Are we more than the sum of our parts? Yes, according to the youth at Kellogg’s Food and Society Conference.

During the youth summit, the participants were guided through a creative exercise that began with finding a metaphor that expressed how they saw their work and ended with the creation of group poems which were then performed creatively for the group. The poems were assembled from phrases picked from free association writings. Each group chose one metaphor to reflect on during this free association session and then combined their phrases to create these insightful, beautiful and deep pieces.

Below you will find a couple of these poems.

Enjoy!

Can you handle the flow?

you can’t give up
you can’t give in
you against the current
“against” - containing again and again
there is always opposition & injustice against diversity
but there will always exist benevolence in life
(more…)

In addition to the winners, we’ve also chosen runner up photos in each category. You will find these selections below. Following the runner up selections is the gallery. I encourage everyone to look through all of the photographs. They each share a unique message about the movement. Enjoy!

The Inspiration

The Humor

The Creative

The Joy

The Sweat

Gallery

At the start of this contest, we set the objective of creating a collection of photos that truly represented the many different facets of the movement: the inspiration, the humor, the creative, the joy, and the sweat. I think you’ll agree after perusing the gallery, this objective has been accomplished.

The winning photos were chosen because of their appeal to the theme of the contest, their appropriateness to a given category, and the quality of their captions. There were many wonderful photos submitted, so this decision was very difficult. We’d like to thank everyone who sent in photos. We are grateful that you shared so many powerful and moving images with us. Due to the volume of photos that were submitted, we were unable to post every photo in the gallery. We did include at least one photo from each contestant, however.

Congratulations to the winners and enjoy the gallery!

The Winning Photos are …

The Creative
“Squash Blossom,” Brett Ramey

The Inspiration
“The Hatching,” Stevie Taylor

The Humor
“My favorite thing,” Hannah Lavold

The Joy
“Growlab Growing,” Helanna Bratman

The Sweat
“Irrigation,” Naomi Davis

The Beauty
“Jam Hands,” Marko Colby

Lucas Foglia has spent the last three years photographing the community around the Somerset Community Garden in Providence, RI (the garden is managed by the Southside Community Land Trust ) . His beautiful photographs not only document the garden and its role in the community, but seek to have a larger impact on the community itself.

Check out this audio slideshow to see some of his photographs, and hear him speak about the work, and the community.

Be sure to turn up the audio on your computer so you hear the soundtrack.

Click here to open the slideshow

Lucas Foglia is a 23 year old photographer in Providence, RI. His work can be found at www.lucasfoglia.com

When some students at the University of British Columbia wanted more access to local and organic foods, they started a co-op, called Sprouts. Lead by a few dynamic students, including BLAST Cadre member Alice Miro, these young people weren’t satisfied with Sprouts mere existence, they wanted everyone to know about it, and join in. 

Alice found local photographer Chloe Lewis and they began discussing what Sprouts ad campaign would look like. They quickly agreed that they were tired of food coops and other “crunchy” enterprises having “crunchy” looking advertising. They wanted ads that were just as slick, savvy, and appealing as any other ad that students ad UBC might be bombarded with. At the same time they wanted to reflect their values in the ads by showing “models” who represented the diversity of students at the university.

Their brain child was a campaign with the tagline “Embrace Local”, featuring the pictures you see above, and a campaign of posters based on them. Photographed against a white sheet using a digital camera, a couple late nights with photoshop, e voila!