A Conversation with Mariana Chilton joined by Leona Brown

Date: Wednesday, November 20th from 1:30–3:30pm
Location: Vancouver Community College, 1155 E Broadway
Health Sciences – Building B, North Facing Main atrium, (1 floor up from Blenz cafe) overlooking mountains

In this dialogue, Mariana Chilton will share insights from her new book The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again with Vancouver-based Leona Brown, Indigenous food justice activist and cultural programmer sharing her grassroots experience.

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All are invited to join the Vancouver Food Justice Coalition, the Centre for Family Equity, and Vancouver Community College nursing health policy students as they co-host a dialogue with public health scholar, community organizer, and author Mariana Chilton and Vancouver based Indigenous food justice activist and cultural programmer, Leona Brown regarding the root systemic causes and solutions in addressing food insecurity and poverty.

Based on 25 years of research, programming and advocacy efforts to end hunger, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America demonstrates that to solve hunger, we must think way beyond food to incorporate personal, political and spiritual approaches to promote flourishing. This involves looking at the original wounds in North America caused by colonization, genocide and enslavement, and forces us to reckon with hard questions about why we let hunger persist. Through the insights gained from grassroots community organizing among women facing discrimination and marginalization, it becomes clear that the experience of hunger is rooted in trauma and gender-based violence — violence in our relationships with each other, with the natural world and with ourselves. This book will help to re-invigorate collective commitment to uprooting the causes of poverty and discrimination, and points to a more generative and meaningful world where everyone can be nourished.

In her book, Chilton:

• Explores the personal experiences of food-insecure families as they navigate public assistance policy.
• Lifts the veil to show how most public assistance programs meant to address food and economic insecurity uphold racist, sexist, and capitalist structures that pry children away from their parents, and actively separate people from one another.
• Shows that well-meaning people often cause harm through disempowering and humiliating people living in poverty.
• Demonstrates how racism, colonialism, enslavement, rape culture, and capitalism are visible in every aspect of the experience of hunger.
• Offers up transformative policy approaches such as universal basic income (UBI), universal health care, Pr*son abolition, and solidarity economies, and discusses the political importance of reparations and rematriation of Indigenous populations.

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives on the importance of childhood nutrition and served as an adviser to the Institute of Medicine and Sesame Street! Mariana has an MPH in Epidemiology as well as a PhD in Folklore!

Leona Brown is a Gitxsan and Nisga'a mother of three children and an Indigenous cultural programmer with training in land and lives around Indigenous culture. Her work has become her healing journey, the grassroots teaching and knowledge is shared with her children. This knowledge is important to who Leona is and where she came from and how she lives with the lands and waterways around her.

Host or Publisher Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks