Are you interested in being a student researcher next year? The Agroecology, Climate Resilience, and Food Justice Lab is hiring! You can learn more about the job description and apply through this link. https://lnkd.in/ewFNXGSV
Applications are due Friday May 16th at midnight. Scan the QR code below or follow the link to apply!
Student researchers Wanyu (Mary) Xiang and Amelia Koenig of the Agroecology, Climate Resilience, and Food Justice (ACRAF) Lab presented their work at the Sustainability & Environmental Justice Student Research Symposium on March 11, 2025. Their research highlighted critical disparities in food and housing security among Santa Clara University students, drawing from the 2023 Food Security and Basic Needs Survey (800+ respondents). Key findings include:
These disparities underscore the urgent need for institutional action to create a more equitable, sustainable, and just campus—especially as marginalized communities bear the brunt of climate crises.
Progress & Challenges: The Basic Needs Committee
In response to ACRAF Lab’s earlier research, SCU established the Basic Needs Committee (2023–24), uniting students, staff, and faculty to develop an action plan. While progress has been made (e.g., hiring a Basic Needs Coordinator), the 2023 survey revealed critical gaps:
To address this, the Committee has formed three working groups this year to advance targeted outreach, policy recommendations, and institutional support.
Innovation in Action: Food Recovery & Advocacy
At the ACRAF Lab, we turn research into action. Our findings expose systemic gaps in basic needs security—but we don’t stop there. We push for institutional change (Basic Needs Committee), build grassroots solutions (Food Alert Slack), and amplify student voices (ASG Resolution).
Here’s how you can be part of the movement:
Hunger is a policy choice. Together, we can rewrite the rules
Katie Duffy wins the Student Life Award, Jules Holland wins the Peter-Hans Kovlenbach, Social Justice Award and Kimber Wood wins Riordan Community Service Award.
Photo Caption: Santa Clara University undergraduates Katie Duffy (first from bottom left), Kimber Wood (fourth from bottom left) and Jules Holland (third from bottom right) stand with President Julie Sullivan and others after receiving awards at the Senior Toast on Friday, May 31st.
Katie Duffy, Jules Holland, and Kimber Wood are research assistants with a significant portion of their work focused on addressing student food security and basic needs at SCU.
Katie and Jules serve on the Basic Needs Committee, advocating for initiatives to support students facing food insecurity and other essential needs. Kimber works in coordination with the tUrn Project and supports basic needs aid, promoting sustainability on campus.
Their dedication and outstanding achievements have not gone unnoticed. Jules Holland, a double major in Environmental Studies and Sciences, received the prestigious Peter-Hans Kolvenbach Award. Katie Duffy, a Political Science major with a minor in Sustainable Food Systems and Public Health, was honored with the Student Life Award. Kimber Wood, a double major in Political Science and Dance, received the Riordan Community Service Award.
These accolades are a testament to their academic excellence, leadership roles, and commitment to addressing food insecurity, promoting environmental justice, and fostering sustainable practices on campus. The recognition they have received highlights their significant impact as student leaders and changemakers, inspiring others to follow in their footsteps and contribute to a more just and humane world.
On February 9, an SCU research team presented preliminary research results to Sacred Heart Community Services food pantry staff, based on surveys and interviews that identified key themes for education materials and campaigns for pantry volunteers and clients. The feedback received during this workshop is being incorporated into a food justice curriculum and a replicable resource guide designed by the team, which other pantries and service organizations can consult to establish a food justice approach to food waste reduction. The SHCS Food Pantry serves 25,000 members each year. This workshop was co-organized by the Initiative’s Christopher Bacon and student researchers Isabelle Solórzano, Paulina Ursua Garcia, and Wanyu Xiang in coordination with Sacred Heart Essential Services Director Sofia Rocha. Paulina and Chris co-facilitated the workshop. See the presentation slides. Photo: Paulina Ursua Garcia.
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Isabelle Solórzano (‘24, Environmental Science, Biology minor) recently secured a competitive NASA DEVELOP internship, and will soon start working with NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. She will join a project researching the impacts of wetland declinations and deforestation on urban heat in Cali, Colombia. They will leverage Earth observations from Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 and partnerships with Fundación Dinamizadores Ambientales and Departamento Administrativo de Gestión del Medio Ambiente to understand the urban heat island effect on Cali communities. Their analysis will combine remote sensing and community partnerships under an environmental justice framework. The team will also develop a tutorial on the methodologies to be transferred to the partners to increase their capacity to use NASA Earth observations and understand the heat disparity in local communities.
Isabelle’s interest in Latin America environmental change issues may have started with many trips back to visit family in Nicaragua and her work for the Environmental Justice and Common Good Initative’s Food and Climate Justice Program and in the Agroecology, Climate Resilience and Food Justice (ACRAF) Lab. In the ACRAF Lab, she helped develop educational workshops, analyze the climate impacts of food consumption, co-author reports, and kick-start a vermiculture pilot program on a project partnering Sacred Heart Community Service. In addition to Professor Chris Bacon, mentors that have supported Isabelle’s work include Professor Jake Dialesandro, who taught her remote sensing, as well as Professor C.J. Gabbe, and Becca Nelson. Congratulations again, Isabelle. We look forward to seeing where this project takes you – the sky’s the limit.
SCU’s Environmental Justice and Common Good Initiative (EJ & CGI) Food and Climate Justice Program lead, Chris Bacon (Associate Professor and Chair Environmental Studies and Sciences Department) Collaborated Veggielution to develop a $217,000 project funded by the County of Santa Clara. Veggielution is the lead agency for this project that aims to create a more diverse, equitable, and resilient regional food economy, and foster food justice through education and action to address inequities in East San Jose. As the key partner in this project, the SCU team will manage a $67,000 subaward, as Bacon will work with student researchers, EJ & CGI’s research coordinator, and Veggielution staff to conduct a feasibility study and policy analysis about the potential to link small-scale food entrepreneurs to values-based purchasing efforts, such as the Good Food Purchasing Program, which is partnering with Santa Clara County Hospitals to offer more nutritions, lower-carbon, and sustainable meals. The SCU team will also co-produce an agroecology, urban agriculture and food policy summer short-course and help design a food systems dashboard with collaboration from C.J. Gabbe (ESS). To collect the data student researchers will help conduct interviews, surveys, and focus groups as well as compile, analyze, and display demographic and food systems data. Veggielution recently hired SCU food justice lab alumnus, Antonio Amore Rojas (ESS and Management ‘23), to work as the cooperative manager for a new enterprise they will be developing as part of this project.
Caption: Veggielution’s Farm Stand offers farm fresh vegetables that are harvested every week by staff members and volunteers. Residents interested in volunteering to pick crops can sign up online at veggielution.org/farming. Photo Courtesy of Veggielution
August 28 and 29, 2023
Sacred Heart Community Services, San Jose, CA
Sacred Heart’s Essential Services and La Mesa Verde (LMV) programs, are partnering with the Initiative’s Climate and Food Justice Program to advance food justice in the South Bay. The team recently led a workshop with La Mesa Verde gardeners, food pantry staff and volunteers to launch a composting pilot project. They invited Michele Young, a Master Composter with UC Extension and senior manager at the County of Santa Clara to offer technical training as part of six hours of workshop time that included, building the pilot facility, and hands-on worm composting. SHCS’ Food Pantry serves 25,000 members each year. As part of an ongoing study, SCU Researchers have found that, although the pantry recovers hundreds of thousands of pounds of edible food it also disposes of about 2,700 lbs per month, (2-10% of the total food received). This project aims to transform the pantry’s food waste into compost while promoting the human right to food. This workshop was co-organized by the Initiative’s Christopher Bacon, Isabelle Solórzano (student researcher) and Fernando Fernandez Levia (SHCS manager). To learn more about free workshops on vermicomposting check UC Extensions Composting Education Program.
Feeding hope, serving dignity: How nonprofit groups fight food insecurity in Silicon Valley is one of the best news stories engaging the people, problems, paradoxes, and potential solutions to address the shockingly high levels of hunger, poverty, and social exclusion in Silicon Valley that I have read in my 13 years as a professor Santa Clara University. It’s in-depth and long form, so take your time reading it. Happy to provide background to journalist Prachi Singh.
Antonio’s Experience presenting ACRAF Research
Last week I had the amazing opportunity to attend Reclaiming the Commons 2023: a biannual conference held jointly for the first time this year by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) in Portland, Oregon! I had an amazing time participating in various sessions with influential speakers on different topics as well as presenting our lab’s research at a conference, and I am excited to share how this experience went for me.
My favorite part of the conference was the opportunity to present my lab’s research. My Faculty Advisor Chris Bacon and I were on a panel, Food Security and Justice Challenges. Alongside Amy Teller from the Land Institute and the University of Minnesota and Karin Warren from Randolph College, we spoke on different issues of food security within our communities. Chris and I presented preliminary results from our survey showing 35% of Santa Clara University students suffer from food security as well as how this population is distributed among different racial, ethnic and student groups within the university. Warren talked about tree plantings and food justice work in the Lynchburg VA community where Randolph has an important role, and Teller analyzed the social side of sustainability in relation to the development and commercialization of Kernza, a new perennial wheat grown largely by small farmers. The panel was a positive space of open discussion that was special to experience for the first time. I also presented a poster explaining our lab’s work, it was visited by 30 – 40 people in a 2 hour span. This was a particularly rewarding experience since I love discussing issues of college food security with anyone who will listen.
The majority of my time at the conference was spent attending many interesting panel discussions. Chris and I started out by going to a session on Decolonization and Indigenous Food Sovereignty. In this session we learned about a real example of Land Back where a Japanese family that had been farming on the Yakama Reservation in WA had returned the Land to the Yakama tribe after having farmed it for over 100 years.The former owners worked with the tribe to keep the farm successful and improve food sovereignty on the Reservation. We also heard from indigenous leaders and forest service biologists who were working together on conservation efforts as well as returning First Food access to the Umatilla and Cayuse tribes of NE Oregon.
Later in the conference I attended the only session held completely in Spanish, a Panel on Latine Activism that had linguists, poets and artists. They discussed the legacies of Colonialism in Latin America, how this is causally related to environmental issues in the region, more specifically México; and showed art and poems in the poet’s indigenous language that reflected the pain and trauma suffered by these communities due to these effects. Lastly, I was able to attend a panel on Latine Bodies and Landscapes, where panelists discussed books that detailed Feminism in Venezuela, Eco Activism in Ecuador, the relationship between society and petroleum extraction and a children’s book about pollution in southern Puerto Rico. It was a pleasure to learn more about my region of the world from local activists improve my personal knowledge of the contexts of different countries. All of these talks had profound impacts on me and I loved the opportunity to be in the same room as all of the panelists.
One of my favorite parts of the conference was being able to experience the city of Portland. Despite having briefly visited before, I feel like this trip allowed me to experience the city more deeply than my previous visit. In addition to a 30 mile bike ride around the city and an exploration of Portland’s incredible public transportation system, Chris and I were able to participate in an AESS sponsored field trip to visit Black Futures Farm in SW Portland. As someone who has been involved in Food Justice and Food Sovereignty around the South Bay community for a while, this experience was the highlight of the conference. We were led on a tour of the farm by founders Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Hoover, who talked about the fields, what was being farmed as well as their relationship with the community. The farm is located in a city park much like Veggielution in East San Jose and they also had an indefinite lease with the city which is crucial to maintaining its connection to the community. It was so inspiring to see community farming efforts being so successful in the Portland area and being used to support communities in need.
In conclusion, this conference was a life-changing experience for me. It opened my eyes to the incredible community work and research that is happening in the environmental community, and left me with a lot of hope in terms of the future of the climate crisis. I cannot thank the sponsors that made this trip possible for me enough: Santa Clara University’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Leavey School of Business, AESS, Bill Sundstrom, Carolyn Anthon, and above all Chris Bacon.
In partnership with ASDENIC and a cluster of cooperatives, food security funding agencies, farmer associations, cooperatives, and universities we co-organized the one day results sharing symposium on June 27, 2023. The objective was to reflect on the advances, challenges and future steps related to the practice of agroecology as a strategy to face the challenges of food security, climate change, diversification and resilience. Our team gave the keynote presentation sharing findings from the current study and relevant work from the last decade including the longitudinal study of smallholders. We also advanced an important discussion about the increasingly likely El Niño event and preparation for probable drought and food security impacts in the region.
The participants in the workshops included 50+ representatives from producer unions, UNAG, PRODECOOP, Nuevo Waslala and organizations that have been working for decades in sustainable agriculture, agroecology, and food security issues, such as the movement for organic agriculture in Nicaragua (MAONIC), the group for the promotion of agroecology (GPAE), and a ADDAC and FUNICA, from cooperation and universities. In addition to presentations, small group and full room dialogue, there was also a seed and materials / publications exchange.
Conversation and demonstration activities were very productive: participants shared resources and stated their commitments to continue with the promotion of agroecology-based diversification in alliances and with a greater inclusion of youth and a deeper engagement with gender and female farmers and rural leaders as well as continuing efforts to decolonize food systems and eliminate the stigma of consuming the diverse and nutrient dense wild foods that some have labeled “food for the poor.” Additional takeaways included: (1) increased interaction among the small yet persistent and dedicated group of farmer associations and civil society groups as well as municipal authorities working in the food security and sustainable agriculture space, (2) increased awareness and coordination to plan an integrated disaster risk reduction and agroecology informed response to the anticipated impacts of El Niño, and (3) commitments to continue developing collective strategies to address soil fertility and acidity issues through expanded testing, continued growth in the production of more sophisticated organic compost, and the development of integrated agroecology-based systems for managing nutrients and soil fertility.
Full 30-page report in Spanish summarizing event will be posted shortly
Posted 7/25/23
