SEMG Film Showing & Panel Discussion – Everyone Welcome!
Sunday, January 19th, 2025 | 12:30 pm
RSVP at http://www.tinyurl.com/BUCfilm
LOCATION: Birmingham Unitarian Church
38651 N. Woodward, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48301
MOVIE TIME! Do you perhaps remember seeing Kiss the Ground—an award-winning film—that explores how climate change alters our food systems, and how farming can help mitigate these impacts? In case you missed it, the movie shares how regenerative farming can help stabilize the earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems, and significantly increase our food supply.
Now, Common Ground is the highly-anticipated sequel to Kiss the Ground. Common Ground profiles a positive and uplifting movement of white, black and indigenous farmers who are using alternative—regenerative—models of agriculture that can help balance the climate, save our health, and stabilize America’s economy, hopefully before it is too late. Common Ground depicts a web of money, power, and politics behind our broken food system. It has won awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Boston Film Festival, the Golden Lion International Film Festival, and more.
Regenerative farming is another opportunity to slow down global warming while helping farmers produce healthier food and reduce the use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers that cause harm to the environment and humans.
Chelsea Skonieczny, The Farm at Trinity Health Oakland
Chelsea is an organic farmer in Holly, MI and Food Program Coordinator for The Farm. Trinity Health believes that food is medicine and lives that mission through their hospital-based farm programs at their Ypsilanti and Pontiac locations. This regional program connects thousands of people annually to the healing power of cultivating and eating nutritious, local food. Learn more at www.trinityhealthmichigan.org/thefarm
Bryan Smigielski Sierra Club Campaign Organizer in Detroit.
Bryan is a lifelong environmental activist, systems theorist, and educator on environmental issues. Bryan is deeply committed to an organizing style that serves to amplify the voices of others. Bryan’s organizing is aimed at shifting from despair into systemic transformation. Instead of leading from the top down, he aims to facilitate our collective intelligence and our ability to work in a communal way to bring about cohesive and purposeful action. In Detroit, Bryan has spent his recent years leading environmental education initiatives in schools, engaging tens of thousands of students through dynamic presentations that inspired environmental justice activism and supported communities overburdened by industrial polluters with strategic nutrition and health education.
Erin Preston Johnson, Sierra Club Community Organizer Detroit.
Mama Erin honed her skills as an organizer and activist during her enrollment at the University of Michigan, where she served as President of the campus NAACP and earned a B.A. in History. She went on to the Howard University of Law where she graduated as the President of her class and has practiced law in the District of Columbia and Michigan for 17 years. Erin believes in intentional cultivation of the land, her family, her community and her village. Being a musician, grower, educator, community leader and mother, all inform her work leading the Urban Forest School, a free, outdoor, nature-based, culturally rooted program for BIPOC Detroit children under 12, as well as her other community endeavors. Mama Erin is a co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, current board president of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN) and a Board Member at the Black to the Land Coalition. She is also a member-owner of the Detroit People's Food Co-op.
Christy McGillivray, Legislative and Political Director
Christy will discuss the importance of being politically engaged, as emphasized by the Sierra Club, which highlights that protecting the environment and advancing sustainability require active participation of all in the political process. They stress the power of collective action and encourage individuals to vote, advocate for eco-friendly policies, and hold leaders accountable to ensure a healthier, more equitable planet for future generations.