Challenge Pre-Work

Getting Ready for the Challenge

This post is to share some suggested “pre-work” so that you can feel prepared to get started on your journey!

You will start to receive daily email prompts on the morning of Monday, March 30th with short readings, video or audio resources as well as links for further study, learning and action.

01 Suggested Readings

Read or re-read these two short pieces on the connection between racism and food systems and take some time to reflect on the readings.
“Backgrounder: Dismantling Racism in the Food System”
“Why We Can’t Separate Justice and Sustainability in the Food System”

02 Familiarize Yourself with the Feelings Wheel

The Feelings Wheel is a tool to track your “internal weather” throughout the Challenge. As our friends at Visions, Inc. say, feelings are messengers. They can tell us important things about ourselves, what pulls us forward into conversations and work for racial equity and what pushes us away. And developing a facility with naming feelings can be the work of liberation and stepping out of white dominant professional/cultural norms that minimize feelings. .

03 Check out this Glossary of Terms

Consult this glossary of relevant terms for Racial Equity Tools, especially those terms that are less familiar.

04 Set Some Intentions for Yourself

What brings you to the Challenge this year, whether this is your first time, or you are doing this for a second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth time? Where do you want to be by April 19th (the end of this year’s Challenge) in your understanding of and commitment/capacity to address racism in the food system (and related systems)? To help you answer this question, you may want to take a few moments to get quiet, perhaps close your eyes, take a few breaths and ask yourself what would you most want to come from your participation in this year’s Challenge. What do you want for yourself? What do you want for others to whom you are connected and with whom you may be interacting over the course of and after Challenge? And what are you willing and able to give to this year’s Challenge in terms of time and commitment so that you get the most out of it?

05 Other Suggestions, Time Permitting…

• Check out this recently released list of resources on COVID-19 and connections to Racial Equity & Social Justice.
• Watch some or all of this webinar from the Inter-Institutional Network of Food, Agriculture and Sustainability on “Structural Racism in the Food System”
• Watch this TEDTalk (15 min) on “The underlying racism of America’s food system” by Regina Bernard-Carreno
• Watch some of these short videos from the “Under Our Skin” project from the Seattle Times, dedicated to lifting up words and phrases relevant to conversation about race and racism.
• Listen to this podcast episode of Flipping the Table with Miakoda Tayloron “Crossing the Divides of Race and Privilege”

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