Sarah Purcell joined us in Carmen Pampa as a recent graduate in international political economy from the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently collaborating with the student-run food cooperatives at the College*, intending to improve campus-wide nutrition through various approaches. She explains

A long-term yet attainable goal would be the integration of the campus's organic vegetable garden into the food cooperative, making it the primary source of fresh food for the students. A similar approach, the farm to table or local food movement, is gaining force in the United States at this time, but is unfortunately largely restricted to a privileged class. The College, on the other hand, created for underprivileged students, has the potential to accomplish this full circle of food production on its very own campus. As it is, every student must contribute four hours per week to community service, so much of their time is already spent in the garden. Furthermore, most of the students on campus are from farm families themselves, so this connection to the earth and know-how already exists.

While this increase in production and increase in collaboration is in the works, Sarah aims to organize the purchase of dry staples such as rice and sugar in La Paz which would save money -- and this money could then be spent on supplementing student diets with otherwise limited foods. She notes, though, that "change takes a considerable amount of work, and most importantly, time, even when attempted on a small scale."

Sarah hopes to use her experience at the UAC-Carmen Pampa to strengthen the unintegrated local food systems in the United States that are now bounded by class constraints. Her approach to these food systems would be through city planning, where she finds special interest in policy that could help with the integration of community gardens into cities and grocery stores into low income neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, she will be moving on in the next few weeks. Thank you, Sarah, for your work here at the College -- and we wish you much success in the future!




____________________
* The students pay about $20 a month to participate in the cooperatives, and that is subsidized by a generous donation from the Carmen Pampa Fund, and additional support from Cross International.