NATALIE CASSIDY
Sustainable Food Systems Advocate
About Me
Learn about what drives my passion for social justice, food access equality, and community resilience.
I am a driven self-starter utilizing my diverse learning experiences to pursue a fulfilling career engaging with local food systems to achieve healthy, inclusive, and resilient communities.
My effective dedication to achieving food justice initiatives is demonstrated in my extensive experience studying and working in the field. My experience with social innovation, social entrepreneurship, and utilizing systems thinking confirms my commitment to finding innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions to social justice issues, including poverty, homelessness, racial injustice, and hunger.
My extensive international experiences attest to my ability to quickly adapt to new situations and work cohesively with people of diverse backgrounds. Fostered by living, working, studying, and traveling in Latin America, my advanced Spanish language competencies have given me additional opportunities to engage with diverse communities, both internationally and domestically.
Personal Statement
Learn about my journey towards becoming a sustainable food systems advocate.
While most of my active engagement in promoting sustainable food justice has taken place in my adulthood, growing up in an agriculturally-rich community has deeply influenced my values and ways I have grown to understand and appreciate food systems. Raised in an area of New Jersey surrounded by a healthy food community, I was constantly reminded of the origins of my food, importance of local food systems, and the privilege of accessibility to such food. Reflecting on the way these childhood experiences shaped my understanding of food and society initially drove my interest in farm-based youth education.
My first year at Dickinson I began volunteering for one of the Dickinson College Farm’s education programs, and by my sophomore year, I was hired to lead Sustainable Earth Education (SEED), another farm-based youth education program which offers classes to local community groups. While I was enthusiastic to play a part in forming children’s understanding of sustainable food and farming, I recognized that further engagement with parents and the surrounding community is also a necessity recognized the need to expand the scope of SEED’s community impact. Now as a senior in my second year leading the program, through outreach initiatives I strive to make SEED more accessible to a diverse range of community groups, especially those that may not otherwise have access to hands-on farm-based, natural environment, or sustainability experiences.
I now offer SEED courses in Spanish and have classes where families learn alongside their children more available as an option. In addition to working with scout troops and homeschool classes, I have also partnered with a variety of afterschool programs, such as ESL tutoring and the Salvation Army programs, to provide a diversity of children with hands-on experience in their local food system. Additionally, through curriculum design and implementation, this position has given me invaluable experience in communicating the values of local to food diverse populations and has improved my awareness and importance of community inclusion.​​
Reflecting back, I am able to see the ways in which early childhood experiences have shaped my understanding of local food systems. I hope to help foster that for others.
Though my passion for food justice has been fostered through a variety of life experiences, I have bolstered this passion through rigorous academic engagement. Seeking to better understand the complexities in our local and global food systems, I declared a double major in Environmental Studies and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, with a concentration in sustainable food systems. While my coursework has given me a holistic perspective on sustainable food systems, helped me identify present-day social and policy challenges, and allowed me to recognize intrinsic connections to other social justice issues, I felt a deeper understanding on how to enact effective, sustainable change to address such issues was lacking; thus, I also declared a certificate in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which has taught me how to design and implement innovative and effective solutions to address the root causes of societal issues such as poverty and food justice.
This certificate culminated in the completion of a semester-long senior research project focused on the issue of homelessness and poverty in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Utilizing systems thinking, my four classmates and I worked as a team to examined the state of homelessness in the greater Carlisle area. To accompany our understanding of homelessness in the Carlisle community, we conducted research on innovative approaches implemented in communities nationwide. We then worked collaboratively to create a comprehensive community report to describe the state of homelessness as we have come to understand it through our research, which also includes useful, accessible, and appropriate recommendations for local organizations, all of which were involved in our research process, to support their work in reducing the occurrence and impacts of homelessness. This project helped me understand the complexity required by coordinated community effort while simultaneously underscoring its importance. The certificate and project also reiterated the importance of avoiding quick-fix band-aid solutions to focus efforts and resources on solutions that address root causes of societal issues. I would use the skills I developed from this experience in my career to engage in collaborative projects and to identify, research, and implement solutions for sustainable, community-wide change.
My extensive, diverse, and immersive international experiences have greatly influenced the way I will work in this field. From experiencing food systems in action in a variety of contexts and cultures, I have learned about promoting positive change in local food systems while honoring local culture, establishments, and society. These international experiences have vastly changed my perspectives on
“one size fits all” solutions, and I have truly come to understand the need to understand and honor the needs of each community. Not only have I myself learned to adapt to different environments, my extensive experience abroad has also taught me how to adopt an open mind in new situations. This quality will aid me in this field as I must adapt and learn about the community and organization in which I am working to better understand the context of my work, while also preventing myself from falling into quick-fix solutions or making assumptions based on past experiences.
Personal Values
Learn about the values that drive my passion for social justice, food access equality, and community resilience.
SUSTAINABILITY
Social, environmental, economic
SUSTAINABILITY
COMMUNITY
Social, environmental, economic
COMMUNITY
EQUITY
Social, environmental, economic
EQUITY
DIVERSITY
Social, environmental, economic
DIVERSITY
EMPATHY
Social, environmental, economic
EMPATHY
JUSTICE
Social, environmental, economic
JUSTICE
UNDERSTANDING
Social, environmental, economic
UNDERSTANDING
RESILIENCE
Social, environmental, economic
RESILIENCE
Call for Action
Why we must demand systemic change to create a sustainable future for ourselves, our communities, and our environment.
Hunger, poverty, homelessness, and racism are not isolated incidents; rather, such complex societal issues are symptoms of flaws in a larger system, which occurs on a much larger scale than it may appear. Considering this understanding, creating and implementing sustainable, effective solutions must not act on isolated incidents; effective intervention requires widespread societal change. While we can see the importance of grassroots movement in creating a demand for change, often such widespread change also requires additional support to achieve change.
Access to nutritious food is a basic human right. Established in the United States’ Constitution is the duty of the government to “establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility…promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Thus, our government has a duty to promote policies that work to eradicate barriers to healthy and culturally appropriate food access. Policies and services, such as the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 and SNAP are crucial in bridging the gap between advocacy and justice. Having worked at the farm stand at our local farmer’s market, I have seen firsthand the benefits of SNAP. Not only do SNAP benefits increase the accessibility of healthy choices found at farmers markets, they also help promote local food systems. Without ensuring access to basic necessities, such as food and nutrition, it becomes increasingly challenging to break cycles of poverty and inequality; therefore, such programs are necessary to advance society towards future in which hunger and food instability are eradicated; the government should and must support this endeavor.
