Faith, Food, & Farms Conference
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Faith, Food, & Farms Conference 2024
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. This article was written by Sousiva Ing for Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative.
Faith, Food, & Farms Conference 2021
Faith, Food and Farms Conference Celebrates Faith Community Pandemic Work; Inspires Leaders to Expand Food Justice Work
The Faith, Food and Farms Conference brought together food justice and sustainability leaders representing 47 diverse religious communities. Most of the just over 100 participants came from the North Bay and East Bay, however attendees came from other areas of California as well as 8 other states. For the first time the conference included tours of farms and gardens at 7 different faith-community sites. Diverse speakers included 8 farmers growing food on lands owned by religious institutions. The in-person event overlapped with the National Faithlands Gathering.* Ammar Ahmed of Islamic Circle of North America in Washington, D.C. spoke about the response of Muslim communities in the U.S. to hunger during the COVID Pandemic. He called on attendees to help with the national effort by Muslim and Jewish groups to urge USDA to make kosher and halal meat available to observant Jews and Muslims through an emergency food program. Advocates are concerned about protein options available to observant individuals who utilize TEFAP, The Emergency Food Assistance Program. (A letter signed by some 47 members of Congress went to USDA last week, we will keep the Interfaith Food network apprised of how to help with this work.)
Ammar Ahmad from ICNA discusses need for halal and kosher food aid options.
Sha’Von Terrell, Black Church Food Security Network.
Sha’von Terrell, Deputy Director of the National Black Church Food Security Network closed the conference with a Call to Action. “Churches and church associations through their assets and financial commitments may aid in the development of farmers’ markets, supply chains, and other arrangements which can help to create equitable food systems and advance food sovereignty,” said Terrell. Specifically she called on faith-groups to work at every level including:
- Nationally: Support the Justice For Black Farmers Act
- Regionally: Support the regional food infrastructure by purchasing produce from Black farmers
- Locally: Incorporate a racial and economic justice lens to ministry planning by partnering with the Black Church Food Security Network.
Episcopal Bishop Rice talks with Father Daniel Green, Rector at St. John’s in Petaluma and other participants.
The in-person conference was organized in conjunction with the National Faithlands Gathering which overlapped with the first-day programming August 25th and continued for two more days. More than 30 people from 9 states focused on how to make lands owned by religious institutions available to more farmers and ranchers. Interfaith Food has been inventorying lands in Northern California owned by faith-based groups, and identified well over 100 parcels that are 5 acres or larger that may be suitable for leases to BIPOC farmers and others. The group heard from farmers that are successfully operating farms on lands owned by churches, and also from those who have faced challenges to identify ‘best practices’. Tours highlighted immigrant farmer Napoleon Camacho who farms at Seventh Day Adventist Academy, and CrossWinds Church in Livermore with a large community garden and tiny home village on church grounds.
Partners helping to promote and/or organize the conference include: University of California Cooperative Extension, Agrarian Trust, Marin Interfaith Council, Land for Good, Green the Church, Center for Earth Ethics, Plainsong Farm, The Conservation Fund, the Center for Food, Faith and Justice, Presbyterian Hunger Program, and the Islamic Center of North America. Special thanks to USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, USDA AFRI/NIFA, Americorps, San Francisco Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, Sonoma Community Foundation, the Heck Foundation, and other conference sponsors for their financial support.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our 8th Annual Faith, Food and Farms Conference held on August 25, 2021!
The conference is made possible with major support from USDA’s AFRI program and a Specialty Crop Block Grant. A full list of sponsors and donors can be found below:
Missed the conference? Check out some of the materials below!