Building Food Sovereign Campuses: A Practical Approach

Universities can be leaders in sustainability by building food sovereign campuses and communities. Instead, universities across Canada are contributing to unsustainable and unjust food practices by hiring multinational corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, Chartwells-Compass) that externalize social and environmental costs. The intern will continue the research from their Ph.D. dissertation about building food sovereign campuses and work with the Concordia Food Coalition to establish a viable alternative approach based in social economy. The Concordia Food Coalition has made agreements with the Concordia Student Union and Concordia administration to create a feasibility study to make the case for a social enterprise to take over the foodservice contract in 2026. This project will work with campus-community food organizations to build the internal structure that will mobilize personnel and resources to establish the social enterprise. The intern will also conduct research with other ‘alternative’ community-based university foodservice organizations to understand best practices in governance, finance, labour and structure. The information will be used to develop the new social food enterprise, to contribute to scholarly debates in the field of food studies and create a manuscript for a book about building food sovereign campuses.

Faculty Supervisor:

Bengi Akbulut

Student:

Partner:

Concordia Food Coalition

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Agriculture and Food; Social Innovation; Commercial Services

University:

Concordia University

Program: