“CAGJ is a model for decolonizing solidarity and food activism in the U.S.” Please donate today
Hello CAGJ supporters,
For over a year now, I have worked as a lead volunteer on CAGJ’s Food Justice Project campaign to stop genetically engineered (GE) salmon. This campaign has been a collaborative effort with the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project, and is unique in its commitment to building relationships and solidarity with Northwest tribes and tribal food activists. I hope you will support CAGJ today with a generous donation, so we can continue to build these important relationships while protecting our land and water for the common good.
I have undertaken this work while conducting research and writing my dissertation for a Ph.D. in critical food studies, focused on how food activism in settler societies like the U.S. has yet to grapple with what it means to re-localize food systems in places where the occupation of Indigenous lands and waters continue to be contested. I have found CAGJ’s commitment, humility, sense of responsibility, and willingness to learn from Coast Salish leaders to be a model for what building decolonizing solidarities through food activism can look like in the U.S. and other settler states. Your donation helps this movement for change grow.
CAGJ has given me an opportunity to do more than conduct scholarly inquiry about food system inequalities, but to better understand what it means to organize socially toward meaningful change, from the local to international scale. Part of the brilliance of this organization is that believes in everyday people and helps others become leaders, activists, and organizers—empowering individual lives while helping to grow a global movement.
As a critical food scholar, I feel strongly that the community-driven and solidarity-focused nature of CAGJ is the right way to transform a brutally unsustainable global food regime. We do not have to settle for a system that perpetuates gross nutritional, labor, and resource inequalities and relies on modes of food production that diminish the ecologies which sustain human and non-human life. Together, we can create food systems that support resilient communities and environments. The time to act is now.
I strongly encourage you to make a generous donation to CAGJ today to continue supporting an organization that has demonstrated over the past 16 years how real social and political wins are possible through grassroots organizing and solidarity between communities differently affected by corporate and state power. CAGJ has inspired me to believe in and act on Arundhati Roy’s exhortation that “another world is possible”. Your year-end donation will help CAGJ continue this vital, meaningful, and inspiring work in 2018.
Thank you for your support and being an agent for change!
With warm wishes,
Janna Lafferty
P.S. With a monthly donation of $10, $25 or $50, you can help us reach our goal of $3,000 more per month is Sustaining Member Donations by the end of 2017. Just click the box that says “I want to contribute this amount every month”.
