Abstract
This paper describes the theoretical and conceptual framework and the research and practice model of Think&EatGreen@School, a community-based action research project aiming to foster food citizenship in the City of Vancouver and to develop a model of sustainable institutional food systems in public schools. The authors argue that educational and policy interventions at the school and school board level can drive the goals of food system sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty. The complex relationship between food systems, climate change and environmental degradation require that international initiatives promoting sustainability be vigorously complemented by local multi-stakeholder efforts to preserve or restore the capacity to produce food in a durable manner. As a step towards making the City of Vancouver green, we are currently involved in attempts to transform the food system of the local schools by mobilizing the energy of a transdisciplinary research team of twelve university researchers, over 300 undergraduate and graduate students, and twenty community-based researchers and organizations working on food, public health, environmental and sustainability education.
Highlights
This paper describes the theoretical and conceptual framework and the research and practice model of the first funded year of the Think&EatGreen@School project: a sustainable food system community-based action research initiative housed at the University of British Columbia, Canada
The process of creating transformative change across the entire University of British Columbia (UBC) campus food system has resulted in a series of lessons that have informed the development of the Think&EatGreen@School action research alliance, including how to engage partners, how to successfully involve students in research and community change, and how to avoid fragmentation of efforts across a multiplicity of projects and partners
UBC (Land Food and Community I and II, Land and Food Systems (LFS) 250 and 350 respectively), guided by a dozen graduate students and their professors, are back from brief but intensive fieldwork placements in 21 public schools in the City of Vancouver. They have reported on their projects on school food gardens; on the quality of diets consumed at the schools; on food procurement and preparation, nutritional value and environmental impacts; on the places where people eat at school and the social relations that unfold in those spaces; and on the ways the school curriculum integrates or fragments learning about food and environment from the lives of students and the school communities
Summary
This paper describes the theoretical and conceptual framework and the research and practice model of the first funded year of the Think&EatGreen@School project: a sustainable food system community-based action research initiative housed at the University of British Columbia, Canada. The fifth section of the paper describes the research and practice model of this community-university research alliance as a concrete example of how grassroots efforts can work to enhance institutional food system adaptations toward sustainability, food security and food sovereignty while reducing environmental impacts of schools. This includes a description of the local context of the research alliance as well as an explanation of Think&EatGreen@School‘s structure and an overview of our project activities. We conclude by sharing some observations of the Think&EatGreen@School project‘s evolution over its first year
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