Creative Campaigning Resources for Food Justice

The resources below are tools you can use to craft activities and awareness-raising events in your community. The goal: to spread the word on how each of us can make food justice a reality in our lives, and around the world.

Activities

Ages 3-6

• The Story of Corn: A storytelling script and list of materials for telling the story of corn – its history, and its role in today’s environment and society. Appropriate for younger audiences.

Grades 1-5

• Go Bananas- Banana Webs: An interactive game where participants trace and compare the paths from field to plate of two different bananas: a conventional banana and an organic fair trade one.

Grades 6 & Up

• Rice Web Activity: An interactive game where participants trace the origins of rice from field to fork to learn about where our food really comes from. Based on a template from the Dig In! Project.

Films

• Guide to Holding a Food Film Night: A practical guide to planning a film screening that focuses on food justice issues.
• USC’s Favourite Food Films: A list of USC’s favourite food justice films that you should see, and screen in your community. Also available in French.

Movie Discussion Sheets

• The Story of Food: USC Canada’s new short animated film will get you thinking about our broken food system. It identifies what’s gone wrong, and what we can do to rebuild it.
• Banking Diversity: Set in Ethiopia, this short film explores the critical role that seed saving and seed diversity play in ensuring a sustainable global food supply. Watch the film here.
• Hijacked Future: This movie examines how the seed market has shifted into the hands of a few multinational corporations.
• Food Inc.: This movie examines how our food supply has become increasingly industrialized and the consequences this has on our health and on the planet.
• Saving the Seed: This film explores the struggles of rural farmers in Honduras to control their food supplies and livelihoods.

Tools

• The Seed Map: a teaching tool that shows the state of global agro-biodiversity today. It identifies key threats to the world’s seed and biodiversity systems, particularly the impact of climate change, and highlights regions where institutions and peoples’ movements are working to preserve agricultural biodiversity. Order the Map – See it on Screen – Learn how to Teach it – About the Issues.
• Name That Seed: A fun contest, perfect for tables at public events, that asks participants to match seeds to the crops they grow. Here’s how to use the ballots, the box cover, the crop display, the banner, response emails, and the solution.

Presentations

• Playing with food: A fun and interactive presentation for younger audiences (60 min) and a list of resources by age group to inspire young people between the ages of 3 and 15 to think about food, and to see what they can do to build a better and more just food system.
• Tools to Campaign for Food Justice: A short presentation highlighting some Canadian food justice campaigns and actions, and a useful list of tools and resources to use to campaign for food justice.
• Hillside Trench Animation: This short animation of a soil and water conservation project – the Hillside Trench – shows precisely how villagers in Nepal have been able to stop soil erosion and flooding in their community. Watch the animation and then discuss.