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Jan 4th, 2009 - 19:46:44 |
Hannah Batten
Okay, so now vacation is over, we will have a lot more access to our student body, and our principals. I am aware that they have already started to decide the food policy, so it gives us more will power to keep up the great work. So I think we should have a meeting soon, or at least a discussion. Thanks, and I hope you all had an amazing Christmas and new years!
Dec 15th, 2008 - 17:01:52 |
Sierra Youth Coalition
There has been a fair amount of confusion regarding what’s happening (and what’s not) in terms of communicating to the board the social and environmental criteria we’d like to see included in the RFP. Hopefully this will clear things up.
The meeting on Thursday was officially cancelled (due to the OC Transpo strike), but Sarah and VC (Canterbury students) and Judith (working with “Growing Up Organic” – they’re lobbying the school board to increase the amount of local and organic food sold in cafeterias) came in anyway and we had a good initial discussion. Some of the key elements were:
Criteria the school board should include in the RFP:
- Non-disposable dishes, or at the very least biodegradable dishes instead of styrofoam/plastic
- Allowing student-run cafes (often not allowed due to “exclusivity” contracts)
- Local food
- Organic food
- Food labelling/nutritional information for foods should be posted (e.g. what’s in the pudding?)
Challenges
- The administration won’t do anything unless you hand them a solution on a silver platter/you do all the work yourself… and even then they won’t necessarily do it
- Not a lot of time to raise awareness among the student body
- Not a lot of time to do the necessary research (the principals’ committee making the decisions will be meeting in early January)
- Most local organic foods are fresh and unprocessed, but we’re not sure if the cafeterias have the physical capacity to work with unprocessed foods (currently, they buy a lot of pre-made foods and just re-heat them)
- Who will supply local organic food?
- Will it be affordable?
Possible solutions/ways forward
- Start talking with principals now so we can find out what they would need from us and target our work rather than do a lot of research and then find out that’s not even what they need
- Find examples or case studies of schools that have already done the things we’re hoping the OCDSB will do (e.g. if we want reusable dishes, we could share the example of Gisele-Lalonde school where they raised money to buy dishwashers and the dishes are loaded/unloaded by students who need to do their community hours)
- Divide up the writing and research that needs to be done (e.g. one person works on reusable dishes, someone else works on biodegradable dishes, someone else works on local food, etc.) We can put it all together at the end – I even volunteer to edit it for consistency and format it so it looks really professional!
- Meet up as a group in early January when school starts up again (and when the OC Transpo strike will hopefully be over) to check in and share what we’re learned/done so far.
- Start with easy wins (e.g. make sure all the apples sold in the cafeteria are local) and then look at bigger changes (e.g. 100% of the food is local, organic and/or fair trade)
- Develop a common “wish list” or manifesto that we’d all give to our principals.
What we’re doing already
- Sarah and VC are tabling all this week for their environment club (SAGE) and they’re using this opportunity to get students to sign a petition asking their principal to take concerns about the environment and student health into account.
- At Sarah and VC’s request, I wrote a letter (on SYC letterhead) that can be given to your principal explaining why and how we, as a group, want to get involved in shaping the RFP. The letter also asks for the principal’s support. If you want to use it, please go ahead (I’m attaching it to this email). The only thing I want to point out is that it’s written in the “we” perspective because I think the letter would be most powerful if signed by a student (you) and an SYC staff (me). So please insert your principal’s name in where it says “Dear’ and sign your name at the end (so it doesn’t look like I’m writing in the “royal we.”
I’ve posted all the info and documents in this email online at http://projects.takingitglobal.org/ocdsb_food/ so it can be easily accessed any time. It would be great if we could all use this page for our discussions seeing as we can’t all meet in person right now. What’s written in this email is not a be-all, end-all, but rather just the beginning. There’s still lots of room for more criteria to suggest to the school board, other strategies, and, of course, there’s work to be done in articulating our position and proposing possible concrete, detailed solutions.
Finally, I just want to say thanks to all of you for getting involved – this is really exciting!
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