What will you experience?

Sustainable Community Food Systems offers you a unique opportunity to connect theory and practice through classroom-based work with service learning and hands-on experiences in the local community. Focusing specifically on the issues of food sustainability, environmentalism, and social justice, you will gain vital skills that will enable you to become a leader in society’s slow and contentious, but ongoing, shift to a more equitable, just and sustainable future.

At the heart of the Sustainable Community Food Systems minor is an intensive internship (16-20 hours per week) with a single community partner that is part of the food system. Over the course of the summer and fall, you will gain practical experience through over 450 hours of paid and credit-bearing internship. This experience is then critically analyzed through an intersectional lens on the complexities of the entire food system that will become a part of your written portfolio. This portfolio, plus your internship hours, will reflect the summation of your work.  

What will you gain?

Sustainable Community Food Systems minor will give you skills to help solve humanity’s most pressing problems. This minor will allow you to learn how to be system thinkers looking at the big picture solutions of how transforming the food system is a platform for creating an equitable, humane and sustainable society. You will discover how your actions can enable you to advocate for a more resilient and just food future. For example, you may choose to advocate for food security in  just and culturally appropriate ways and/or learn how to innovate as a social entrepreneur towards a more sustainable food system.

Sustainable Community Food Systems offers students who are motivated to get out of the ‘classroom box’ an innovative opportunity to learn creative critical thinking skills, as well as hands-on engagement with our local food system. Such an opportunity will give students a leg-up in terms of working in the emerging and ever-growing food, sustainability, and social justice movements.

– Phoebe Godfrey

Few issues illustrate the merging of sustainability, practical human needs, local action, and equity in the way food does. in this program, you will learn all aspects of sustainability, social, economic, and environment, through hands-on experience and self-directed study. From food production to social action to sustainable technology, you will make a difference in the local community and develop social entrepreneurship skills that you can carry to any endeavor in your future career.

-Andy Jolly-Ballantine