This weekend, national nonprofit
Meal Exchange is holding its annual three-day
food summit at the U of T 's Hart House, where leaders will reveal the result of a year-long project to draft a national
student food charter.
With a mission to educate and mobilize students around issues of food security, Meal Exchange is hoping students will take the charter back to their campuses in order to launch campus-specific initiatives, says education manager Gregory Sam. The charter isn't prescriptive about what exactly each Meal Exchange chapter should be doing. Instead, it outlines the principles that underlay the campus food movement more generally, including a commitment to social justice, collaboration, education and health.
The idea for a charter first emerged at last year's summit, which was also fittingly the first year of the food summit's relaunch. Though the Meal Exchange has been holding a summit for eight years now (the organization itself was founded 13 years ago), the summit was expanded significantly in 2011.
"We broadened the scope and included students from all across the country who are interested in food issues, specifically our meal exchange chapter members," says Sam. "The old [summit] was run with smaller groups and was focused on meal exchange programming…. But at last year's summit, we got a wide variety of students together to discuss what food should like on their campus. The hope was to take the ideas generated from that to have a document that could be taken back to their campus with them. But what we discovered was that three days isn't a long enough time to create such a massive document that could be used in a widespread way."
That's why for the past year, Meal Exchange has been consulting with campus stakeholders across the country, including faculty and administration as well as students, to generate the document that will be revealed at this weekend's summit.
In addition to the presentation of the charter, the summit will also include social activities and networking, a wide variety of food-focused speakers, panel events and interactive tours of Toronto food organizations.
"It's a unique experience in the sense that it is three consecutive days and it is exclusive to university students and college students." says Sam "It generates a family-like atmosphere."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Gregory Sam, Education Manager, Meal Exchange