2016 FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Award Ceremony honoring Aileen Suzara, Oct 31

“Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape” by Lauret Savoy is a keynote for this event.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Join us as we honor Aileen Suzara and celebrate the potential of scholarship to transform the world and of activism to transform the academy. Keynote: “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape” by Lauret Savoy.

Brief speaker bios:

Lauret Edith Savoy is Professor of Environmental Studies and Geology, Mount Holyoke College. Her life and work draw from her need to put the eroded world into language, to re–member fragmented pasts into present. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she explores the stories we tell of the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. For her, writing of the complex intertwinings of natural and cultural histories is a way of seeking home among the ruins and shards that surround us all. Lauret’s newest book is Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint Press 2015), winner of the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Among her many other publications is the co-edited (with Alison Hawthorne Deming) The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions 2015), which includes an essay by Aileen Suzara.

Aileen Suzara, the 2016 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner, is a land- and kitchen-based educator with roots in the environmental justice and community health movements. An alumna of UC Berkeley's Masters in Public Health Nutrition, she is passionate about helping young people grow as ecologically-minded, culturally-literate leaders in the Good Food Movement. Collaborating with Filipino Advocates for Justice (FAJ), Aileen supported the launch of Bahay Kubo, a garden in Union City that builds upon FAJ's youth leadership model with hands-on experiences in growing and sharing healthy Filipino food. In 2015, the project placed first in the Big Ideas@Berkeley competition.She is an advisory member to the Filipino American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity and an eco-culinary educator with Sama Sama Cooperative, which works to "reclaim language, culture, and land-based traditions." She is hard at work on Sariwa (Fresh), a sustainable Filipino foods business that connects traditionally-inspired diets and entrepreneurship as a tool for change. Developed as a pop-up restaurant at Berkeley's Eat.Think.Design health innovations course, Sariwa is now a proud participant in the La Cocina women's food incubator.

For more information on the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, please visit http://issi.berkeley.edu/yamashita-prize.