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VCN: Tell us a little about yourself. What is your favorite food and why? AC: My name is Alec Chi. I’m from Houston, Texas, and my family is from Taiwan and Japan. I like cooking, farming, swimming, and skateboarding. My favorite food is stinky tofu which is fermented tofu that can be cooked in a stew or deep fried, and it’s usually sold as a [...]

The Institute’s Nicholas Freudenberg, Katherine Tomaino Fraser & Yvette Ng provide recommendations for the next New York City Mayor. In less than six months, a new Mayor and dozens of City Council members will join their returning colleagues to chart a course for governing the city in the coming years. Even sooner, a new New York Governor will need to determine her priorities. While policy [...]

Growing up, I always wanted to help people. As a child, I watched my mom host food giveaways in the neighborhood, advocate against police brutality, connect people with resources, and serve as a go-to person for people in need around us. It would be easy to think we had a lot, but we did not. We were also struggling and living paycheck to paycheck. But [...]

The CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute is pleased to announce that our second cohort of CUNY Food Justice Leadership Fellows have completed the 12-month training portion of the program and been placed into 6-month internships with organizations that are committed to food justice and creating opportunities for young food justice leaders: Alec Chi- East New York Farms- Alec will be interning with East New York [...]

VCN: Tell us a little about yourself. What is your favorite food and why? CM: I’m a Public Health major at Hunter College, and I’m a Food Justice Leadership Fellow with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, so I advocate for food justice in New York City. I also work in an ophthalmology clinic where I see patients with eye diseases at every age, from [...]

Cheyenna Layne Weber organizes within solidarity economies and grassroots racial justice groups. She is a co-founder of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC and New Economy Coalition, which both serve to build solidarity economies across Turtle Island [U.S.] territories. Currently she works with SolidarityNYC to support NYC’s solidarity economies and with PeoplesHub, an online movement school, on solidarity economies and accessibility/disability programs. You can find [...]

Kim Vargas Earlier this year, the first cohort of CUNY Food Justice Leadership Fellows completed the yearlong training portion of the program and started 6-month internships with organizations committed to food justice and creating opportunities for young food justice leaders. To help you learn more about our Fellows, we will be publishing a series of interviews with them in the coming months. This [...]

Two months ago, I was doing outreach for the Swipe Out Hunger CUNY Food Navigator program. We were hosting an information session and, in preparing for it, compiled a list of key food security stakeholders at CUNY. We view these as people who work directly with students and, as a result, are uniquely positioned to spread the word about food security initiatives and resources to [...]

Ashanté Reese is the coeditor with Hana Garth of a 2020 book called Black Food Matters: Racial justice in the Wake of Food Justice (University of Minnesota Press). Reese is assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In this interview with the Urban Food Policy Newsletter, Institute Director Nick Freudenberg asks Reese about her [...]