WISCASSET

Chewonki and the Morris Farm Trust will host “Local Food, Local Hunger,” a public forum that will engage the community of Lincoln County in conversations about food security. The event will take place at the Chewonki Center for Environmental Education in Wiscasset from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m this Saturday.

The forum will address the current state of food insecurity in Lincoln County, and also encourage important discussions among nonprofit and government nutrition related agencies, educational institutions and students, farmers and growers, food pantries and food-insecure individuals.

“Both Chewonki and Morris Farm sit at a really particular intersection of education and agriculture,” said Megan Phillips, an educator and farm manager at Chewonki. “This is an exciting opportunity to bring together local community members and people who want to be change agents or act as change agents in the realm of food security issues or hunger relief and prevention issues around the state.”

Phillips hoped this would be the first of a three-year forum, with a primary focus on establishing the state of food security in the region, and also launching an effort to support the changes that need to be made.

The forum is made possible by a three-year Americorps VISTA position at Morris Farm.

“The VISTA project focus is on developing a food security initiative at the farm,” said Greta Huff, a full-time VISTA member at Morris Farm. “Planning a forum on food security was a part of the VISTA project plan that was developed by one of the current co-presidents of Morris Farm.”

Huff reached out to Chewonki as a resource because the two Wiscasset organizations share similarities in farming and nonprofit goals, as the Morris Farm serves the community as a working farm and education center, and Chewonki provides nature-based education programs to 8- to 18- year-old students.

Chewonki provided the space for the forum, as their building will allow large group presentations and small group breakout sessions, according to Huff.

Deborah Cook, the interim director of Advancement and Communications at Chewonki, said the food forum aligns with the organization’s three pronged mission — providing opportunities for transformative growth, challenging people to build thriving sustainable communities, and encouraging appreciation and stewardship of the natural world.

Chewonki’s intersection with hunger relief was always an abstract goal, according to Phillips. The solution was prompted by a semester student’s human ecology project on farms that grew food for food pantries and hunger relief organizations.

The project involved growing two rows of vegetables at Chewonki for St. Philip’s Church Food Pantry in Wiscasset this past summer.

Phillips also noted that in her “Farm and Food Systems” class, conversations on hunger relief shifted from pointing fingers and seeing hunger relief as “someone else’s problem” to focusing on how the students could make a difference.

“I think it’s powerful for them to be involved with real world issues that are connected to place,” she added.

The purpose of the forum on Saturday is to start these conversations with the community.

“What we don’t know today, and may not know Saturday, is how the spark of this awareness translates into their own communities and their own choices of work in the world,” Cook said. “And really the role of the forum is to place it as an important topic of conversation and then create the space for the participants to discover and decide what the next best step is.”

The morning will involve a series of workshops and presentations, while the afternoon will continue dialogue of “how-to” plans to move forward according to what was learned, according to Phillips.

Mark Winne will be the main speaker at the event. Winne is the author of “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” and the co-founder of the City of Hartford Food Policy Commission, the Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the national Community Food Security Coalition, among many other accolades.

Phillips said representatives from University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s Harvest for Hunger, Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program, Veggies for All, and Healthy Lincoln County will also be present to talk about their organizations and explain what inspires them to do the work they do.

“There is a continuum that exists between charity and social change — meeting immediate needs and longterm needs. Both ends of that spectrum and everything that happens in between that continuum are so important,” said Phillips. “And this forum is a really powerful opportunity to begin the conversations that will lead to long-term social change.”

Huff outlined several short- and long-term goals that the Morris Farm Trust hopes to achieve in the community through this forum.

“From the perspective of the community, the shortterm goal is improve knowledge about what food security looks likes in our community, how we are currently combating it, and how we can better coordinate our efforts,” she said. “The longterm goal is to improve the nutritional status of our community members.”

Huff also hoped the forum would establish connections with community partners to better utilize the Morris Farm space, and that it would become a hub that supports partnering organizations, farmers and community members.

“The hope is to increase knowledge in the community about the efforts that are currently working on food security, establish new connections between community partners and to develop new ways to address food security,” she concluded. “And in general to generate energy to continue mobilizing the amazing efforts that already exist in our community.”

The forum is open to the public with a $17 attendance fee that will cover lunch and snack breaks. A subsidized rate of $5 is also available.

Registration for the forum and more information can be found at www.morrisfarm.org.

THE FORUM, at the Chewonki Center for Environmental Education in Wiscasset from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m this Saturday, is open to the public with a $17 attendance fee that will cover lunch and snack breaks. A subsidized rate of $5 is also available. Registration for the forum and more information can be found at www.morrisfarm.org.