Workshop: Regional Food Systems: Essential for Resilience

Regional Food Systems Societies have always traded with one another, creating long-term partnerships with neighboring communities and even people on the other side of the world. But as trade routes have become dominated by a few giant corporations, the idea of re-establishing routes closer to home has become more popular. Learn how each of the speakers has addressed this challenge from their experiences and how we can make food system changes where we live.

This workshop is being offered as part of the 2021 Regenerative Communities Summit. Please click here to learn more and register using our pay-what-you-can donation-based system to participate.

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Speaker:

Bryan Deans is the founder of OLCERI and host of the Indigenous Wisdom & Permaculture Skills Convergence (IWPSC), on his permaculture demonstration site. He was born on Pine Ridge reservation and has to be an incredible community resource for over 20 years. Bryan is skilled in permaculture design, integrating these teachings with his understanding of the Lakota ways, and a great communicator and teacher. He has worked as a project manager, in local government, an aerospace mechanic and engineer, welding teacher, and permaculture designer. He has envisioned, designed, and built all of the infrastructure and programs on the OLCERI homestead. Including wind and solar clean energy system, a farmer-rancher educational program for local people, wild horse rescue program, biodiesel production, a sawmill for local lumber, and a community garden that currently produces hundreds of pounds of food. OLCERI’s latest projects are an Earthship-style rammed earth tire building that will house the Indigenous Wisdom Center, a Lakota language school, and cultural preservation center. With his work with OLCERI Bryan has also designed the methodology for Food Distribution Network to supply fresh foods to people throughout Pine Ridge.

Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Food Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is interested in multi-actor collaborations for sustainable food systems, food system resilience, human rights in the food system, the right to food in the US, and bridging interests and concerns of academicians and community-based activists. She participates in Vermont’s Farm to Plate Network; the Food Solutions New England network; the national Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture & Sustainability; and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).  She earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Systems Ecology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.