Week Three
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Day #21: Final Reflections
Today we invite you to spend a little time on this final day of the FSNE REC reflecting on how your participation has helped you to think, feel, sense and act differently on this journey of moving from “me to we” and advancing transformative change in communities, food systems and beyond. What have you learned? What has been affirmed for you? What new commitments have surfaced? How will you put your commitments into motion? What kinds of support do you need? Where might you
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Day #20: Catch-Up and Reflect
Again, we are leaving space on this last weekend of the FSNE REC for participants to catch up on any topics from the week that you may not have been able to get to and/or to go a bit deeper in your explorations of a particular prompt, topic or materials. See below for links to all the prompts of this past week, all of which speak to how we can build “a bigger ‘we’.” Day #19 – Weave Collective Dreams of “The Better” Day #18 – Raise the Next Generations with Care
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Day #19: Weave Collective Dreams of “The Better”
01 Learn At Food Solutions New England, we believe that vision and imagination are powerful forces for change in food and other systems that can help us forge paths to the bigger and better “we” that is desired by so many. The stories we take in and share about what is possible can have real impact and ripples! In this spirit, we invite you to watch and/or listen to two short segments of a video from a talk given by Penobscot educator, author and attorney Sherri Mitchell (Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset) on her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom
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Day #18: Raise the Next Generations With Care
01 Learn Our children are our gifts to the future. Our commitment to these young people demands we celebrate their differences, acknowledge the challenges they face at different stages, in different places, and explore the possibilities for their future in ongoing and authentic ways. Though some adults have historically been reluctant to discuss differences among children, including racial differences, we now acknowledge that celebrating diversity and difference allows children to embrace their unique body and personalities for who they are, and their racial and cultural heritages. From a very early age, children can discern
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Day #17: Make “Sacred” Space, Connect to All Our Kin
01 Learn Another way we can build a bigger we is to “take time out of time,” or make sacred space, to become more aware of and connect to the more-than-human world. We are one species among many, and Indigenous teachings remind us that we are so young compared to the sun, moon, wind, oceans, mountains and many other creatures, both plant and animal. We need to know our place, and respect what these other kin are telling us about living in right relationship with one another and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. One
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Day #16: Connect Food and Faith-Beliefs-Spirituality
01 Learn In 1964, as the Reverend Martin Luther King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize he shared the following often quoted words “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.” Beliefs, faith, and spirituality shape our ideas of what is right and wrong, what is valued or dismissed. They inform how we act as individuals, as communities, as countries, as part of an inter-connected, and interdependent global
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Day #15: Build Bridges and Solidarity
01 Learn “Solidarity is…a verb, a practice, a strategy.” That’s how Solidarity Is, a project of Building Movement Project, introduces their Principles of Transformative Solidarity Practice which includes centering, connections, commonalities, co-liberation, co-spiratorship, and capacity. Further, the Building Movement Project differentiates “transactional solidarity” — being a spectator, bystander or mildly interested participant — from “transformative solidarity,” which requires us to challenge ourselves to commit for the long term, disrupt the status quo and deepen relationships rather than walk away when they become hard. “It’s a daily, lifelong practice,”
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Week Three Theme: Building a Bigger “We”
This week will look at how we can continue to expand the “we” that we currently consider to be “us” to a larger, more diverse and more profound WE. Building “a bigger we” is about certainly about creating more partnerships and a larger sense of community across lines of human difference so that we might realize equity and justice. And this is also the destination of our work. If we truly understood ourselves to be connected to all other beings, human and more-than-human, and acted accordingly on a daily basis, we would be in a different place. Some might say