In Praxis
The Praxis Project
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The Praxis Project's In Praxis podcast shares the stories of our community-based partner organizations and how they are impacting health disparities through local initiatives, policy change, and advocacy. Each episode highlights how these diverse organizations are creatively addressing social justice issues across the country, all with the same goal of health justice. By uplifting our partners’ strategies and tactics to solve local issues, we hope other organizations will find value in these lessons and experiences.
Available episodes
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Jul 20, 2022
Organic Community Power - Albino Garcia
Albino Garcia is the Executive Director and Founder of La Plazita Institute. Over the last 18 years, La Plazita has been serving New Mexico's communities through economic, cultural, agricultural and community revitalization through organizing and power building. In this episode, Albino gives a rich history of how La Plazita came into existence. He discusses La Plazita's philosophies of "La Cultura Cura" and how they are healing formally incarcerated youth and families through connecting them to the land. Albino also takes time to dive deep into what it means to build organic community power. He encourages organizers and movement workers to continue to take care of your community first, and the rest will follow.
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Jul 5, 2022
Building A Community of Earthseed - Ashely Gripper
Dr. Ashley Gripper is the co-creator and co-director of Land Based Jawns, a Philly based organization committed to reclaiming ancestral, earthly, and spiritual relationships with Mama Earth and land for Black folks. In this episode, Ashley tells an in-depth story of her life—sharing all the interconnected moments, memories and experiences that brought her to the land work that she does daily. Through joy, grief, sorrow, and healing, all things return back to the earth and so should we. Land Based Jawns' mission and work is deeply inspired by Octavia Butlers' books: "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" as foundations to building communities of people rooted by establishing a healthy relationships with the land. Ashley, discusses her research around building "Agricultural Community Power" and the ways we rethink measuring success to align with Black ways of knowing that captures the practice of Ubuntu and interdependence.
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Jun 22, 2022
[Spanish] Derechos de los Trabajadores, ¡Justicia Alimentaria! / Workers' Rights, Food Justice! - Lupe Gonzalo
Nuestra lucha por la justicia alimentaria debe incluir a los que trabajan más cerca de nuestros alimentos. La organizadora de trabajadores agrícolas, Lupe Gonzalo, de la Coalición de Trabajadores de Immokalee (CIW) comparte el profundo poder que se encuentra dentro de las voces de los trabajadores agrícolas. Como trabajadora agrícola, Lupe arroja luz sobre las condiciones abusivas en las que están sujetos trabajadores agrícolas, desde el robo de salaries, la agresión sexual, y condiciones similares a esclavitud moderna. Los intentos fallidos de responsabilizar a los propietarios de granjas por las atrocidades en curso llevaron a Lupe y sus colegas a recurrir al poder de la responsabilidad social. El programa y la campaña Fair Food de CIW amplifican las voces de los trabajadores agrícolas para promover el cambio y fomentar la responsabilidad entre las grandes corporaciones de alimentos para establecer un código de conducta entre sus proveedores. Yendo más allá de establecer protecciones y garantizar que las políticas de seguridad se implementen y hagan cumplir, CIW ha luchado para construir poder, voz y agencia entre los trabajadores agrícolas en Immokalee, FL e inspirado a defensores en todo el país.
Our fight for food justice must include those working closest to our food. Farmworker organizer, Lupe Gonzalo, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) shares the profound power that lies within farmworker voices. As a farmworker herself, Lupe sheds light on the abusive conditions farmworkers work and live in everyday—from wage theft to sexual assault to modern-day slavery. Failed attempts to hold farm owners accountable for on-going atrocities led Lupe and her colleagues to turn to the power of social responsibility. CIWs Fair Food Program and campaign amplifies farmworker voices to advance change and foster responsibility among large food corporations to establish a code of conduct amongst their vendors. Going beyond establishing protections and ensuring that safety policies are implemented and enforced, CIW has worked to build power, voice, and agency among farmworkers in Immokalee, FL and inspired advocates nation-wide.
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Jun 6, 2022
The Power of Youth Led Food Justice - Bevelyn Afor Ukah
Bevelyn Afor Ukah believes that youth power holds the key to our survival and collective freedom. Only through our ability to be in multigenerational relationships with one another in our organizing efforts, will we be able to achieve the just world we know we deserve. Bevelyn's work at the Food Youth Initiative (FYI) at the Center for Environmental Farming System, centers their work in the Food justice space. Food Justice for FYI is more than just about food access, their organizing efforts span across interconnected issue areas leading us towards liberation. Bevelyn speaks to us as a person ever learning from the wisdom and leadership that youth have to offer, sharing the stories of her student organizers and all the ways they are working to transform our communities for the future.
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May 23, 2022
Getting Back to Mother Earth - Donne Gonzalez & Emily Arasim
In this episode of In Praxis, we are joined by Donne Gonzalez and Emily Arasim from New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA). Donne is the Farm Trainer/Farm Manager and Emily serves as the Youth Education Coordinator. Both Donne and Emily are deeply committed in serving as caretakers, and passing on knowledge about intergenerational farming and the larger systems impacting people living in the area. They discuss the importance of returning our hands and hearts to the land starting with the land in our backyard. Through building our relationships back with the land, the cascading consequences builds and heals our communities.
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May 9, 2022
Rooted in Praxis - amaha sellassie
amaha sellassie is a public-sociologist working to transform communities through a love ethic. In this episode, amaha shares the story of how Gem City Market, a worker owned cooperative, came into existence. Gem City Market is the first full service grocery store in West Dayton, Oh. amaha shares his insight and perspective on the socio-political and economic dynamics that sparked the necessary change in his community. West Dayton is becoming a place that provides for one another with a deep sense of care and commitment to being a thriving community and Gem City Market is one of the first steps in this transformation. As listeners, we are asked think about what unlimited resources are already abundant with us and our communities that will fuel our fights in justice.
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Apr 22, 2022
Planting Seeds to Grow Community - Angela Patel
As a second generation Pan-Asian American, Angela Patel (she/her) uses her cultural history to shape and influence her work at Danny Woo Community Garden as the Sustainable Community and Educational Coordinator. Danny Woo Community Garden is situated in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown-International District stewarded, cultivated, and cared for by the local community of Asian elders, transient neighbors, and lovers of the land. In this episode, Angela discusses what food sovereignty means and how to combat scarcity mindset in immigrant communities by cultivating a culture of abundance.
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Apr 11, 2022
History Bearing Fruit to the Present - Kyle Tsukahira
Kyle Tsukahira is the Co-Director of Asian Pacific Islander Forward Movement (APIFM) based in Los Angeles, CA. In this episode, Kyle shares his journey into food justice work, starting with a memory of foods that remind him of home. Kyle tells us about his lineage and the ancestors that brought agricultural practices from the East and adapted them in western soil, passing down knowledge from one generation to the next. Through their Food Roots program, APIFM partners with local Asian American farmers and other farmers of color growing culturally relevant food, and supports food distribution to local businesses and communities. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Food Roots program has worked to provide over 180,000 lbs of fresh produce and over 150,000 eggs to thousands of families in need across Los Angeles County.
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Mar 25, 2022
Feeding the Generations to Come - Carleton Turner
Co-founder, co-director, and lead artist of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, Carlton Turner works at the intersection of arts, culture, and agriculture. Carlton comes from a long lineage of workers of the land and believes in the power of storytelling through food. In this episode, Carlton tells his food story—a deeply compelling tale that tells the socio-political and economic history of Utica, Mississippi as it connects to the current day. Through the unfolding interconnected history between power and agency, Carlton makes the case for community investment, empowerment, and access to food and our story as we journey back towards regenerative food practices for the generations to come.
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Mar 11, 2022
Finding Freedom in Food - Emanuel Brown
Space Curator, Facilitator and conjuror of spaces for freedom, Emanuel H. Brown (he/him), Executive Director and Steward of Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom, life's work centers around the question of How can people get free? How can people feel free? In this episode, Emanuel explores ideas of freedom through our ability to access healthy and health promoting food and our connection to the land. Food is a story. Food is restoring. Food is a mechanism for our healing. Our collective relationship to food and its source can transform not only our bodies but our world as we strive for liberation.
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Jun 4, 2021
Taking on the Giant - Janna Cordeiro
In 2014, when Berkeley, CA passed the nation's first soda tax, advocates and public health practitioners in San Francisco made a parallel effort to enact a similar tax on sugar sweetened beverages in their city. A testament to the beverage industry's massive funds, the measure failed in San Francisco in 2014. It would take another two years for the city to pass this measure successfully.
Janna Cordeiro from San Francisco's Wholesale Produce Market discusses her public health work on sugar sweetened beverages in San Francisco and the struggles of taking on the well-resourced soda industry. As the SFUSD parent representative to the San Francisco's Soda Tax Advisory Committee, Janna speaks to the ways soda taxes can be reinvested to advance health equity and reduce prevalence of preventable chronic diseases in working-class communities of color. She advocates for the use of soda tax revenues to support small business owners and to fund community organizations working on the ground to dir…
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May 21, 2021
Centering Community in Soda Taxes - Christina Goette
Christina Goette, co-founder of Shape Up San Francisco Coalition, discusses the wide range of efforts to reduce sugary drink consumption in the Bay Area and situates SSB work along the spectrum of prevention. From education initiatives, to organizational culture change, to policy advocacy, the spectrum of prevention provides multiple avenues for decreasing sugar sweetened beverage consumption. Reflecting on the journey of passing San Francisco's SSB tax, which was unsuccessful when it was first proposed in 2014, Christina emphasizes the importance of centering the voices of communities who are disproportionately burdened by beverage industry's predatory marketing as well as ensuring tax revenues are reinvested directly back into these communities. She shares how building authentic partnerships with community-based organizations who are grounded in their communities and have community trust was central to the passing of the tax in 2016. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2:…
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May 7, 2021
Building on Historic Public Health Efforts - Holly Scheider
Holly Scheider, chair of Berkeley's Sweetened Beverage Product Panel of Experts, discusses Berkeley's work to reduce sugary drink consumption and their fight against the beverage industry. She touches on the ways Berkeley's Measure D has been used to invest in community-led health initiatives for those most harmed by the negative health impacts of sugary drinks and describes how healthy checkout ordinances, city procurement policies, and other strategies can be complimentary to soda taxes in combatting the tactics of the beverage industry. Drawing on her extensive background working on clean air ordinances and other public health policy to challenge Big Tobacco, Holly connects the fight against the beverage industry to the historic public health efforts that took on the tobacco industry. Building on this experience, Holly breaks down excise taxes and helps reframe arguments of regressivity to place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of sugar sweetened beverage industry. This…
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Apr 23, 2021
Community-led Participatory Policymaking - Sara Soka
In 2014, Berkeley, California passed Measure D, the first local tax on sugar sweetened beverages in the nation. Sara Soka, fellow at the Beeck Center and the campaign manager for Measure D, discusses the process of passing Measure D and the importance of community in moving SSB work forward. Reflecting on the Measure D campaign, Sara touches on the ways community-led research, storytelling, and mapping is necessary for participatory policymaking and emphasizes that equity must be centered throughout the entire SSB policy process, not just within the actual policy itself. For this to happen, community members must be at the table during decisions making and the process must center those most impacted, particularly communities of color. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.
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Apr 9, 2021
Sweet Danger - Jeff Ritterman
Jeff Ritterman, cardiologist and board member of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility working to combat medical racism and climate change, discusses his experience and lessons learned from proposing the first municipal soda tax in Richmond in 2012 and his work on the tax in his time serving on Richmond's City Council. Though the 2012 measure did not pass, it would be followed by successful sugar sweetened beverage tax efforts in other parts of the Bay Area, including Berkeley and San Francisco. Jeff highlights the importance of collaborating with and centering Black and Latinx community members who carry the disproportionate health burdens caused by the beverage industry's predatory marketing of sugary drinks and uplifts other measures, such as removing sugary beverages from health centers, to decrease sugary drink consumption. He breaks down some of the literature on the mechanisms by which excess sugar in sweetened beverages lead to diabetes and…
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Mar 26, 2021
Combatting the Rise of Soda - Mike Jacobson
Michael Jacobson, senior scientist at and co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), tracks the rise of soda consumption, proliferation of research on its health effects, and industry responses over the years. As former Executive Director of CSPI for 40 years until 2017 and author of books such as Nutrition Scoreboard: your guide to better eating and the recently released Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet, Mike draws on decades of experience as a nutrition advocate. He describes in depth the deeply politicized nature of the fight for SSB taxes and efforts to preempt them both on local and national levels. In addition to SSB taxes, Mike explains the wide array of innovative strategies advocates have used to reduce sugary drink consumption, including removing sugary beverages from schools, children's meals, and checkout aisles and the need for research to assess both efficacy and messaging around various strategies. While he notes…
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Mar 12, 2021
The Power of Personal Connections - Winnie Huston
Winnie Huston, Policy Strategist at DC Greens, discusses the importance of relationship building in the work of food justice and shares her personal journey to the work. Through wisdom garnered being on the ground in DC, Winnie speaks to the power of connecting personally with community members in food spaces and bringing community members and policymakers together to collaborate in the fight against inequitable outcomes due to sugary drinks and other unhealthy foods. Centering the ways sugar sweetened beverages inequitably impact communities of color through targeted marketing and disparate resource access, Winnie affirms the need to direct SSB tax funds back to those most impacted for nutritional services and educational initiatives. She makes the case for innovative and grounded ways to communicate the negative health impacts of SSBs to these communities. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusio…
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Feb 26, 2021
The Case for Equity-based Policy Processes - Rod Lew
Rod Lew, Executive Director of Asian Pacific Partners for Empowerment, Advocacy and Leadership (APPEAL), discusses how the negative health impacts of sugary beverages can be best understood in the context of a long history of racism and structural oppression as well as toxic relationship building between industry and marginalized communities. Building on this, Rod makes the case for systems change and calls for equity based policy processes in SSB taxes and building community power through reinvestment to challenge the negative health outcomes caused by sugary beverages. From APPEAL's work on tobacco, Rod also draws parallels between the tobacco industry and the beverage industry in their tactics regarding claims of regressivity in opposition to taxes on their products and threats to their profits. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.
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Feb 12, 2021
Reclaiming Indigenous Lifeways & Foodways - Denisa Livingston
According to the USDA, 99% of Navajo Nation is a "food desert." However, Denisa Livingston from Dine Community Advocacy Alliance and the Slow Food International Council, holds that the lack of healthy foods in the Navajo Nation is more accurately described as food apartheid. Reflecting on the multigenerational impacts of unhealthy foods and drinks in the Navajo Nation that stem from a history of dispossession and harm, Denisa discusses how the fight to reduce sugary drink and other unhealthy food consumption is a matter of reclaiming indigenous lifeways and foodways. She talks about the Healthy Dine Nation Act of 2014, a 2% tax on unhealthy foods and foods with minimal-to-no nutritional value, and the importance of uplifting food as medicine. Further drawing from her lived experience and work, Denisa discusses the need for the struggle for food sovereignty to center community connection and healing and the ways language and culture are central to the fight. This episode of In Praxis is…
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Jan 29, 2021
A Systems Transformation Approach - Xavier Morales
According to the CDC, half of Black and Brown children born in 2000 can expect to develop diabetes in their lifetime. Xavier Morales, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, reflects on the structures that drive such inequities in communities of color and makes the case for a transformative systems approach to health inequities caused by sugar sweetened beverages. Challenging us to think of health equity as a verb, rather than a noun, he uplifts community-imagined and -led health and education initiatives as critical tools in the fight against the beverage industry. Drawing on SSB tax work done in Oakland, Berkeley, and Philadelphia, he argues that reinvestment of SSB tax revenue into communities most impacted by the beverage industry's predatory marketing to do this work is necessary to build the power needed to oppose the industry's exploitation and obfuscation of the truth. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.
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Aug 4, 2019
Tere Almaguer - PODER
This podcast episode in Communities Building Power for Health (CBPH) Series features Tere Almaguer of PODER, an organization based in the San Francisco's Mission District. Brought to you by the Praxis Project.
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Aug 2, 2019
Joseph Martinez II - Miami Children's Initiative (MCI)
Miami Children's Initiative (MCI) is #BuildingPowerForHealth in Liberty City, FL. Joseph Martinez II, MCI's Health & Wellness Coordinator, shares with The Praxis Project how MCI operates as well as his experiences organizing the Fresh Food Co-Op program, promoting healthy food access, and his hopes to expand it! Watch the video to see how MCI is promoting food justice and working towards health equity for their neighborhood.
To support MCI or to learn more about this organization, please visit their website at iamlibertycity.org!
For more highlights of communities organizing for healthier environments check out our Communities Building Power for Health video & podcast series: http://bit.ly/CommunitiesBuildingPower
#HealthIsCommunityPower #CBPH #FoodJustice
Music: Juan RIOS - Cosmos
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Aug 1, 2019
Guy Reiter of Menikanaehkem Community Rebuilders
In this podcast episode of Communities Building Power for Health, we speak with Guy Reiter (Anahqwet) on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin about his organization Menikanaehkem and their work in rebuilding their community by fostering language and cultural revitalization.
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Aug 22, 2018
Genoveva Islas - Cultiva La Salud's Vendors For Health Project
In this second webisode of Communities Building Power for Health, The Praxis Project interviews Genoveva Islas, the director of Cultiva La Salud, an organization working for health and social justice in Fresno, CA. Fresno is a food desert and obesity and diabetes are a major issue disproportionately affecting the health of the community. In an effort to improve health through local food choices, Cultiva La Salud is introducing a new program: Vendors For Health. Vendors For Health are mobile fruit and veggie vendors who are determined to give their community healthier food options! We visited their community kitchen, Food Commons Fresno, where mobile vendors prepare their daily product and spoke to Genoveva about her experiences and insights organizing Vendors For Health, changing city policy and building power in the community.
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Aug 7, 2018
Janet Robinson-Flint - Black Women for Wellness
In our 3rd webisode of Communities Building Power for Health, The Praxis Project interviews Janet Robinson Flint, the Executive Director of Black Women for Wellness, an organization focusing on improving health and social justice conditions for black women. We sent Jeremiah Headen to Los Angeles to speak with Black Women for Wellness to learn about the organization, what they do and what practices have been successful in their mission to build power.
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Sep 1, 2017
Kelly Carlisle - Acta Non Verba Youth Urban Farm Project
Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in the inner-city by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming. Founded and led mainly by women of color from the surrounding neighborhood and larger community, ANV creates a safe and creative outdoor space for children, youth, and families in East Oakland, CA. Within this severely economically depressed neighborhood in the nation’s second most dangerous city, ANV engages and deepens their understanding of nutrition, food production, and healthy living as well as strengthens their ties to the community.
For more information about Acta Non Verba: http://www.anvfarm.org
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