How can local communities do the work of ensuring healthy food security and affordability? In a moment of economic precarity for so many, how can we create abundance for our neighbors?
Tune in for a conversation with activists and experts who are meeting the challenge of hunger head-on in their communities. Click here to access resources for further learning.
This event is the first in our "Doing the Work" series, which will run through 2026 and focus on real-life solutions to an economy waged on war — solutions that don't depend on a lawmaker or a power-broker to put into action!
Meet the Speakers
Leading the conversation is Carmen Rios (she/her), a feminist superstar and AEOO's digital director. Carmen is a writer, editor, podcaster, public speaker, and digital strategist who has spent nearly two decades telling stories that advance intersectional gender justice. Most recently, Carmen was the supervising producer and host of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a five-part audio series for Ms. magazine about the intertwined history of the magazine and the feminist movement. Her writing and reporting on queerness, gender, race and class has been published in print and online by outlets including BuzzFeed, Bitch, Bust, CityLab, DAME, ElixHER, Feministing, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, GrokNation, MEL, Mic, the National Women’s History Museum, SIGNS and the Women’s Media Center.
Maureen Fitzgerald is the former vice president of government relations for eastern district of Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the state with more than 400 food pantries, soup kitchens and meal programs in 35 counties across eastern Wisconsin. She now runs a public policy and advocacy consulting practice offering solutions to improve access, participation and administration of the federal nutrition programs.
Anore Horton is the Executive Director of Hunger Free Vermont, a statewide advocacy, public education, technical assistance, and coalition backbone nonprofit dedicated to ending the injustice of hunger for everyone. During her tenure, she has been instrumental in fighting to eliminate the root causes of hunger through statewide initiatives that have made school breakfast and lunch universally free for all students in all public schools, expanded Vermont’s participation in other federal nutrition programs including 3SquaresVT (SNAP), Meals on Wheels, summer and afterschool meals, and childcare meals, along with state-level projects that enact dignified solutions to hunger. Anore spearheads key collaborations with many Vermont and national partners to protect and expand the right to food, and to ensure that equitable access to nutritious and affordable food is built into the fabric of every Vermont community.
What is a Zoom of Our Own?
This event was recorded live. As some feminist epistemologists (Gilligan, Belenky et al.) have taught us, seeing and seeking connections seems to be women’s ways of knowing and reasoning. Our economics is lived in tangible and complex communities. Our goal is to model how women can talk together and learn together about traditionally male territory still new to most women.
Our Zoom of Own Series brings women (and men!) together to construct a fuller knowledge and set of values now omitted from the mainstream “free market.” Together, we're flipping the script on a racist, sexist economy.