Institute For The Future

IFTF's Food Futures Lab and Real Food Real Stories host picnic with Navina Khanna

On Tuesday, August 15 at 6pm the Institute for the Future’s Food Futures Lab will be hosting Navina Khanna of the HEAL Food Alliance as part of the community speaker series organized by Real Food Real Stories. The event will be a fascinating discussion guided by Navina’s own personal stories of how she is transforming the food system in our country – a daunting but imperative task. As Navina herself says, however, “if it isn’t daunting, it isn’t worth doing.”

(Get your tickets below!)

Navina is both an empathetic community organizer who is making real change at a local scale, and an unstoppable advocate for putting food issues at the forefront of political discourse. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked to improve sustainability and justice in the way we produce and eat food through various organizations and projects.

In 2014, Navina won a James Beard Leadership award for her achievements as a food justice activist, and since then has established the HEAL Food Alliance to continue her work. HEAL is a local non-profit that convenes cross-sector players from across the food and ag space. Its name hints at the wide range of people that the organization brings together: stakeholders in Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor.

The distinguishing theme of Navina’s work is her ability to view problems within the way we produce, sell, and eat food at a systems level without losing sight of the individuals who make the wheels turn at a local level. At HEAL, ‘food justice’ is an expansive term; it necessitates not only community participation, but also aligned political leadership and business integrity. The failing parts of our food system echo throughout the entire country’s health and wellbeing outcomes – both food insecurity and obesity, and both high-yield industrial agriculture and lack of food access for low-income families are results of the same problems. While single-issue critiques of the food system are easily digestible, Navina and HEAL don’t go for the low-hanging fruit – they have a holistic vision of what the future food system can and should look like.

Within the Institute for the Future (IFTF), the Food Futures Lab connects with food changemakers like Navina to understand possibilities for our food system in the coming decade. As futurists, we consider the way complex futures can grow from simple changes to the present. People like Navina, who work to make their preferable futures into reality, are perfect examples of the power of futures-thinking. Our 2017 research is Eating for Change - Transforming the Next Decade Through Food, and will explore the new behaviors, strategies, and innovations from others like Navina from around the world who are using food as their medium to make change in the world. 

We’re excited for Navina Khanna to share her insights next month, and we hope you’ll join us in a night of storytelling to understanding the current food system. Given her unique perspective and layered background, expect to end the night with a belly full of good food and plenty of inspiration to help improve our future food system.

Event details:

Join us as we listen to how Navina is transforming our food system!

Tue, Aug 15, 2017
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
201 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto [map]
*don't forget to bring ID

Get your tickets!