Flip The Table Youth Food Council
Support New York City's first Youth Food Council! Flip the Table: Youth Food Council (YFC) is a youth-led coalition working to support, empower, and amplify the passionate young voices of the food justice movement.
Leader
Tyler Caruso
Location
920 Pacific St Brooklyn, NY 11238
About the project
We are a youth-led coalition of environmental and social justice organizations tackling food justice in NYC. YFC was created to give young adults the chance to gain skills to change the food system, have their voices heard, improve the youth food insecurity and predatory junk food issues in NYC. Our mission is to create a coalition of youth who already know some issues about food justice to speak out and make change.
Founded in 2010, YFC is preparing for the pilot year of a youth council (youth here defined as teenage) within a supporting intergenerational community. Together, YFC and supporting organizations will work together to secure and strengthen food sovereignty in NYC.
YFC will build upon existing support for urban farms and social justice organizations as valuable Brooklyn assets through its partnerships. Youth from participating organizations will meet once a month with their fellow members and work with artists, activists, politicians, chefs, farmers and gardeners to create a new food system. In addition, members will be going around to the various organizations all over the city that they are partnered with and see what other youth do besides their host organization. The skills and the connection formed between peers will help them continue to be unstoppable advocates for justice and equity in their communities and across the five boroughs. Participating and partnering organizations include East New York Farms!, FIERCE, Bushwick Campus Farm, Audre Lorde Project, BK Farmyards, and NYC Food & Fitness Partnership. Food justice for all!!
The Steps
-YFC is currently reviewing youth applications from around the city.
-The council will be formed by mid-November and will kick off with an orientation.
-During the orientation youth members will work together, beginning the dialogue on social justice, empowerment, self reflection, and building community. Climbing Poetree will perform for the group.
-Subsequent council meetings will happen each month. Instructors are already on board to continue facilitating the social/environmental justice curriculum kicked off during orientation as well as to lead skills-based workshops such as kitchen skills, using media in social justice movements, stormwater management, asset mapping, and food systems planning.
-Youth will also meet with their professional mentor once a month starting in December.
- The program will run through the end of July and close with a retreat.
Why we‘re doing it
Youth pay the highest cost for the current and past inequities in the food system, and simultaneously lack any agency within the current political system. Compounding the problem is the tokenization of youth both within organizations and government initiative programs that uses a deficit model that blames the youth, as oppose to reconstructing and transforming institutional vestiges of power and oppression.
Participating youth will have the tools they need to be active members of their community. Youth will be well versed in food policy and technical skills such as environmental monitoring, asset mapping, and serving social justice through media and the arts. YFC will build on existing support for community gardens and farms as valuable Brooklyn assets through its partnership with local organizations. YFC’s aim is to raise awareness among youth about local, regional, and systemic issues surrounding food systems while connecting them to these local organizations, institutions, and entrepreneurial opportunities. We are using sustainable food systems and agriculture as a framework for cultivating the environmental and social justice leaders of tomorrow.