Attendees skate at the Skate for Food Justice event at Astro Skate of Orlando on Wednesday. The funds from the event will be used to build community gardens around Orlando.
Emiliana Chavez
Skate for Food Justice, an event organized by Sunrise Movement Orlando, Sunrise UCF and the UCF League of Women Voters, was held at Astro Skate of Orlando on Wednesday to fight food insecurity and raise funds to build gardens in the community.
Tickets for entry were $10, while half of each ticket purchase went toward the cause.
Aija Diaz, a political science graduate, is a member of the Sunrise Movement Orlando and helped organize the event. She said Sunrise Orlando noticed there were many food deserts in Central Florida, primarily in minority communities. She said members wanted to find out why this happens and how they could change it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture uses the Food Access Research Atlas to map “low-income and low-access” areas with limited access to places that sell healthy, affordable food, which it uses to define food deserts.
The share of the population in low-income and low-access tracts in Florida in 2015 was 14.72%, according to USDA data.
Diaz said that with the money raised through this event, those in the organization want to go around different neighborhoods in Orlando asking if they could use empty land to plant two-by-four-foot gardens with fresh produce.
The people in these neighborhoods wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of these gardens, Diaz added, but rather SMO would bring volunteers every Saturday and the food produced can go to community members who don’t have access to fresh produce.
“Our biggest goal is also the community building, learning, knowing faces, knowing names, knowing how we can help,” Diaz said. “Because at the end of the day, we’re here to connect everybody. We want to be the connector. We want to be the glue.”
Members of the Sunrise Movement Orlando talk with District 5 Commissioner and UCF professor Dr. Kelly Martinez Semrad (right) at Astro Skate of Orlando on Wednesday. The Skate for Food Justice event was put together by Orlando-based organizations to raise money to fight food insecurity.
Emiliana Chavez
Dr. Kelly Martinez Semrad, District 5 commissioner and a UCF professor, joined the event to support the cause. She said Sunrise Orlando helped her with her campaign and she thinks they are a great organization.
“Sunrise Orlando talks about urban forestry and doing fleet farming and using our spaces for productivity, whether it be for farming in urban areas or whether it be for leisure and activity and exercise,” Martinez Semrad said. “I just think that land is a scarce commodity, and we have to use it in the most practical, most logical, most impactful ways.”
Chloe Scott, senior political science major and president of UCF League of Women Voters, helped organize this event. She said the organization wanted to help promote this event because issues like community deserts are important, especially given Orlando’s affordability crisis, she added.
“Having these events, banding together, especially as young people, it’s so important because we really are making a change for the oncoming generations and even the people now who are struggling,” Scott said.
The fundraiser hit close to home for Sophia McKenzie, a member of the Sunrise Movement Orlando who grew up in west Orlando and said the area is “surrounded by junk food” and people from low-income backgrounds don’t have access to affordable, nourishing meals.
“I feel very connected to the cause,” McKenzie said. “Food is to nourish ourselves, it’s how we stay healthy and a lot of the time people don’t have the education to know about that or the access. And I feel like food is another way to keep us subjugated.”
Members of Sunrise UCF, Sunrise Movement Orlando and the League of Women Voters of UCF gather at Astro Skate of Orlando for the Skate for Food Justice event. The event took place Wednesday to raise funds for building community gardens around Orlando.
Emiliana Chavez
Diaz said the organization raised $400 from the event and plans to use this money to buy materials to start working on the community gardens.
Diaz said they hope to continue hosting fundraising events like these to focus on more community-based causes that may not be as large-scale but can be addressed with small steps.