The Capstone

Prescott College
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  • FOOD
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Celebrating a more just and sustainable food system.

  1. Reconnecting Children to Their Food

    10/06/2025

    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
  2. Food Policy and Urban Food Security

    08/01/2025

    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
  3. Fiber Hemp for Ohio Farmers

    07/14/2025

    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
  4. Supporting Cultural Foodways Within Community Nutrition Programs

    06/11/2025

    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

  5. 05/07/2025

    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

  6. 04/11/2025

    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

  7. 01/16/2025

    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
  8. Using GIS to Make Food Systems Data Accessible

    11/12/2024

    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
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About

Celebrating a more just and sustainable food system.

Information

  • Creator
    Prescott College
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2025
  • Episodes
    39
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Prescott College
  • Show Website
    The Capstone