Week Three
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Day #21: Final Reflections
Today, we want to thank you for joining us on this journey to co-create a world that welcomes, celebrates, and values the uniqueness that we each bring. We invite you to spend a little time on this final day of the Challenge reflecting on how your participation has helped you to think, feel, sense and act differently as we move from “me to we” in realizing transformative change in communities, food systems and beyond. What have you learned? What has been affirmed for you? What new commitments have surfaced?
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Day #20: Catch-Up and Reflect
Again, we are leaving space on this last weekend of the Challenge for participants to catch up on any topics from the week that you may not have been able to get to and/or where you want 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 #15 – Build Bridges and Solidarity Day #16 – Connect Food and Faith-Beliefs-Spirituality
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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 tools 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. As we explored in yesterday’s prompt, the stories we take in and share about what is possible for ourselves and others 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
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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 bodies, personalities and cultural heritages.The American Psychological Association encourages parents and caregivers, to talk openly about and acknowledge diversity, affirming that one “race” or
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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. It is important for us to know our place, and to respect what these other kin are telling us about living in right relationship with one another and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants.
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Day #16: Connect Food and Faith-Beliefs-Spirituality
01 Learn In 1964, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. 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, and 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 community. So what do
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Day #15: Build Bridges and Solidarity
01 Learn “Solidarity is a verb, a practice, a strategy. This is how Solidarity Is, a project of Building Movement Project, introduces their Principles of Transformative Solidarity Practice. The Building Movement Project also points to the difference between what they call “transactional solidarity” — being a spectator, bystander or mildly interested participant — and “transformative solidarity,” which requires us to challenge ourselves to commit for the long term, move away from the status quo and deepen relationships rather than walk away when they become hard. “It’s a daily, lifelong practice,” said Deepa Iyer, director
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Week Three Theme: Building a Bigger “We”
This week we will look at how we can continue to expand the “we” that we currently consider to be “us” to a larger, more diverse WE. Building “a bigger we” is certainly about creating more relationships and partnerships and a larger sense of community across human differences. This is also the destination of our work so that we might know equity and justice. 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 much different place. So how might we go about