Youth participating in Rooted in Community’s annual food justice conference perform a puppet show focused on climate justice in Center City Park. (photo by Lauren Barber)

This article originally appeared in the Triad City Beat.  Read the original version here.

By Lauren Barber

Under the partial cover of Center City Park’s wooden pavilion, youth performers steered colossal pole puppets — faceless gray suits symbolizing big oil, giant fists in shades of brown labeled “People power” and “El poder de la gente,” and vibrant flags representing wind, air and sun — but not before a proper introduction.

Last week, the NC Climate Justice Summit hosted the annual Rooted in Community food-justice conference for youth in Greensboro. The theatrical performance, an adaptation of the NC Climate Justice’s roadshow, marked the third and final day of the youth gathering and highlighted economic, environmental and social-justice issues. Expert puppet artists from Paperhand Puppet Intervention showed a different group of young people and families to how to create the puppets earlier this year with the goal of enabling them to use puppets to shape the narrative of justice movements.

Bevelyn Ukah is the youth coordinator for the Food Youth Initiative, the local organization that orchestrated the event. She was among the mentors and organizers who honored Goldie Wells, interim councilwoman and candidate for District 2, and Christina Young, professor and director of public health and education at UNCG, for their contributions to furthering environmental and social justice. The honorees emphasized the importance of young voices in movement building.

Two days prior to the show, youth led their own workshops, many of which focused on how the power of storytelling — and amplifying the stories of others — is key to moving hearts and minds on issues like climate change.

Ree Ree Wei, a 19-year-old youth leader associated with Transplanting Traditions Farm in Chapel Hill, attended a workshop focused on how to implement social media “as a tool to send a message to people that has a huge impact and leaves them thinking about others.”

As a Burmese refugee, she said that this type of training is an invaluable resource as she and others strategize for how to use writing and other creative practices to effect change.

Young people from as far away as the US Virgin Islands attended the Rooted in Community conference, and brought their stories with them.

Event emcee and local youth leader Noah McDonald said he learned about a primarily indigenous Lumbee youth-led project to convert a prison into a sustainable farm, museum and recreation center in Scotland County.

“They talked about the history of chain gangs in North Carolina and how our road systems were built almost entirely by African-American and Lumbee men,” McDonald said. “You can go in the museum and learn those stories and feel what it was like.”

Though few participants knew one another when they arrived in Greensboro, they moved in practiced unison on July 22.

“The youth group performed this for the first time two days ago,” Alyzza May, a member of the local planning committee, said. “It shows we can learn things quickly together… to create solutions to climate change which, in part, is bringing down big oil and corporations that are extracting from our communities.”

To the pounding of djembe drums, hand-held xylophones and the rattle of snare drums, performers chanted, “We resist until we rise; We stand up for lives!” and proudly hoisted their battle flags. After several scenes in which the giant hands labeled “people power” met the suits, pipelines and methane gas, three immense-yet-elegant green giants with human-like faces graced the outdoor stage. Flowing clothes of various shades of green draped the oversized puppets effervescent leaf hands and large, pink flowers affixed to the flipside of the puppets’ faces seemed to symbolize hopefulness, if not simply a reverence for nature.

At the finale, youth performers paraded their puppets around the periphery of Center City Park while the chorus of djembe drums and chanting continued. The encircling march indicated to everyone within its path that they are now part of this story.

As one of the youth’s props urged, the time had come to “look, listen and decide.”

Dimitrius Eliza, who came from Camden, New Jersey, to the summit on food systems and inequality in Greensboro, North Carolina, sits in a tree.

This article originally appeared in Youth Today.  Read the original version here.

By Stell Simonton

About 100 high school youth from community and out-of-school organizations gathered along with their adult allies in Greensboro, North Carolina, this past weekend for a conference on food systems and inequality.

Sponsored by the Rooted In Community National Network, it focused on issues ranging from environmental degradation to lack of access to healthy food to poor working conditions in agriculture. Rooted in Community encourages young people from low-income and historically excluded communities to develop skills to take leadership for food justice, according to the organization.

Dimitrius Eliza, a recent high school graduate, came from Camden, New Jersey.

“Camden is a food desert,” he said.

“There’s a ton of corner stores,” he said, but only one supermarket in the area.

He said it is far easier for people to find a honey bun and a drink at a corner store than find transportation to a full grocery store.

He works at the Center for Environmental Transformation, where he teaches other youth about gardening, cooking and nutrition. The center has an urban garden, a program for children and offers job training for youth.

Eliza said he is also concerned about pollution in his hometown — air pollution from a trash incinerator only a quarter-mile from his home and water pollution from the city’s aging sewer system. These problems aren’t getting people’s attention, he said.

“I feel like we’re being overlooked a lot,” he said.

The 19th annual Rooted in Community National Youth Leadership Summit, which draws youth from as far away as Canada and the Virgin Islands, offered workshops, field trips and service projects, said Cecilia Polanco. She is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and led a social media workshop for youth at the conference.

In March, Polanco started a nonprofit food truck venture whose proceeds go to scholarships for undocumented youth.

She’s concerned about Latino food vendors in North Carolina’s Triangle area, whose traditional small businesses have been curtailed by increased regulation.

These vendors have been working in the area for a long time, but the explosion in popularity of food trucks has added new laws, Polanco said. Vendors who might sell from their car trunk at church can’t keep up with the regulations or they can’t communicate because they don’t speak English, she said.

Participants at the conference also visited Transplanting Traditions Community Farm in Chapel Hill, which helps refugee farmers transfer their skills to a new country. In 2016, 8 acres were cultivated by 40 families, according to the organization’s website. Produce is sold at farmers markets and through subscription to individuals.

The farm provides training for adults, internships for refugee youth and has a summer camp for children. Its youth collaborative made a video about the farm in 2014.

Participants visited Stagville Plantation near Durham, North Carolina too. It was one of the largest plantations in the antebellum South with about 900 enslaved people.

“A discussion around food justice can’t be had without talking about race and issues around racial inequality,” Polanco said.

The local group hosting the conference was the Food Youth Initiative, located at Center for Environmental Farming Systems, a partnership of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, North Carolina State University and the state agriculture department.