May 9th General Meeting: Food Access & Equity

Our May 9th General Meeting marked our first ever virtual, bilingual meeting. The focus of the meeting was Food Access and Equity and we worked with Rooted Language Justice to learn the process of setting up and hosting a Zoom meeting with synchronous bilingual translation.

Since the emergency stay at home orders went into effect back in 2020, the Food System Coalition has been hosting our General meetings on Zoom. We have continued this format even as the orders to stay home have long expired in an effort to shrink the distance across this large county and work to engage new members from the farthest reaches of our local food system.

In addition, the SLO Food System Coalition Steering Committee adopted our statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in April 2021 (http://www.slofoodsystem.org/our-mission.html) and we have been working to live up to this statement in as many ways as possible. We know that language access is of huge importance to our SLO food system stakeholders.

Some highlights of the May 9 virtual meeting http://www.slofoodsystem.org/quarterly-meeting-may-9th-2023.html:

• 40 people from across the food system logged on to share resources, network, and listen to the presentations.
• Rooted Language Justice interpreters walked us through the process of setting up different language channels and showed participants how to toggle between channels based on the language they felt most comfortable using.
• Food Bank shared data they collected through a series of interviews to improve their services and access to food in SLO County.
• Cal Poly professors discussed their work with the Food Policy Work Group and the need for farmworker housing and general community education on housing solutions for the people who put food on our tables. Too often low-income housing projects face difficulties getting approved and opposition from neighbors.
• CAUSE shared results from the UC Merced Farmworker Health study and their efforts to launch a farmworker resource center in Santa Barbara County.

Our next quarterly meeting will be in August and will be our only in-person event of the year. Subscribe to our newsletter for date and location (TBD). 

In November we will resume virtual, bilingual meetings as we build on and improve our efforts to make our meetings more accessible to all members of our food system. 

Author: Shannon Klisch, FSC Co-Chair
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