Home » Initiatives » BLJTI Overview

BLJTI Program Overview

Food Justice

peter-wendt--r5KSMkyoSc-unsplash

Program Description

Our relationship with food and the land, whose regenerative nature has the capacity to care for and nourish all of us, is essential to keeping the body alive and to keeping communities functioning politically, economically, culturally, and spiritually. The abundance that access to safe, nutritious, and locally produced food brings looks like self-sustaining communities, economic freedom for Black farmers, economic protection from the impacts of inflation at the grocery store, healthy bodies, emotional comfort, tender moments of passing along food traditions to children, and joyful celebrations with family and friends. And yet, environmental and climate injustice manifests in our food systems, creating food insecurity, harm from Confined Animal Feeding Operations, harm to agricultural workers and local farms, and long-lasting and compounding disadvantages in Black communities. This program explores these challenges, focusing on how agencies and agricultural companies have disadvantaged Black farmers and populations. Participants will learn about the local initiatives that have successfully uplifted equity in access to safe, affordable food, replacing inequitable food policies and practices. By the end of the program, participants will be equipped to advocate for food justice, ensuring access to healthy, affordable food for all.

Program Objectives

The objectives below outline the core knowledge, skills, and capacities participants will build through this program. At the conclusion of the certification program participants will be able to:

  • Explain current inequities and disparities in food access, quality, and management.
  • Summarize the needs for models and practices to advance food justice for Black communities.
  • Assess the utility of various community engagement and advocacy approaches to advance food justice.
  • Examine existing policies, practices, regulations, and advocacy activities that govern food use and resources.
  • Formulate a justice action plan to advance food justice in Black frontline communities.
  • Examine the relationship between food justice, land, and African and African diasporic knowledge systems, including histories of land dispossession, agricultural exploitation, and contemporary practices of stewardship, seed keeping, and food sovereignty in Black communities.
  • Assess the public health and cultural dimensions of food injustice, including structural drivers of diet-related illness and environmental exposure, as well as the role of food in identity, healing, resistance, and intergenerational knowledge in Black communities.