Join the Skyway Local Foods, Local Places Workshop!
The Skyway Urban Food Systems Pact invites you to help Skyway grow our local food economy, improve food access, and keep our neighborhoods vibrant and healthy! Please join us for the Local Foods, Local Places workshop, where we’ll create a community action plan focused on food and place-making by and for Skyway!
Participation is free, but please REGISTER HERE (so we can send you Zoom links and information on how to participate).
Virtual Workshop Sessions
Monday, October 25
Opening, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM PT
Tuesday, October 26
Case story sharing, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PT
Small Group Exercises, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM PT
Wednesday, October 27
Action Brainstorming, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PT
Action Prioritization, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PT
Thursday, October 28
Action Planning, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM PT
Closing, 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM PT
Please join us for as many sessions as you can attend, but don’t shy away if you can’t be there for every session – we value your participation in any amount. Virtual workshop sessions will be conducted in English and translated in 5 languages: Vietnamese, Chinese, Somali, Tagalog and Spanish.
If you are not a member of the Skyway community, but you bring knowledge or passion about food, food systems, economic development, health and wellness, transportation, arts and culture and/or any other aspect of food and place-making, we would be honored to have you join us! Please note that this will be a community-driven action planning process, so we ask participants from outside of Skyway to come ready to listen and follow the lead of Skyway community members, and the guidance of our facilitators, while also being willing to share your knowledge when asked!
BACKGROUND
The Skyway Urban Food Systems Pact is a Black and women-led collaborative made up of Skyway community members, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, and other institutional partners who support building a just and equitable food system in Skyway. “UFSP” formed in 2020 out of grassroots efforts to meet the increased need for food in Skyway due to Covid’s economic impacts. Organizers realized that food insecurity in Skyway was a systemic issue with roots much deeper than Covid-19, and resolved to organize to combat the underlying sources of hunger and lack of food options in Skyway. Since February 2020, the Urban Food Systems Pact has been organizing community members across Skyway around building a common agenda for food justice in Skyway.
Through the Local Foods, Local Places (LFLP) workshop, UFSP is partnering with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Services Division, which have been sponsoring the Local Foods, Local Places program in communities across the country for the last 7 years. These federal agencies provide a facilitator with expertise in local food and place-making initiatives to lead the LFLP workshop, and they offer ongoing technical assistance regarding potential federal resources. Skyway is the first LFLP community selected in Washington state! We are looking forward to welcoming these federal partners to Skyway (virtually!) through the workshop.
Draft Goals for Skyway, to be explored at the Local Foods, Local Places Workshop
As part of our planning for Local Foods, Local Places, the UFSP core team has developed several draft goals for the workshop. The draft goals are the foundation of the community workshop. It is around these that we will vision, learn, identify assets and challenges, brainstorm, prioritize and detail actions to advance in the next 6-24 months. They need to be broad enough to allow for the most necessary next steps to be surfaced and specific enough to be relevant to the community and keep us focused during the workshop. Our draft goals are based on the community visioning process and input that we’ve gathered from community members over the last 6 months.
Champion and engage community around the breadth of economic development opportunities connected to the food system. > May include workforce development, career pathways, youth/social enterprise, entrepreneurship training, lowering barriers for BIPOC owned businesses, infrastructure creation (e.g., commercial kitchen)
Deepen organizational partnerships and coordination around food initiatives. > May include securing the foundation for a local food alliance, policy, integration of food with other planning/public health/placemaking initiatives
Increase access (e.g., economic, physical) to health promoting local foods preferred by the community. > May include farmers market, SNAP/EBT enrollment, transportation improvements, community gardens, school gardens
Shape the environment to shift hearts in minds toward community health and wealth. > May include streetscape improvements, art, food production in visible public places, creating new associations with food and land
We’d love your feedback! Please email the UFSP Project Manager, Sarah Lindsley, at slindsley@skywayufsp.org if you have any input on these draft goals.
LFLPFlyer Skyway-Eng-2
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