Food insecurity touches so many other issues that are both region specific, and global. It exacerbates immigration conflicts, worker’s rights, land disputes, environmental degradation, refugee crisis’s, gender issues, trade, and global security. Our group chose to tie food insecurity to local immigration issues.
Immigration is obviously a highly political issue right now because of the administration’s brutal policies, and Washington is home to a significant amount of undocumented immigrants. We learned that migrant workers do a lot of the farm work in the Skagit Valley where local berries and fruit come from, and there are reported labor rights violations. Our plan was to make an educational campaign about the issues in our surrounding farmland, reaching out to local vendors and our community within University of Washington.
This shifted when we rethought whom we actually want to be helping, and how we wanted to go about it. While an educational campaign would probably reach a handful of students and really make an impression, connecting to people who actually might be experiencing challenges that are a result of the intersection of food and immigration seemed more valuable.
This process took a lot of time to really contemplate what it meant to be helpful and effective, and make an impact in a community that we cannot claim as our own.
We volunteered at the University of Washington Food Pantry, and created an informational flier with resources and support for undocumented students who were experiencing their own food insecurity. At the Food Pantry, Erica encountered two students who are part of families who are migrant workers in Skagit Valley. They connected us with other resources and shared their experience. Our project was able to bring us meaningful conversations about the issues we had researched and learned in class was special, and I think impacted us as much we were hoping to impact others. We wanted to jump right into the middle of the issue and make an impact, but there is a lot of learning and relationship building that is important, and that is partly what the conversation showed us. However, the invisible steps like being really thoughtful about who we could learn from and build productive relationships with were important.
This was one of the biggest connections that I made between the course content about action and intervention and our project.
Systems theory helped us make the connections between our global aspirations in terms of our project, and the realistic local action. Understanding that a series of political, economic, environmental and societal systems are all interconnected in a huge web was helpful in feeling like our small action could actually have an effect outside of our University of Washington community. Thinking systemically about the food insecurity, immigration and the University of Washington led us to a great project, and it felt like a success overall.