Introduction—and Invitation—to the Food Dignity Special Issue

Abstract

First paragraphs: Over the course of five funded years and with five million dollars, three dozen community food justice leaders and academics across three U.S. states and nine organizations collaborated on action and research about community food justice, security, leadership, sustainability, and sovereignty. We called this collaboration Food Dignity. If you read this special issue, you will hear 20 voices (and about a dozen more, indirectly) presenting some of what we have learned since first proposing the Food Dignity collaboration in 2010 and also striving to make useful sense of it, for ourselves and for you. In this opening set of essays, leaders of the five community organizations partnering in Food Dignity each describe how and why they chose to collaborate in this project and reflect on their experiences with it (Daftary-Steel, 2018; Neideffer, 2018; Sequeira, 2018; Sutter, 2018; Woodsum, 2018a). Then we discuss how the three of us—the project PI, a community leader with decades of experience in community activism, and a non–tenure track academic team member who joined the project a little late—ended up being the ones leading this project to its close, including guest editing this journal issue (Hargraves, Porter, & Woodsum, 2018)....