The Brooklyn Food Conference is being held on May 2 at John Jay College in Park Slope. Created by the Brooklyn Food Coalition, over 500 people have already registered for the conference and thousands are expected. There is a fundraiser dinner featuring local/sustainable foods that is almost sold out.
- Over 60 workshops are planned from everything from growing food in your backyard, to getting healthy food to underserved communities, to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, to organizing food workers, to global issues around food. Food demos, including Teen Iron Chef, a bookstore, child care (at the John Jay HS site only), are all free. Lunch, dinner and a cocktail party to celebrate our accomplishments together are priced low (to cover costs).
- Over 150 community organizations are partners for this huge event and we are expecting over 2000 people to attend from all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
- Over 10 elected officials have confirmed their attendance and experts will be on hand to tell us about accessing the Stimulus Package funds for food-related businesses and community projects.
For more information and to register go to www.brooklynfoodconference.org
The conference hopes to:
- Bring Brooklyn together to demand and participate in creating a vital, healthy and just food system available to everyone.
- Create a Brooklyn legislative food democracy agenda and constituent base.
- Organize neighborhood meetings of elected officials—congressional reps, state legislators, city council members—to press for a food democracy agenda.
- Influence public policy by educating elected officials and showing them the depth and diversity of public interest.
- Create a broad-based Brooklyn Food Coalition.
- Create a useful, cross-referenced directory of attendees.
- Help partner organizations grow their constituency by offering attendees avenues for action.
