Food, Farming, and Faith: A LAMP Symposium on Growing Community - Panel 1

The 2016 Leadership and Multifaith Program Symposium on Growing Community: Food, Farming, and Faith took place on March 1st, 2016 from 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. at the Historic Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech.Runtime: 119:52 minutesAmirah AbuLughod - TITLE: "Building Communities, Engaging Faith, and Cultivating Nonviolence". Stony Point Center is a conference center that is also home to a multifaith intentional community, called The Community of Living Traditions (CLT). The mission and work of the CLT is to practice hospitality, engage faith, and cultivate nonviolence and justice in the world. The vision towards a more holistic experience as a conference center and community includes the Stony Point Center Farm, a small-scale farm run on regenerative and sustainable agricultural practices with an intention towards utilizing the space as a teaching resource to nurture the connection between faith, food, and justice. The setting run by members of a multi-faith intentional community lends itself to dynamic earthcare teachings, farming practices that actively weave together religious traditions, sustainability, and experiential learning. Stories and reflections from a Muslim farm apprentices’ experience will give you a glimpse at what it is like to fast during the month of Ramadan while farming the land, what a farm crew of Muslims, Jews, and Christians looks like and how those relationships have deepened religious convictions and broadened thoughts on sustainable agriculture.Carl DiSalvo - TITLE: "Broadening Participation in Agriculture Futures". This talk will share recent work that explores participatory approaches to designing technologies in support of small-scale agriculture. These projects are structured around workshops in which community stakeholders come together to collaboratively make prototypes of alternative agricultural tools and services. These prototypes are then documented and shared through public forums to prompt reflection on how we might better support diverse forms of farming and food production.Jennifer Leavey - TITLE: "The Urban Honey Bee Project". The Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project focuses on finding synergies between two grand challenges of our nation: ensuring a qualified future workforce of science, technology, engineering and math professionals, and protecting pollinators and our food supply. The project was established in 2013 as a way for undergraduates to explore how diverse disciplines approach a common model research system. Students are studying how urban habitats affect bees both through individual research and in courses, and there are groups of students developing technologies that will improve our ability to study bees. An unexpected outcome of the project was the enthusiasm expressed by individuals from across campus and the Atlanta community. The project now boasts a robust volunteer program with nearly 200 trained volunteers who provide educational outreach to local schools, and maintain bees and provide pollination services and beekeeper training in community gardens and urban farms in West Atlanta.K. Rashid Nuri - This talk will focus on the Truly Living Well Center for Urban Agriculture (TLW) in Atlanta, its vision for urban agriculture, and its ethic for community and environmental stewardship. TLW’s work of growing fresh, nutritious food in the inner city helps to mitigate chronic disease by teaching the health benefits of locally grown food, making healthier foods more accessible, and inspiring people to eat better.Nathan Stucky - TITLE: "Faith, Farming, and Community: The Inseparability of Life and Death". The Farminary at Princeton Theological Seminary integrates theological education with the practices of sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture builds community at the Farminary because it invites the seminary community deeper into both the Christian theological tradition and the most pressing matters of our contemporary context. Putting the Christian theological tradition and the contemporary context in direct contact with the soil transforms relationships within and beyond the seminary community. Students relate to each other, the land, the broader community, the theological curriculum, and God in new ways as the practices of sustainable agriculture unveil interconnectedness that has always existed yet has frequently been masked by education in an industrial or modern mode. This presentation explores these relational transformations and the accompanying growth in community that sustainable agriculture is cultivating at the Farminary.H. Bruce McEve