Publications, Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation

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Browsing Publications, Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation by Author "Niewolny, Kimberly L."

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    2023 Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation Annual Report
    Trozzo, Katie; Niewolny, Kimberly L.; Bendfeldt, Eric; Kelinsky-Jones, Lia (2024-12-18)
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    Hope in Times of Crisis
    Niewolny, Kimberly L. (Virginia Tech, 2020-04-01)
    Access to trustworthy information is significant during a world health crisis. The Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation is working with our partners to provide current information and resources that are relevant for food systems change makers and stakeholders on and off campus. We are also prioritizing creating space for reflection on the current conditions in the food system to more deeply understand how this pandemic impacts our everyday lives now and into the future. Through careful reflection and learning, we hope to create new possibilities for the work that lies ahead. This will include a critical focus on uplifting the needs and concerns of those most vulnerable to disruptions in the system. In this effort, it will prove crucial that we listen to our frontline workers, organizers, students, and scholars whose practice, policy, and scholarship have judiciously crafted food movement possibilities in which emphasize justice and fairness as core values: agroecology, community food security, food justice, food sovereignty, and more.
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    Mutual Aid for Food Systems Change in the Time of COVID-19
    Trozzo, Katie; Niewolny, Kimberly L. (Virginia Tech, 2020-04-01)
    Mutual aid is a way for individuals and groups in a community to support one another in times of crisis. Often mutual aid initiatives or projects emerge after “natural disasters” in the form of relief and disaster recovery services, but they also exist as a way of life for some communities and in response to “un-natural disasters” that many groups and communities face every day as a result of historical injustices, social inequities, and religious persecution. In this way, mutual aid can be understood as work rooted in individual agency and collective action to address both the immediate needs and structural conditions a community seeks to address, such as by providing affordable and safe housing, food security, appropriate health care, or accessible transportation. What is important is that the mobilization work draws attention to the needs of all, but especially those most vulnerable to the conditions the community seeks to change (Spade, 2020).
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    Struggle and Adaptation During COVID-19 Food System Disruptions
    Bendfeldt, Eric S.; Niewolny, Kimberly L. (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-08)
    This time of collectively enduring and working to contain the coronavirus (COVID-19) presents many challenges to people, communities, states, nations, and the world. Currently, we are urged to stay-at-home if possible, keep social distance and shelter in place to flatten the curve, protect people at high risk and most vulnerable to infection, and curtail the asymptomatic spread of the virus. Economically, people are facing and experiencing the disruption of schedules, careers, livelihoods, and protracted financial losses. Businesses, particularly in the food service and hospitality sectors, are experiencing declining sales, decreased revenue, and tremendous uncertainty. Food economics Professor William Masters of Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy states the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is “the largest loss of income and decline in gross domestic product caused by a single identifiable event” (Jiminez, 2020, p. 2).