Throughout the year, the MCA hosts high-quality professional development programming, open to teachers of all subjects, grade levels, and disciplines. These events are educator-specific, skills-based, training on contemporary art integration. Programs are designed in connection with the cultural assets of the MCA and the needs of the Chicago area educators.

In the first learning series event of this school year, we begin to explore the development of systems of food apartheid and the negative impacts that these systems have on students and communities. The term “apartheid” is used as it acknowledges the existence of economic and racial segregation systems. And as history has shown us, apartheid systems can be dismantled through collective action.

This event is intended for classroom educators. All educators receive ISBE credit hours for attendance.

About the Artist

Toni Anderson is a South Side Chicago native dedicated to fostering meaningful eco-social practice as a roadmap for personal and societal transformation. Anderson is a practitioner of wholeness, a healer, an urban ecologist, and spiritualist. In 2012, she founded Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab, an organization dedicated to “planting freedom’’ by providing robust youth-centered coursework spanning urban ecology, global travel/service leadership, space equity, conscious leadership and the arts. Sacred Keepers intentionally examined the value systems and sacred earth keeping traditions of indigenous cultures and how they uniquely relate and are impacted by nature and climate change. Anderson uses the rich dynamics of natural and social environments to provide youth with the tools to be agents of proactive, mindful social change. She creates place-based youth development curricula rooted in a love of generational outdoor experiences both domestically and internationally. As a parent, Anderson understands the roles that mindfulness and nature play in freedom-making.

Anderson is a recognized expert and public speaker on the topics of serial displacement disorder, natural and emergent migration pathologies, and public space activation as revolutionary praxis. Across the globe she has spread the word about the importance of re-connecting our youth to the outdoors and the oppressive and emancipatory narratives that space holds within communities of color. Anderson’s words transcend and transmute the oppressive narratives that space holds within communities of color.