Accessibility to nutrition has a huge impact on peoples’ lives and well being. Follow along with our meetup booklet as we learn more about food systems, food sovereignty, and a community’s power/role in growing and eating their own healthy food.
There’s a picturesque commercial of America, featuring picnics and barbecues with fresh local fruits and vegetables during the peak summer month of July. Meanwhile, there is the silencing of truth where ancestral African and Indigenous farming culture is taken advantage of, lands are stolen, water is contaminated, seeds passed through generations are modified. People are separated by race and class, confined to food deserts and food swamps, their access to nutrition limited by the gatekeepers of capitalism.
This month, we are unpacking what equitable food systems can look like, discussing how food needs to revolve around communities not corporations, and learning from the leadership of food justice organizations who are changing the world.
Our July Meetup was centered around the Food Justice movement. It
began with our traditional matriarchal and Indigenous land
acknowledgement, and a pause to show respect…
Olinka Green is a fierce crusader for justice. As a certified Health Educator with more than 30 years of providing health education to the African American community, Green has a unique focus on preserving at-risk African American families. She has been directly involved in activism for over 20 years, spending the last ten working to dismantle police brutality and uplift the Black Lives Matter movement.
The issue of police brutality hits particularly close to Green’s heart, as she was a personal victim of police assault. On April 29, 2015, Green was protesting the deaths of women of color, and specifically trans women who’d been murdered by police. The one-woman protest started at the West End in Dallas, Texas, and ended with Green being arrested, maced, and assaulted by a Dart officer. She was charged with assault to two public servants and faced a $30,000 fine. Green’s charges were noticeably identical to the charges pinned on Sandra Bland, the Illinois woman who died in police custody.
Due to Green’s community work and activism, she was bailed out through community fundraising. Fortunately, because of high community pressure and countless Black Lives Matter protests in Dallas, the case was dropped. Due to her tireless fight for justice, Green was given the Peacemaker Award of the Year in 2015 by the Dallas Peace Center. She has also received the Sandra Bland Justice Award, and the Ambassador for Justice Award by the Cathedral of Hope Church of Dallas. Green has been featured in The Dallas Weekly Newspaper (Talented Tenth Edition 2009), and received the Launch a Dream Award for her work with juveniles in the Texas juvenile justice system.
Green is a member of the Southern Methodist University’s Women of Color and Power of Narrative Speakers Division. She was recently named by the Dallas Observer as one of the “10 Brilliant Dallas Women to watch.” Green has been a speaker at TEDxSMU, and is the mother of two sons and seven grandchildren
Did you know?
Urban farms supply food to ~700 million city dwellers.
11.5 billion pounds of garden produce becomes food waste every year
produce that could feed 28 million people.
About 690 million people globally are undernourished.
Studies show a higher density of fast-food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods
and found that unhealthy foods were more heavily promoted in African American communities.
How to take steps to grow your own food.
Empowering communities to develop
self-sustaining food practices.
How access to nutritional food is used as a power
mechanism to oppress and harm groups of people.
