurement education, and small group discussion, participants will trace food from production to campus plate, and identify the pressure points where our collective action can shift that journey.

Throughout, we'll ground our analysis in food justice values, uplifting questions of who benefits and who bears the cost in our current campus food system. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how campus food procurement works and concrete steps they can take to be part of changing it.