The Capstone

Prescott College

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FOOD

Celebrating a more just and sustainable food system.

2025-10-06

Reconnecting Children to Their Food

For her Capstone project, Suzanna Coffin designed an educational curriculum for students in grades kindergarten through 6th grade with experiential learning opportunities designed to reconnect a generation of children to their food. Suzanna lives and works now in Portland, Oregon and graduated from the MSFS program in our accelerated program—an opportunity offered at Prescott College where students can begin taking graduate level courses as undergraduates.

21 min
2025-08-01

Food Policy and Urban Food Security

Examining the relationships between Urban Agriculture and Policy is the area of interest for this episode of The Capstone, featuring Sean Flaherty. Sean cites an increasingly urbanized population with growing levels of food insecurity, as the motivation to look beyond improving efficiencies in food production to explore the impacts of policy on municipalities, using the City of Alexandria Virginia as a Case Study. His Capstone project examines the shortage of policies directed toward urban food production–and he advocates for the need to consider the role of diverse stakeholders–including property owners and non property owning municipal residents, urban developers, food and social justice advocates, and municipal agencies–in the work of creating structures that support increased food production in urban areas…or as he says, “production closer to the need.”

28 min
2025-07-14

Fiber Hemp for Ohio Farmers

Sasha Sigetic is an agricultural educator, farmer, craftsman, herbalist, and mother, who runs Black Locust Livestock and Herbal as well as currently serving as the Program Director for the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. Her Capstone project explores hemp as an ecologically valuable crop with viable market opportunities for Ohio farmers which include policy revisions, investments in adequate processing facilities, expanding farmer education, and the creation of farmer cooperatives.

29 min
2025-06-11

Supporting Cultural Foodways Within Community Nutrition Programs

Jez Vedua-Cardenas currently resides in Southeast Michigan, where she was born and raised. Jez is a Registered Dietitian (RD) and an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), and works with WIC (a supplemental nutrition program of the USDA for Women, Infants, and Children.) Through her work, Jez realized there was a knowledge gap among many health and wellness professionals working with immigrant communities. Drawing on her own experiences growing up as a Filipino-American, and surveying the experiences of others–mothers in particular–she created educational materials for nutrition professionals that highlight traditional Filipino foodways. She emphasizes the connections between food, identity, and what it means to nurture and show love, and examines how assimilation pressures and modern food practices can impact eating patterns and health issues.

33 min
2025-05-07

The Experiential Guide to Food Systems Literacy

In this episode, Olivia Rovang talks about the ways Experiential Education is critical to Food Systems literacy–understanding this type of literacy as an essential aspect of incentivizing stakeholdership and change within the sustainable food systems movement. Her Capstone project produced a comprehensive reference guide for individuals, communities, educators—anyone interested in increasing their sustainable food systems literacy through experiential hands-on learning activities focusing on systems thinking methodologies.

24 min
2025-04-11

Sobre La Mesa (On The Table): An exploration of Food & Culture

Courtney Buzzard (she/her) is a M.S. of Sustainable Food Systems Candidate at Prescott College. She is the proud daughter of a long history of farmers on her father’s side and her mother, a Nicaraguan immigrant to the United States. Beginning with a B.A. in Sustainably from Arizona State University, Courtney has long fostered a passion for environmental and social justice. She has worked for over a decade in the food and beverage industry, deepening her love of food and cooking. Courtney aims to inspire the communities of the Latin American diaspora to reincorporate cultural cuisine into their homes through her work. She lives in Arizona with her cat Frankie, where she aims to create meaningful change by improving cultural food access in low-income and immigrant communities. The land she lives and works on is home to the Hohokam and Tohono O’odham peoples.

24 min
2025-01-16

The Small Farms Biodiversity Toolkit

Food, nature and people have always been MaryEllen’s passions, and her sustainable food systems work seeks the flourishing of all three. Co-founding a community garden over ten years ago opened her to synergies in natural systems and ways humans could cooperate with them. She recently started a small urban farm in Indianapolis with her husband that provides endless opportunities to support an ecological system where organisms collaborate. MaryEllen believes that humans can join that elegant dance to create a just, thriving food system.

24 min
2024-11-12

Using GIS to Make Food Systems Data Accessible

Focused on the Olympic Peninsula bioregion in Washington State, this project addresses limited local food procurement, affordable food access and limited non-direct marketing opportunities for small and mid-sized producers by developing a participatory value chain coordination model. She creates a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-oriented data gathering and visualization tool for rural food systems that addresses a multitude of social, logistical, and economic challenges faced by regional food systems in rural settings.

27 min

Celebrating a more just and sustainable food system.

Creator

Prescott College
Years Active

2020 - 2025
Episodes

39
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Prescott College
Show Website

The Capstone