Last week I met the newest face on the Northside, a young organizer based at the Hive on Calhoun Street. His name is Alistair Hall, and he’s from New Jersey.
Oops. No. This is Alistair.
He’s not orange from spray tanning, doesn’t appear to own hair gel, and isn’t a guido. Far from it, in fact. Alistair is a recent Vassar graduate.
Not impressed? You should be. I am, and I don’t impress easily.
For the uninformed, Vassar is one of the legendary group of prestigious private liberal arts colleges for women known as the Seven Sisters. Unlike the other sisters, Vassar is now co-ed. The others, with the exception of one that has merged with Harvard, are still women only. The Seven Sisters are all counterparts to the formerly male-only universities known as the Ivy League. Prior to becoming co-ed, Vassar’s trustees rejected a merger with Ivy League sibling university, Yale. Seriously. They said no to Yale.
When I asked him why he chose Vassar, I found out that he’d been swimming competitively since middle school, and Vassar offered him the best opportunity to continue that sporting activity. When it came to what he liked about Vassar, “There are no core classes we had to take, we were free to explore and take whatever classes we liked.” That is a true liberal arts education. He also noted that the school has a nice campus.
He majored in Urban Studies, with a focus on grassroots sustainability.
While he was in college he interned one summer in Washington, D.C., doing policy work on public transit. While he was there, during the summer of 2009, he noted, “I saw the climate bill collapse and fall apart due to a lack of government action.” It was then that he decided, “there has to be a better way.”
According to a recent piece on the Huffington Post, the 2012 Farm Bill is a Climate Bill. Which brings us to what on earth someone like Alistair would be doing in a town like Battle Creek, Michigan?
Alistair is participating in Green Corps, a “field school for environmental organizing” according to their website, whose mission is to “teach the next generation of environmental leaders the strategies and skills they’ll need to win tomorrow’s environmental battles”. As a result, he is assigned to Food and Water Watch, a non-profit which “works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainably produced.”
Food and Water Watch is running a campaign to lobby for a Fair Farm Bill. Battle Creek is one of a number of cities in Michigan who have an organizer resident in our community. Alistair will be here for the next couple of months, organizing, lobbying, and working to ensure that the new Farm Bill ensures that the family farms which have been dying out rapidly over the last few decades in favor of factory farmers like Monsanto are able to compete against the corporate juggernauts which not only control our food system, but use farming practices that are unsustainable, questionable, cruel and downright unhealthy.
These are issues that local organizations like Good Food BC and the Fair Food Network have been working to make us aware of, by screening documentaries like Fresh and Food Inc. I grew up around small farmers and I have seen some documentaries on factory farming before, and those were pretty tame to me, but shocking to some who hadn’t seen what happens when you scale farming up to that level.
Alistair is working on scheduling the screening of another documentary as part of the Fair Farm Bill campaign. He is also preparing for the kickoff event of the campaign on January 19, from 7:00 to 8:00 pm at First United Methodist Church, in the fellowship hall.
I’d recommend this kickoff event to local activists interested in doing some organizing and learning some skills, as part of the activities will be breakout sessions which include training on organizing. So, come out and welcome Alistair to our activist community, learn something new, and enjoy refreshments, as well.
You can also say hello to Alistair at the Michigan Family Farms Conference on Saturday, January 14 at Lakeview High School, from 8:00 am to 4:40 pm. He will be tabling there. Say hi to me, too. I’ll be there with my camera.
