I've written about the project "Education = Power In Choice (EPIC): Empowering Communities Through Food System Education" in these pages before and how it all began through the Food Systems Game Changers Lab and the project Love & Plenty that I submitted as an idea in 2021 that was accepted into the Lab and led me to being connected with a wonderful group of people around the world to come up with an answer to the question, "How can we make a more equitable food system through education?" A few months ago I was contacted by Hana McMahon-Cole, one of the wonderful people who has continued to be a part of the EPIC project moving forward, and she was in the process of creating a speaker series for youth food system education that is part of the after school and out of school time program Beyond School Bells. As I wrote at the time, we had such a wonderful conversation that really was so inspiring and affirming of all of the importance behind the work we have been doing together. Times like those are so precious as reminders that the work of education and sharing information and connecting communities to their food system is making a difference for the better in so many lives.
I heard from Hana last week that they had finished editing my conversation with her as well as the introductory video for the series, and when I had a chance to review it I was delighted. It's so wonderful to be a part of such a stellar group of beautiful souls who are doing so much excellent work in their respective communities and in the world, and to have the opportunity to speak with Hana after all these months of working together on EPIC and have the chance to speak about the things we are doing in our own work as well as our collaborative project. I'll post the actual videos when they're ready to be seen publicly, but for now I'll share the landing pages to show the other people involved and the project as a whole. In a very fun surprise for me, the photograph the team creating the videos used for my landing page profile photograph is one of the very special and beautiful photographs taken by Victor Kaminsky at the one year anniversary celebration of YES Gallery. Having the two worlds of my life meet together in this way makes so much sense to me because the combination of art and life and health and wellness, healthy food, and community and youth development have been somehow connected in everything that I do, and what I always find when I try to describe to people my vision for different projects, they all seem to interconnect and reflect all of these many seemingly different areas. Holistic health is for me the most exciting and inspiring idea to investigate and aspire to, and connecting people together in community based settings around the topics of food, wellness, art, design and sustainability seems to be something that helps communities to connect and heal and grow in healthy and dynamic ways.
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