We are grateful to CAN Co-Founder Steve Gliessman for his many contributions as he steps down from his role as Board Chair. During his tenure, he established agroecology as the organization’s guiding tenet, built a network of researchers, reached hundreds of people through the International Agroecology Shortcourse, and connected students and community members to our work. Steve will continue to serve as a Board Member, and we appreciate his continued support in this role. We welcome Sonja Swift as CAN’s new Board Chair; her commitment to justice and dignity for land-based peoples will propel CAN forward.  

Dear Friends,

Just like its partners, CAN continues to build its organizational strength. As we uphold the founders’ original mission to sustain rural livelihoods and environments through agroecology, we rise up to the injustices created by the corporate-controlled food system. Together, with our partners, we build on nearly 20 years of work to co-create agroecology knowledge and action, accompanying community-led efforts to defend cultures, seeds, and land. The next generation will lead this work.

CAN was founded as a way to transform research findings into direct action for food systems change. For over 20 years, CAN has grown its Network with participatory and democratic processes, and has facilitated skill-sharing and knowledge exchange among grassroots communities, cooperatives, researchers, students and consumers. We have strengthened and co-created agroecology knowledge and practice about ways to diversify food systems, protect local environments and make sure every farm family has food for their own table. It has been a remarkable and rewarding journey.

CAN is an important part of the agroecology movement, while at the same time maintaining respect for the long-standing agricultural knowledge of indigenous peoples that prefaced the term itself and helped lead to its formation. With a vision of unifying efforts to protect and revitalize earth knowledge, soil health, seed diversity and community life, CAN values authentic depth of relationships with communities, the way academic rigor is coupled with valuing the knowledge of lived experience, and the dedicated focus on women and youth.

We both look forward, in our new roles, to working closely with CAN to further strengthen this network of people with deep commitments to caretaking the land and caring for one another.

 

Adelante,

Steve and Sonja

More about Sonja Swift

Sonja hails from foothills along Los Osos creek, California in the homelands of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash. She co-directs Windrose Fund of Common Counsel Foundation and works as Program Advisor for Swift Foundation. She has consistently advocated for more accountability and coherency in the field of philanthropy and that funding go to organizations led by people with lived experience. She also serves on the boards of the Colorado Plateau Foundation and Oakland Institute. Writing is her artistic medium, both creative nonfiction and poetry. She is a good hand at farm work, and remains committed to caretaking orchards, fields, oak groves and grassland while also, together with her husband and son, calls home in the unceded territory of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, in He Sápa, the Black Hills, South Dakota. Sonja is honored to serve as Board Chair and join the strong team of women leading CAN as their peer and compañera. 

More about Steve Gliessman

With graduate degrees in Botany and Ecology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Steve has accumulated more than 50 years of teaching, research, and production experience in the field of agroecology. His international experiences in tropical and temperate agriculture, small-farm and large-farm systems, traditional and conventional farm management, hands-on and academic activities, non-profit and business employment, and organic farming have provided a unique combination of experiences and perspectives that have shaped is view as an agroecologist.  He was the founding director of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Agroecology Program, one of the first formal agroecology programs in the world, and was the Alfred and Ruth Heller Professor of Agroecology in the Department of Environmental Studies at UCSC until his retirement in 2012. He co-founded CAN and will continue to serve on its board of directors. He is the editor of the international journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and dry farms organic wine grapes and olives with his wife Robbie in northern Santa Barbara County, California.