Upcoming Speaker Series: Story Feeds Culture
You’re invited to join CSPI for a narrative change speaker series event on December 13th at 1 pm ET: Story Feeds Culture by Food Culture Collective.
The Food Culture Collective team will work to orient us to a narrative framework, set of principles, and story facilitation methods that interrupt white supremacy culture and instead support mutuality, reciprocity, and belonging for all. Additionally, they will create a space for people to experientially root in personal storytelling and engage in transformative narrative work.
About our speakers:
Ada Cuadrado-Medina is dedicated to cultivating moments and spaces for exploration, celebration, and deep connection that nourish us, and open us up to new possibilities—especially around food and community. Growing up in a diasporic, military Puerto Rican family that was constantly uprooted, Ada’s relationship with food is centered around building home and identity.
Before joining Food Culture Collective, Ada spent 7+ years working in design and marketing roles at small-scale organic and sustainable farms—including a human-grade insect farm—as well as in natural snack brand start-ups based in the Bay Area. Previously she had worked as a food tour guide in Washington DC, an in-house graphic designer, and a conference manager for a finance-focused organization.
In her role as Digital Culture Creative at FC Collective, Ada designs and manages digital spaces that encourage connection, exploration, and reflection through storytelling and participation within and beyond our place-based food communities. Ada believes that everyone has a creative, inquisitive sense of play that needs to be fed and unleashed regularly so that we can build the irresistible food future we all want.
Stephanie Lew’s journey with food has been about building and renewing relationships with community, place, and self. Their colorful engagement with food includes farming on a 400-acre, diversified, organic farm, carbon farming on rangeland, connecting people to soil, changing the narrative around ‘ugly produce’, and selling produce at farmers markets. Stephanie has found communing over food to be the most human way to understand and be in relationship with the world.
Stephanie first joined Food Culture Collective as a participant in our story facilitation training, and later as a member of the 2021 Facilitator Cohort. The experience had a profound impact on their ability to find their voice and name their truths around being a Chinese-American, which inspired them to join the FC Collective team. Stephanie continues to do the work of exploring and reclaiming their heritage through story and is excited to share the same opportunities with the broader community.
As Network Weaver, Stephanie’s full-hearted engagement and passion for this work is expressed in their work to deepen and grow relationships within the Food Culture Collective community and beyond. Stephanie’s natural inquisitiveness, attention to detail, and unabashedly warm and generous presence help to ensure all FC Collective programs run smoothly and support collective healing and transformation for all participants, in authentic and meaningful ways.
Food has been a guiding force in Jovida Ross’ life, since her early years on her family’s organic micro-farm in Coast Miwok lands of rural Northern California. While her previous work spans efforts to generate community-based solutions to violence, queer liberation, reproductive justice, and ecologically-responsive and just economies, the throughline remains a deep belief that together, with commitment and intention, we can reorganize our world to support our mutual thriving. Jovida sees food as central to this vision and brings more than two decades of experience generating collective strategies that bring ambitious visions to fruition.
Before joining the Food Culture Collective team, Jovida spent 7+ years as Director of Programs at Movement Strategy Center (MSC), where she co-founded The Transitions Initiative and led the design and facilitation of MSC’s Transitions Labs. These BIPOC-centered cross-movement learning and strategy spaces gathered more than 200 social justice movement leaders from across the country to explore the question: How do we transition our world from domination and extraction to resilience, regeneration, and interdependence? With Jovida’s leadership, FC Collective has come to clearly situate our work within a movement-building context, understanding that we work in concert with others whose visions align with ours.
Please share this event with your colleagues and register today using this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYuce6przspHddM-F_FSb9aEijx32WxiyK-
This event is hosted as a part of CSPI’s Resource Hub. The Hub is a space where partners can gather to learn from CSPI, one another, and health equity practitioners and community advocates from across the country. Resources include skill building trainings, policy and power building toolkits, webinars and conversations at the intersection of public health policy and racial justice, as well as partner convenings that encourage collaboration and relationship building across CSPI's networks.