Lead Facilitator: Niegel Rozet of Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo (KUA)
Executive Summary: This project aims to expose KUA network members to emerging conversations and movements around food systems and food sovereignty through the perpetuation of their cultural practices.The voices of our networks belong at this larger food systems table. Our strategy, implied in our name meaning “grassroots growing through shared responsibility,” is to provide opportunities for rural and Native Hawaiian community driven biocultural resource management initiatives and practitioners to develop shared understandings of the food system issues that affect them and develop a space for deep meaning making, empowerment and dialogue.
Hoʻomāhele Video Collection
We meet people where they are at, on the ground. Their food systems work include traditional fishponds, traditional agriculture field systems or the stewardship of wild stocks and fisheries. To share and amplify their voices we identified a handful of community projects that effectively address our issues of food security from mountain to sea. Aloha ʻĀina.
Key Levers:
Networks are most connected to the following THFST food system loops.
- Mend the Nets, Catch the Fish: levers identified in this area included local food sharing and purchasing, locally grown and harvested food, and viable food system business or programs.
- ‘Āina is ‘Ohana: emphasized the importance of emotional, physical, spiritual health and wellness/ the practice of self-sufficiency, and the practices of aloha and kuleana for local food and aina traditions.
- Cultivating Careers: key leverage points included capital flow to the local food system, job creation, and viable food system business or programs; youth and new farmer opportunities- paid, grassroots, programs for youth to learn farming and have access to land ownership including scholarships for master gardening, livable wages for farmers, housing and healthcare for farmers, local woofing for local kids, teaching science of farming.