The speech below was delivered as part of a workshop titled “Setting the Course: The College Food Movement”. The two people referred to below are Ashwini Jaisingh, a a junior at Georgetown University and Domestic Fair Trade Coordinator for USFT (United Students for Fair Trade); and Tim Galarneau, Coordinator of the University of California Sustainable Food Coalition.

Hi, I’m Rowan. The project I want to talk about is in some ways an extension of what Tim and Ashwini are doing. They are already collaborating across campuses and issues and finding that their efforts are exponentially more effective because of this collaboration.

There are, however, many schools that are undertaking these issues in isolation, isolation from other schools and also issues in isolation from each other on a single campus. Now, don’t get me wrong, amazing things have been accomplished in this fashion.

In fact, in the back you can see a list of 168 schools that have programs that involve purchasing local foods, organic foods, fair trade foods, holding courses on food issues and even having student farms. But think, if this much as been done without the help of shared information and amplified efforts, what is possible with this collaboration?

So we at The Food Project see an amazing opportunity to take this collaboration, that Tim and Ashwini are already engaged in, to the next level, to get the college food movement as organized as the industry it is trying to effect.

What I mean by that is that college administrators, including dining services administrators, have open lines of communication with other schools. They are very aware of what other schools are doing and eager not to be left behind. Competition between schools often results in advances on one campus being duplicated elsewhere.

Students should have the opportunity to communicate and share on the same level and also the ability to capitalize on this relationship between schools to further their agenda.

So what we want to see is two things:

The first is collaboration of students across the nation on issues and between campuses.

The second is a to think of our work in terms of system shift, to define a goal for the national movement.

We think setting a goal is so important because it will really crystallize the college food movement AS a movement. Right now the movement is so dispersed that many people do not recognize it as such. While the different issues (fair trade, buying local, organics, etc.) have different roots, they share many common principles and have the same end goal, the same system is targeted.

So what we propose is a goal to shift 20% of dining services procurement to be inline with the movements principles within 5 years. We estimate that today 1-2% fulfills these criteria.

In order to accomplish these goals we’ve created the Real Food Challenge. The challenge has three main components.

The first is to create spaces for leaders in college food activism to come together to share learnings and advance their work. This will take places at events like the Annual Kellogg Food and Society Conference, the CFSC conference, the CFSC farm to cafeteria conference and the USFT convergence.

The second component is to support these leaders by providing three spaces in the Food Project’s leadership program, the Cadre

We will also be proving year round resources online about programs, advice and opportunities for collaboration. We hope this will provide a place for students to connect and to share information.

The final component is to actually track to progress we are making towards our goal of 20%. There is, after all, very little point in having a goal is we cannot measure our success. The main challenge here is that many campuses do not record their procurement of local and fair trade goods. This is largely because the software programs that hand purchasing do not have a flag for these categories. Those colleges that do keep records of this purchasing activity do so manually in addition to their standard purchasing records.

One solution to this problem that has been suggested is to approach the software companies and ask them to include these flags. This task is made quite bit easier because there are only three major providers of this software.

So maybe this is where we start, who knows. We’re very excited to be taking on these issues though and really think that this shift can be accomplished by students and have a real impact.

Also, I’d like to invite you to take a look at the list at the back and see if there’s anything you’d like to add or revise. This is the most up to date information I could find, and I’d really appreciate any additions you might have.

Thank you.