A growing leader in sustainability
You are what you eat. Thanks to new funding, Concordia students will have access to more healthy, local and sustainable food choices on campus.
Concordia is one of the first recipients of a J.W. McConnell Family Foundation Institutional Food Fund grant. Created in January, the grant encourages sustainable food strategies in Canada’s public institutions.
Concordia will use the $60,000 grant towards creating a new, two-year contract position — a sustainable food system coordinator — within the Department of Environmental Health and Safety.
“This person will work with the university’s contracted food services provider as well as on-campus student initiatives and student-run food services to identify local purchasing needs and opportunities and to develop local and sustainable procurement strategies to meet them,” explains Mikayla Wujec, BA 12, interim sustainability coordinator, Department of Environmental Health and Safety, and part of the team that applied for the funding.
From left: Chantal Forgues, Mikayla Wujec, Dominique Croteau and Pietro Gasparrini | Credit: Concordia University
She hopes the new sustainable food system coordinator will also develop a reporting system to track and scale the amount of healthy, local and sustainable food served at Concordia.
“There were already lots of different people doing amazing things on campus, but looking at how other universities made the transition to a localized and sustainable food system, we realized it was important to create a specific job to hold that responsibility,” says Wujec.
The coordinator will also reach out to local farmers and other suppliers, organize events like harvest festivals and get input from students on what foods they want to eat.
“When you think sustainability, you think about environmental, economic and social elements,” Wujec says. “That means taking diverse issues such as feminism and indigenous rights along with sustainable food strategies and the environment into consideration with every decision.”
Looking ahead to the 2015 expiry of Concordia’s food services contract with Chartwells, the Office of the Vice-President, Services, set up a Food Advisory Working Group in 2013 to provide recommendations on evaluating food services providers.
It was through research for the Food Advisory Working Group that Wujec, at the time working for Concordia’s Sustainable Action Fund, discovered the Institutional Food Fund grant, a new arm of the McConnell Foundation’s Sustainable Food Systems initiative.
A team effort was required to successfully secure the funding. Wujec and her colleagues in the Department of Environmental Health and Safety, Pietro Gasparini, director; Chantal Forgues, sustainability coordinator; and Dominique Croteau, sustainability analyst; teamed up with Sabrina Lavoie, executive director of Budget Planning and Business Development and associate director of Hospitality Concordia Johanne De Cubellis.
“Right now in Quebec we have so much access to amazing local produce, so we’re really excited about having someone who can help Concordia move towards increased local and sustainable procurement,” says Wujec.
The Institutional Food Fund mandates that recipients share lessons learned with other institutions. So Wujec and Concordia's food contract administrator Sylvie Lacelle will join other fund recipients at a Learning Group from October 14 to 16 in Montreal.
Food Secure Canada, a McConnell Foundation partner on this grant, will also provide technical support for sustainable procurement strategies.