Maria Polzin
Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) Project (University of Cape Town)
Cape Town, South Africa
My name is Maria Polzin, and I am a rising senior in Gallatin studying how emotions are politicized along the intersections of race, gender, and environmental studies. I have interned at the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, and I run an ongoing project entitled Survivors, which uses the arts to empower survivors of sexual assault. While much of my work has focused on combating violence, I believe no social justice issue can be divorced from the environment. I am interested in learning more about how certain relationships with the environment are formed, politicized, and amplified or ignored in political discourse. Food insecurity, particularly, exemplifies viable grounds to explore such intersections between people, politics, and the environment.
As I began to explore food insecurity in America, I noticed much of the contemporary dialogue focuses on the absence of grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. This approach can be effective in terms of mapping food deserts; however, too much of a focus on supermarkets risks overlooking the nuanced ways people obtain and produce food outside of the formal economy. Furthermore, there are many instances when supermarkets cannot effectively address food insecurity. For example, community members may lack time or money, or they may have cultural preferences regarding what they eat and from whom they purchase food.
A human rights approach to food insecurity can begin to frame the right to food within these larger contexts through the understanding that all rights are interconnected. How does realizing the right to food limit or promote one’s right to participate in the cultural life of community, the right to environmental security, amongst others? Centering the voices of individuals most affected by food insecurity throughout the exploration of such intersections has the potential to illuminate sustainable solutions to food insecurity because community members know best when and where certain rights should be prioritized.
I am thankful for the opportunity to go to South Africa in May, where I will be interning with the Community Systems Strengthening (CSS) for Health Project at the University of Cape Town. CSS is a three-year project that aims to model how strengthening community networking and capacity, particularly with a leadership role played by health committees, can sustainably address some of the threats to health in three specific communities, with a vision of rolling out the model to other sites beyond the life of the project. South Africa provides a unique context for CSS because South Africa has one of the few constitutions in the world that includes extensive socio-economic rights, such as the right to access food and health systems. CSS calls on these rights to both foster community engagement and demand policy reform.
In efforts to support the project in centering the voices of community members, I will be compiling an oral history archive that explores community members’ and community stakeholders’ engagement with food and food security. Employing what I learn through the interviews, I will begin drafting workshop outlines that trained community volunteers can make use of to initiate dialogues around the democratization of food systems. Throughout this process, I will volunteer to assist community activists with work on food gardens and food security advocacy.
While I have been preparing for this research through my academic studies, I understand I am entering these spaces as an outsider, so I have few concerns regarding what community members will say or what relationships they may or may not want to have with me. By keeping an open mind, I seek to act as a facilitator of dialogue rather than a teacher so that the community members can be the experts in their own lives.