|
LAFPC Quarterly Newsletter June 2013 CONTENTS UPCOMING EVENTS: • Fri, 6/7/13 – Celebrate LA festival in Grand Park • Sat, 8/3/13 – Healthy Food B
|
|
LAFPC Quarterly Newsletter
June 2013 |
UPCOMING EVENTS:
• Fri, 6/7/13 – Celebrate LA festival in Grand Park
• Sat, 8/3/13 – Healthy Food Business Leadership Training
NEWS:
• Street Food Vending Petition
• Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti Weighs in on Food Policy
• LAFPC Offers Multilingual Trainings for Neighborhood Market Owners
• LAUSD Adopts Meatless Mondays
• LAFPC Launches Redesigned Website
INTERVIEW:
• Joann Lo: Executive Director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and LAFPC member
• Celebrating the Summer Solstice with the Food Chain Workers Alliance |
Celebrate LA Festival in Grand Park – Friday, June 7, 2013
It's the season for transition in Los Angeles -- from spring to summer, and from Mayor Villaraigosa's leadership to Mayor-elect Garcetti's -- so let's celebrate!
Join Mayor Villaraigosa and Mayor-Elect Garcetti for a final farewell event and Heritage Celebration Finale on Friday, June 7th from 5-10 pm -- Celebrate LA at Grand Park! Celebrate LA will be a fun-filled event for the whole family. There will be food, activities, performances by Grammy-award winning artists, and a special appearance by former President Bill Clinton!
LAFPC and partners are hosting a special "Good Food Zone" at the event, including:
• Food trucks + delicious street food from sidewalk vendors working to legalize their businesses, coordinated by East LA Community Corporation (ELACC);
• Produce from Alex Weiser and Phil McGrath's farms at the Sustainable Economic Enterprises LA (SEE-LA) farmers' market booths;
• Celebrity chef demonstration using farmers' market fare on a SNAP (food stamp) budget;
• Good Food Pledge drive with raffle prizes organized by Amy Knoll Fraser;
• And a Food Stage hosted by our very own, Evan Kleiman and Rudy Espinoza!
For more information, please visit the Celebrate LA 2013 and Empower LA websites.
Hope to see you there!
|
Healthy Food Business & Leadership Training – Saturday, August 3, 2013
SAVE THE DATE: The Healthy Neighborhood Market Network presents a “Healthy Foods, Healthy Businesses: A Business and Leadership Training for Neighborhood Markets” on Saturday, August 3rd from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. This special full-day training is designed to provide independent store owners and their staff with the skills and resources needed to successfully introduce healthy food items at their stores. Intensive workshop sessions will connect store owners with industry experts who will present strategies for growing a business, effective marketing, and handling fresh produce.
This event if FREE for market owners, managers and staff. Free lunch will also be provided. For more event details, please visit www.neighborhoodmarkets2013.eventbrite.com, email healthyneighborhoodmarkets@gmail.com or call (213) 978-1568. This event is organized through the LAFPC’s Healthy Neighborhood Markets Network and Community Market Conversion Program.
|
Street Food Vending Petition
The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign is an initiative to legalize food vending on Los Angeles' city sidewalks. The campaign is driven by a city-wide coalition of organizations who are committed to developing a system that gives micro-entrepreneurs an opportunity to make an honest living, encourages healthy eating, and supports existing small businesses in communities all over Los Angeles.
If you support the cause, then let your voice be heard by signing this online petition!
Street food vending petition
Find printable versions of the petition at www.streetvendorsforla.org
We are also recruiting volunteers to help survey small businesses in Los Angeles about legalizing sidewalk food vending. To find out about our next volunteer training and canvassing outing, please email Clare Fox at claremfox@gmail.com.
|
Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti Weighs In on Food Policy
Congratulations to Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti! We look forward to working with him to strengthen our regional food system for the benefit of all Angelenos. Click here to read the Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti’s statements on food policy priorities!
|
LAFPC Offers Multilingual Trainings for Neighborhood Market Owners
This spring, the Los Angeles Food Policy Council hosted two business and leadership development trainings for neighborhood markets in Los Angeles County, as part of the Healthy Neighborhood Market Network Training Series launched last summer. The trainings are designed to provide independent storeowners and staff with the skills necessary to develop their stores into successful healthy food enterprises. Last year, market owners requested trainings that included a culturally focused component, and address the unique strengths and challenges faced by immigrant or minority market owners in Los Angeles. In response, LAFPC organized a Korean-language focused training and a Spanish-language focused training to kick off the training series in 2013. |
 Credit: Erin Golightly |
The Korean language focused training, titled “Healthy Food, Healthy Businesses,” was held on Tuesday, March 19 at the Expo Center in South LA. With support from Citi Community Development, the training brought together food retail and business development experts, neighborhood market owners and community-based organizations to build skills and relationships needed for successful healthy market makeovers. Over 70 storeowners participated in this training, creating an intimate workshop environment that allowed for lively dialogue between industry experts and attendees. Since the workshop presentations were held in several different languages, English, Spanish and Korean translators were on hand to make sure that all participants could understand every presentation. |
 Credit: Erin Golightly |
The training began with an opening plenary of guest speakers who touched on a wide range of topics, and was followed by food retail skills building workshop sessions. Larry Frank, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of the Mayor, gave a warm welcome to begin the day. Our key note speaker was Bob Annibale, Global Director of Citi Microfinance and Community Development, who spoke to the significance of small businesses to the global economy. The plenary session was moderated by Yonah Hong (formerly of the Community Redevelopment Agency), and featured guest speakers Professor Kye-Young Park from UCLA, Dr. Tony Kuo from the L.A. County Department of Public Health, and Esther Park from LAFPC and the Community Market Conversion Program. The speakers provided a cultural and historical context for the gathering of Korean store owners, discussed the health disparities in Los Angeles that reach across race, class and geography, and spoke to the valuable role that store owners can play in creating diverse, healthy communities.
The Spanish-language focused training, “Entrenamiento Para Mercados Comunitarios,” was held on Thursday, April 25 in Boyle Heights in partnership with La Causa Youth Build and the California Endowment. Industry and nonprofit experts provided special training on business accounting, healthy food promotion and marketing, and accessing capital for store improvements, all with the goal of developing healthy food champions in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. All speaker sessions were offered in Spanish or English with simultaneous Spanish translation.
Attendees included storeowners, staff from community non-profits working on health and neighborhood development, and engaged residents looking to transform the food landscape. Several non-profit practitioners who are just beginning to work with corner stores in their communities found the training helpful for thinking through program design and how best to engage business owners.
To read more details in the complete event report, please click here.
|
LAUSD Adopts Meatless Mondays
As the second-largest school district in the nation, the Los Angeles Unified School District serves an astounding 650,000 meals to its students and faculty each day. So when LAUSD adopted "Meatless Mondays" throughout its cafeterias in February 2013, it was a move that could simultaneously improve student health, lessen environmental impact, and reduce lunchroom costs. Back in November 2012, LAUSD became the second institution to commit to LAFPC's Good Food Purchasing Pledge program (after the City of L.A.), and Meatless Mondays will help the district to reach their Good Food goals. Kudos to LAUSD!
To read more about Meatless Mondays at LAUSD, please check out the articles on the LA Times and Annenberg TV News websites.
|
LAFPC Launches Redesigned Website
We are excited to announce that LAFPC launched its redesigned website in March 2013. With an ever-expanding network that includes hundreds of LAFPC network participants and dozens of partner organizations, the new website was designed with our evolving organization in mind. Some features will include greater flexibility for posting food news, articles and event information, sections to dedicated to each Working Group, and a greater emphasis on making important information readily-accessible. Please visit www.goodfoodla.org to check out the new design!
Also, if you haven't done so already, please help us spread the word about the Good Food Pledge — we've set a goal to reach 2,013 sign-ups by early June! It's a great way to get friends, family and colleagues thinking about how we can connect with and improve our regional food system.
|
Joann Lo: Executive Director of Food Chain Workers Alliance
Joann Lo, the Executive Director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, became a member of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council earlier this year. The Food Chain Workers Alliance (www.foodchainworkers.org/) is a national coalition of workers' organizations whose mission is to improve wages and working conditions for all workers throughout the food system. For the past two years, Joann has played an instrumental role in helping to create and launch LAFPC's Good Food Purchasing program, which is among the most comprehensive, metric-based food purchasing policies of its kind in the nation. Joann also sits on the City of Los Angeles’ Sweatfree Advisory Committee and the Enlace Institute Advisory Board. |
How did you first become involved in the labor movement?
In college, I had friends who were part of the Student Labor Action Coalition that was working to support the employee unions during contract negotiations. The college wanted to subcontract out dining services, which would have meant lower wages and job cuts. I was an environmental biology major, and working on labor issues was much more exciting than studying soil samples!
It seems like there are a lot of parallels between the garment industry and food industry in terms of the supply chain structure. How have you applied your past experience organizing with garment workers to your work with the Food Chain Workers Alliance?
My experience organizing garment workers and analyzing the clothing brands that control the money and have an impact on wages and workers has been very important to my work at the Food Chain Workers Alliance. It has helped us work on strategies for supporting campaigns dealing with large corporations such as Walmart and Darden (who owns restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster).
What are the biggest challenges that prevent positive change for food workers?
The consolidation of corporate power is a challenge for the food system. Actually, it can be both a challenge and an opportunity. If we work to influence the large, well-known companies to improve working conditions, then we also have an opportunity to help educate people and get the public's attention and also improve labor standards for a large segment of the food system.
Another challenge for food workers (and all low-wage workers) is that many unscrupulous employers often use fear to keep their employees from organizing and fighting for their rights. People who can't afford to miss a paycheck are afraid of losing their jobs, and then they won't be able to support their family. Also, undocumented workers fear speaking up for themselves. |
Tell us more about how the Good Food Purchasing Pledge is a first for the labor movement.
As far as we know, the Good Food Purchasing Pledge is the first of its kind to include labor standards. It is really exciting. The sustainable food movement and most other food purchasing programs tend to place their focus on nutrition and environmental sustainability -- worker issues are usually not addressed. LAFPC's Good Food Purchasing Program sets a new tone by including labor. I hope this can be a model for other governments and institutions.
The purchasing power that large institutions like the City of L.A. and LAUSD have can really influence the market. I think it was exciting that LAFPC was able to bring together a wide range of organizations with different priorities to make the Good Food Purchasing Program happen. We didn't leave anything behind -- everyone worked together.
Some people may be surprised to learn that the first step to become a Good Food Purchaser is to simply comply with existing labor laws. Explain how this is actually a big step for the food industry.
Last year the Food Chain Workers Alliance published a report called "The Hands That Feed Us," and we found that almost 1/4 of America's food workers receive less than minimum wage. Also, a majority has suffered an injury or illness while on the job. So ensuring that employers are complying with existing labor laws is actually a major step forward. Simply complying with existing labor laws is also a pretty common first step among other broader sweat-free labor standards, like standards pertaining to the garment industry.
Of course, to improve worker conditions, we want to move beyond basic compliance, so to reach the next tiers of the Good Food Purchasing Pledge, institutions must meet higher standards. The higher tiers include things like providing health insurance and a living wage, hiring unionized workers, having a worker-owner business model, or being third-party certified for labor issues.
What are a couple current issues and/or campaigns that you and the Food Chain Workers Alliance are working on?
A couple of the current issues that we are working on include immigration reform and increasing the federal minimum wage.
We are working with the US Food Sovereignty Alliance to advocate and build support for fair and humane immigration reform. We believe this is an important issue for people who care about food because our food system really does depend on immigrant workers. Undocumented workers suffer from more exploitation than documented workers do. We’re encouraging organizations to sign on to our principles for immigration reform.
One third of minimum wage workers in the U.S. are food workers, so we are trying to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour. Also, minimum wage for workers who receive tips has been $2.15 for the past 22 years. Right now we have a petition titled "Tell Congress: Don't Let Food Workers Go Hungry," asking Congress to pass the Miller-Harkin Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10/hour over the next 3 years and the tipped minimum wage from $2.13 to 70% of the regular minimum wage.
Interview by Haan-Fawn Chau
|
Celebrating the Summer Solstice & Supporting the Food Chain Workers Alliance
On Sunday June 23, 2:00 -4:00 pm, join the Food Chain Workers Alliance in Glendale for a Summer Solstice Garden Party to learn about the great work of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and meet others who care about food and the workers who feed us! Kids are welcome. Tickets are $30 per person and can be purchased through http://fcwa-summersolsticeparty.eventbrite.com/. |
|
|
|
|
