Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative hosted our 10th annual Faith, Food, and Farms Conference at the Petaluma Community Center on May 8, 2024. With an agenda including tours of local sites, speakers from a variety of religious and secular organizations, as well as locally sourced meals, attendees were able to make connections and broaden their understanding and develop capacity to assist with food access during extreme weather disasters. Over 70 individuals registered representing more than 35 faith-based organizations from 9 California counties.
Looking towards a theme of food access during fires, floods, and other disasters, Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative brought together local, regional and national experts to advance knowledge of how to ensure food security and create networks to strengthen community resiliency and resources during times of disaster.
Attendees toured local congregations that previously utilized their facilities during recent disasters. Attendees learned more from the members of the congregations and heard about how they used physical assets and human resources including volunteers to better aid their community. Physical assets included commercial kitchen use, cold storage, dining halls or even overnight shelters. Tour sites included St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Sebastopol; Iglesia Cristiana Shalom Elohim, Rohnert Park; and St. Seraphim of Sarov Orthodox Cathedral, and Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa.
The tour also made a stop at Petaluma Bounty’s community farm. Attendees were given the chance to tour the nearly 3 acres of land where Petaluma Bounty hosts a number of activities as well as cultivates vegetables for the community.
Speakers at the conference covered a number of topics, including but not limited to: food waste reduction; resources to facilitate food access in disasters; transforming vacant faithlands into farms, gardens and/or farmworker housing; and advocating for local, state, and federal policies supporting family farmers and food justice. Attendees heard from members of local congregations as well as representatives from the United States Department of Agriculture, Zero Waste Sonoma, the Agricultural Institute of Marin, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, and University of California Cooperative Extension.
In addition to learning from expert speakers, attendees were also given time to network and broaden their local community resources to a number of congregations and organizations. In a post-event evaluation, an attendee mentions being inspired, especially by “how open everyone is to helping.” They took part in workshops with local and national speakers to dive deeper into the different ways in which different congregations/communities can or have addressed food access in times of disaster as well as the resources that can be utilized.
The conference closed with Timothy Van Meter, of the Methodist Theological Seminary of Ohio, and President Trever Burgon, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sharing their insight on innovative programs that have gone beyond the scope of traditional religious programming to aid neighbors and grow community food security.
The conference was supported primarily by a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Other sponsors included the Marin Community Foundation and the Heck Foundation.
For more information on the speakers and resources shared, please visit the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative website to access an excerpted version of the resource binder provided at the Faith, Food, and Farms Conference. Full copies of the 97 page document are available on request.