Featuring Sean Flaherty
Examining the relationships between Urban Agriculture and Policy is the area of interest for this episode of The Capstone, featuring Sean Flaherty. Sean cites an increasingly urbanized population with growing levels of food insecurity, as the motivation to look beyond improving efficiencies in food production to explore the impacts of policy on municipalities, using the City of Alexandria Virginia as a Case Study. His Capstone project examines the shortage of policies directed toward urban food production–and he advocates for the need to consider the role of diverse stakeholders–including property owners and non property owning municipal residents, urban developers, food and social justice advocates, and municipal agencies–in the work of creating structures that support increased food production in urban areas…or as he says, “production closer to the need.”
Featuring Sasha Sigetic
Sasha Sigetic is an agricultural educator, farmer, craftsman, herbalist, and mother, who runs Black Locust Livestock and Herbal as well as currently serving as the Program Director for the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. Her Capstone project explores hemp as an ecologically valuable crop with viable market opportunities for Ohio farmers which include policy revisions, investments in adequate processing facilities, expanding farmer education, and the creation of farmer cooperatives.
Featuring Jez Vedua-Cardenas
Jez Vedua-Cardenas currently resides in Southeast Michigan, where she was born and raised. Jez is a Registered Dietitian (RD) and an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), and works with WIC (a supplemental nutrition program of the USDA for Women, Infants, and Children.) Through her work, Jez realized there was a knowledge gap among many health and wellness professionals working with immigrant communities. Drawing on her own experiences growing up as a Filipino-American, and surveying the experiences of others–mothers in particular–she created educational materials for nutrition professionals that highlight traditional Filipino foodways. She emphasizes the connections between food, identity, and what it means to nurture and show love, and examines how assimilation pressures and modern food practices can impact eating patterns and health issues.
Featuring Olivia Rovang
In this episode, Olivia Rovang, talks about the ways experiential education is critical to food systems literacy–understanding this type of literacy as an essential aspect of incentivizing stakeholdership and change within the sustainable food systems movement.
Olivia's Capstone project produced a comprehensive reference guide for individuals, communities, educators—anyone interested in increasing their sustainable food systems literacy through experiential hands-on learning activities focusing on systems thinking methodologies.
Olivia joined the MSFS program at Prescott as an accelerated student, a unique opportunity offered at the college where qualified undergraduate students can simultaneously pursue a graduate degree, Currently she is focused on integrating sustainability and equity into everything she’s involved with and enjoys navigating collaborative spaces with diverse stakeholders.
Featuring Courtney Buzzard
With over a decade of experience in the food sector, Courtney has a passion for food systems, the environment, and social justice. She describes herself as the proud daughter in a long line of farmers on her father’s side and her mother’s– Nicaraguan immigrant to the United States. Courtney uses she/her pronouns and lives in Arizona on the unceeded land of the Hohokam and Tohono O’odham peoples. She aspires, through her work, to create meaningful change by improving cultural food access in low income and immigrant communities and re-establishing the value of cultural foodways in the homes and communities of the Latin American diaspora.
