UNCA to hold ‘Food and Social Justice’ forum, Jan. 20

From University of North Carolina Asheville

Press Release

Erika Allen, who focuses on community-based transformation through the food system, will present a discussion, Food and Social Justice, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 20 in UNC Asheville’s Highsmith University Union, in the Grotto. This event, a Social Justice Coffee Hour presentation by the university’s Key Center for Community Citizenship and Service-Learning, is free and open to the public, and is the first of a series of public events this semester about food systems.

Allen is the Chicago and national projects director for Growing Power, a nonprofit organization and land trust focused on community and urban agriculture, where she has provided technical assistance and planning support for thousands of new and limited-resource farmers and local-food pioneers to strengthen farm businesses.

Allen is co-chair of the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council, and was appointed by Governor Pat Quinn in 2008 to the Illinois Local and Organic Food and Farm Task Force. She served on Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Energy, Environment and Public Space Committee, and is a Post Carbon Institute fellow. Allen was an awardee for the Chicago Tribune’s Good Eating Award in 2006 and was honored in 2007 for her work in community food systems by Family Focus, an organization serving families in low-income Chicago communities.

Allen’s talk is sponsored by UNC Asheville’s Breman Professorship of Social Relations, the university’s Office of Sustainability, Student Environmental Center, and Key Center for Community Citizenship and Service-Learning. For more information, visit keycenter.unca.edu or call 828.251.6400.

Additional food and food systems events coming up this semester at UNC Asheville include:

· Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate, with Laura Lengnick, author and professor of sustainable agriculture and environmental studies at Warren Wilson College, at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 26 in the Sherrill Center, Mission Health Systems Mountain View Conference Room.

· Developing, Implementing and Sustaining a Food Assistance Incentive Program for Farmers’ Markets: Lessons Learned in South Carolina, with Darcy Freedman, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University and core faculty of the Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 31, in the Sherrill Center, Mission Health Systems Mountain View Conference Room.