Episode 1: Rachel Chadderdon Bair - at the intersection of food, healthcare, economy and environment
Rachel Chadderdon Bair, Photo credit: Jacqueline Luttrell
Guest: Rachel Chadderdon Bair, Director for Sustainable and Innovative Food Systems, Kalamazoo Valley Community College
Kalamazoo, MI
Host: Dave Karlsgodt, Principal, Fovea, LLC, Seattle, WA
Co-Host: Greg Farley, Professor of Biological Science and Director of the Chesapeake College Center for Leadership in Environmental Education, Wye Mills, MD
Production Assistance:
Kristen Thompson
Overview
What happens when a community college, a hospital, a mental health care service, and a city government convene around one idea? This episode, Dave Karlsgodt and co-host Greg Farley sit down with the Director for Sustainable and Innovative Food Systems at Kalamazoo College, Rachel Chadderon Bair, who is working at the center of just such a collaboration.
Rachel is helping build a program at Kalamazoo’s Bronson Healthy Living Campus that’s aimed at helping the next generation of workers in the food system to understand the nexus of food, health, the economy, sustainability, and community. Her ultimate goal? A complete remodeling of the food system in southwest Michigan. For now, though, she’s focused on bringing more stability to the program and developing projects over the next five years that maximize collaborations between local farmers, the school, and the hospital. Rachel describes her successes and challenges thus far, answers questions about course transferability, funding, institutional constraints, business practices, and the challenges of running a farm without consistent care over weekends and holidays. At the heart of all this is the question: what does it take to change a food system?
Resources
Bronson Healthy Living Campus: https://www.kvcc.edu/healthyliving/
Episode Transcript:
The following is an automated transcription of this episode which will include errors and omissions. You can listen and follow along with the text here:https://otter.ai/s/QAOpjkyORKmNyf6d0MCx4Q
You can find a text-only version of the transcript here: