How we Organize
Art and Storytelling
Honoring the connection between culture and movement building, SOFSA has been working on curating spaces and “activations” that encourage participants to experience art and performance as part of their exploration of food, organizing, and civic engagement.
Throughout the last few years, we’ve incorporated art:
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As performance, to open gatherings and create a container of joint celebration
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For its visual appeal, to draw folks into shared space
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As a tool for program participants to explore their own relationship to food and food systems
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As an advocacy tool creating imagery to support storytelling to effect policy change
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As a site of co-creation and intention setting.
Visual Notetaking
Archiving, advocating, storytelling
Visual notetaking, at the Food Justice Gathering, webinars, and listening sessions, serves primarily as an archiving tool. They capture conversations in a way that allows us to make connections, literally, visible, while enabling the public to engage with food system topics across time.
Beyond that, we've used visual notes as part of advocacy packets, helping us illustrate stories and complex themes so that they're more accessible to the public and policy makers.
Zines
Capturing Personal Stories
Throughout 2025, SOFSA hosted various zine-making workshops, giving youth and adults opportunities to engage their creativity as they explored their relationship to food.
Participants explored family cooking traditions, senses and memory, and how culture shapes our own relationships to food and body image.
Advocacy Postcards
Civic engagement meets creativity
Postcards straightforward and effective advocacy tool. They allow constituents to write or sign on to brief messages to their elected officials. When they're sent in large quantities and at the right times, postcards and letters can influence how an elected official votes on legislation.
At SOFSA, we've worked with artists to design custom stamps that members can use to create unique postcards. We create messaging suggestions, and then bring people together to create, write, and send postcards to their elected officials. Calls to action follow our advocacy priorities, and change depending on legislation being considered at the state and local level.
Performance Art
An invitation to arrive
Since 2024 Mary Nickson has been opening the Food Justice Gathering with original music inspired by the Gathering’s theme. The pieces have marked an “arriving” for attendants, and are a meaningful part of setting intention for the day: one of sharing and celebration of local work, not of academic discussions removed from community context.
Food Justice Gathering posters
Celebrating the movement
Since 2024, we've commissioned artwork from a local artist to design the visual identity of our yearly Gathering. The "artist of the year" interprets the theme for the Gathering, and works with SOFSA's communications lead to fine tune the design.
The design then becomes the base for all of the Gathering's materials, from flyers and program, to slides and stickers.
Commissioning custom art for the Gathering keeps the convening grounded in cultural celebration, helping us maintain its identity as an accessible, non-academic conference.
