Food Dignity Research Articles

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from East New York Farms!

First paragraphs: I worked as the director of the East New York Farms! (ENYF) Project for seven years, from 2006 to 2013. As media interest and general excite­ment about sustainable food grew during that time, assessing potential opportunities for “partnership” and participation in the broader world of sustain­able food work (that is, outside East New York) became an increasingly important part of my role and an increasingly significant way in which we defined what we were, and were not, about. The route to participation by ENYF in Food Dignity started with Megan Gregory, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, inviting our then farm manager, David Vigil, and some of our youth leaders to speak at a conference in Ithaca, New York. I remember David coming back and telling me that “they treated us like royalty,” as he described being picked up in Ithaca, taken out to dinner at the world-famous Moosewood Restaurant, and generally welcomed and appreciated by Megan and the other hosts at Cornell. We accepted the invita­tion to this conference largely because of the leadership-development opportunity it afforded to our youth members to share their experiences in food justice work and hear from others. Had it been an invitation for just our staff to speak, we may not have felt that we could justify committing the time to this; invitations to food-related con­ferences were frequent, but we always prioritized our work on the ground.... See the press release for this article.

Overcoming the Venn diagram: Learning to be a co-passionate navigator in community-based participatory research

This article is a personal account of working as an administrator and research scientist on a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project called Food Dignity. It describes how the community partners on the project taught the author about privilege and oppression in campus–community research partnerships. It describes her initial failures to acknowledge privilege and actively work to overcome oppression via acts of 'passive oppression' and suggests that acts of passive oppression produce and reproduce structural oppression. The article goes on to give specific examples of structural oppression in CBPR relationships and proposes ways that people in project coordination and administration roles can help circumvent or overcome them. It concludes by acknowledging the author's place of privilege as an academic in Food Dignity, and by re-envisioning her role within the project as a 'co-passionate navigator'. It examines the importance of co-passionate navigators in CBPR and describes their role in changing the campus–community research landscape, making CBPR partnerships more just and equitable for all partners.

Shared voices, different worlds: Process and product in the Food Dignity action research project

Diversity of perspective makes for greater depth when painting a portrait of community life. But embracing the idea of representing true diversity in a formal research project is a whole lot easier than putting it into practice. The three dozen members of the Food Dignity action research team, now entering the fourth year of a five-year project, are intimately familiar with this challenge. In this article, four of the collaborators explore the intricacies of navigating what it means to bring together a genuine cross-section of community-based activists and academics in an effort to draw on one another’s professional and personal strengths to collect and disseminate research findings that represent the truth of a community’s experiences, and are ultimately disseminated in a way that brings tangible benefit to the heart and soul of that community. The authors include Food Dignity’s principal investigator (Porter) and three community organisers (Marshall, Herrera and Woodsum) in organisations that have partnered with Food Dignity. Two of the organisers (Herrera and Woodsum) also serve project-wide roles. These collaborators share their personal and professional hopes, struggles, concerns, successes and failures as participants in this cutting-edge effort to equalise community and university partnerships in research. Keywords: community-based participatory research (CBPR), food justice, equitable community-campus partnerships, food sovereignty, case study, action research

Expanding the frontiers of nutrition research: new questions, new methods, and new approaches.

Expanding the frontiers of nutrition research: new questions, new methods, and new approaches.

Food Dignity: five community food system stories

Many communities are tackling hunger, obesity, equity and other issues by expanding local engagement with and control of food systems. This paper examines the practice and potential of community‐driven approaches to food security through five case studies of community food system projects located in California, Wyoming and New York. The project coordinators are coauthors of this paper and team members of the Food Dignity action, research and education project (www.fooddignity.org). Research methods include interviews and narrative inquiry analysis, participation and observation, file coding, and Photovoice. Each project is working to build local control over and engagement with the food system. The actions, challenges, strategies and successes of these initiatives will be highlighted. We close with implications for the supportive roles nutrition professionals should play. Funding from USDA/NIFA/AFRI Competitive Grant no. 2011‐68004‐30074.