The San Jose State Cesar Chavez Community Action Center commenced Earth Week on Monday with a food justice panel featuring speakers from various environmental organizations.
“My work is beyond just any organization,” said Eli Tizcareño, a campaign coordinator for the National Young Farmers Coalition. “It's pretty much a spiritual journey of ‘how is it that we feel more alive and we feel good about what we do?’ ”
The National Young Farmers Coalition is a New York advocacy network fighting for the future of agriculture nationwide, according to its website.
Molly O’Dell, a civil engineering senior and member of California Native Garden Foundation (CNGF), said it's important to credit the source of knowledge.
CNGF is a San Jose organization dedicated to informing and educating the public about gardening with native plants.
“We are aware of the fact that the stories and the knowledge and the histories of indigenous peoples, even to this region, are really stories that haven't been told and have been left out of traditional curriculum,” O’Dell said. “We [CNGF] have members of local Indigenous communities come in for Indigenous storytelling as part of teaching nature.”
Tizcareño said most social issues and environmental issues are interconnected with one another.
“Something that is really important and essential to think about is how all of our issues are interconnected,” Tizcareño said. “How is it that white supremacy is at the root of many of the issues that we're working to heal from and that we're working to create solutions around?”
Tizcareño said understanding the histories of displacement and colonization is important to understanding the injustices many marginalized communities face.
“Political education became a really important part of my own healing process in terms of understanding who I was and who I am with other people around me,” Tizcareño said.
Carolina Prado, a panelist and SJSU environmental studies assistant professor said the department has held difficult conversations about incorporating social justice issues into its curriculum.
“One of the big [conversations are] around overpopulation and why that continues to be a part of our curriculum and environmental studies,” Prado said. “We've been knowing for a long time that the conversation about how ‘there’s too many people in the world,’ but the problem is colonial and racist and sexist and why [do] we continue to have it as part of our curriculum?”
Prado also said SJSU should help homeless community members who live downtown near the campus.
“As someone who works in mutual aid projects that face unhoused communities [. . .] the way San Jose interacts with our unhoused people in San Jose, I think is pretty aberrant,” Prado said.
Nina Arrocena, the community produce stands coordinator for Mandela Partners in Oakland, said people should become directly involved with existing community-led organizations.
“[Join] an organization that you know the faces of and that can tell you personal stories, they're the ones who really understand how you can best support them,” Arrocena said during the panel.
Mandela Partners is an Oakland nonprofit working in partnership with local residents and local businesses to better wellness, generate income and build assets through local food enterprises in low-income communities, according to its website.
“Organizing is really what moves us forward in terms of sustaining structural change and making sure that we're also doing good organizing and not replicating the violent systems that we're trying to pass,” Tizcareño said.
