Shorlette Ammons Awarded Food Equity Fellowship from the Center for Social Inclusion

Shorlette Ammons, CEFS’ Community-Based Food Systems Outreach Coordinator, has been awarded a one year Food Equity fellowship by the Center for Social Inclusion (CSI). Based in New York, CSI is a national public policy strategy organization that works to unite public policy research and grassroots advocacy to transform structural racial inequity into structural fairness and inclusion. CSI Founder and President Maya Wiley, a noted Food Justice Advocate, came to North Carolina to deliver CEFS’ annual Sustainable Agriculture Lecture in February 2013.

Said Ms. Wiley, “Shorlette exemplifies the leadership and the grassroots engagement we want to support. We respect and appreciate the leadership that she provides her community, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems and North Carolina A&T. We are offering Shorlette the opportunity to be a CSI Food Equity Fellow to inform her own work and strategies and to participate, with CSI, in identifying and supporting greater community-of-color innovation in policy reforms and programs to meet our shared goals”.

As part of the fellowship, Shorlette is embarking on a year-long project to interview women of color working on food issues throughout the South. The process will help create and strengthen women-of-color networks in the South, and a resultant brown paper will offer policy recommendations for addressing structural inequalities in the food system.

The fellowship also includes a two-week writing retreat, during which Shorlette and her twin sister Shirlette, an accomplished poet, musician and author, will write about food in the context of Southern culture.

Shorlette, a former librarian, has a Master’s Degree in Library Science from North Carolina Central University. She has developed her growing experience by working closely with the Goldsboro community over the past five years through the Wayne Food Initiative and various community-based food systems projects, including community gardens and a recently-established urban farm.

Read more about Shorlette’s Community-Based Food Systems work on the CEFS website.

From the September 2013 E-Newsletter