vue - New Economy Cultivation: Growing Community-Based Business Solutions

Growing Community-based Business Solutions explores a model developed by CoFED.org to startup and grow food businesses on national campuses as a way of inciting change in the local food system. Learn from their "Five Building Blocks for Success" model that intertwines five critical elements for initiating and developing a community-based business: "Heart", "Sunlight", "Hands", "Fertile Ground" and "Water". Join this conversation coming from Oakland, where the community-based food movement has been vitally active since the 1960s. This is the final in Meridian University's webinar series produced as part of the Emergent Thinking in the Creative Economy course in the Integral MBA in Creative Enterprise and open to students and the public. This series is hosted by Nika Quirk, core faculty for the Integral MBA program. OUR PRESENTER Farzana Serang, CoFED.org. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Farzana Serang is proud to join CoFED as its first Executive Director in 2012. She brings a diverse set of skills and advocacy expertise rooted in 10 years of cultivating and managing strategic cross-sector relationships, coalitions, and partnerships. She has used her leadership development experience to strengthen the impact of triple bottom line initiatives that provide equitable benefit for people, the planet, and the economy. Most recently Farzana worked with PolicyLink, where she helped build a national online platform to showcase asset-building strategies, best practices, and efforts to build lifelong economic security. She also recently worked as a consultant for the Democracy Collaborative, researching innovations in anchor institutions that generate community wealth, and supported local food business development with the national enterprise Milk & Honey. She currently serves as a member of the Oakland Food Policy Council, and is on the board of Sustainable Economies Law Center. In 2012, Farzana graduated from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she received a Masters in City Planning focused on community and economic development. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an Associate of Arts degree in early childhood education.