As the year comes to a close, we are grateful for our resiliency as an organization. We remain deeply committed to our mission and work and we hope that you will be here with us in 2022. Please make a donation to LAJF to help sustain our programs. It is the financial support that we receive from people like you that enables us to provide opportunities for personal growth for our participants like Sarah. Please take a few minutes to read her story and make a donation to LAJF as we prepare for 2022.
Creating community through food justice
Sarah S., CRS ‘19, ‘21, Oakland, California
Through Camp Rising Sun, Sarah discovered that her authentic leadership style is rooted in self-reliance or the ability to have faith in oneself and maintain that sense of self within a group.
Sarah has attended both our in-person Camp and returned as a second year camper and co-facilitator in our Virtual programs. These two different experiences have helped her to approach the world by taking other people into consideration. She believes that compassionate leadership opens up new possibilities for how we interact with others, and she put this into practice when she led her fellow campers in our virtual workshops. As a leader, she accounts for everyone involved, and doesn’t act in isolation.
In her own life after Camp, she is using these learnings to lead by example. One of her biggest passions is making a difference through food justice, which is creating access to healthy, delicious, and ethically produced food for all. Throughout the pandemic, Sarah and a friend cooked meals for unstably housed members of their community, using leftover organic produce from local grocery stores. This demonstrates her commitment to thinking of others and being a part of a collective working towards the greater good.
While working to create change, she relies on the lesson she gained from CRS, which is that having a passionate and hardworking community makes anything possible: “I hope to explore food justice on an even more sustainable and wide scale using tools and values from Camp.”