Eat Local Seattle Food Fair

Summary of project proposal:

The Supplier Diversity Program at UW is a registered student organization that promotes the use of local, minority, women, and LGBTQ owned companies around the greater seattle area. Eat Local Seattle Food Fair is just one of the many outreach projects that we are working on, in order to encourage the UW community to utilize these companies. We will be inviting vendors from across the community to come on to campus (HUB Walkway) on September 28th, in conjunction with Dawg Daze to sell their goods, and be further exposed to the UW community. Our hope is to provide a fun interactive experience for the UW community during the first week of fall quarter, but we also strive to generate exposure for the companies that will in turn help their business in the long run. Whether it be through UW departments utilizing them as suppliers in the future, or students simply visiting them during the school year. The long term impact is of utmost importance to us.

Environmental Impact

While our project does not directly reduce the University’s environmental and/or create more sustainable campus, it will instead help expand diversity, inclusivity, and equity in sustainability. Many times, theses historically underutilized business have suffered due to lack of access to money, markets, and management. We understand that as a student organization, it can be hard to provide monetary help. Therefore, by providing a space where these businesses can be exposed to a larger consumer base and generate revenue, we believe it will help expand the diversity of businesses being affiliated by the UW community.

Student Leadership & Involvement

Student Leadership and Involvement are the driving force behind the Eat Local Seattle Food Fair. UW supplier diversity is a student led organization that works with connecting students and local minority, women, and LGBTQ owned small businesses. Our Eat Local event will be powered not only by our vendors, but also by student volunteers that will be interacting and engaging with vendors and other UW students. Our student volunteers will be both educating and engaging students on the importance of diverse suppliers and asking them to sign the pledge to support theses locally small owned businesses. We also have other academics that are a part of UWSPD that will be creating posters about the history and background of each vendor and their road to become a business owner.

Education, Outreach, & Behavior Change

The Eat Local Seattle Food Fair, not only will this be an event where the UW community can purchase goods from vendors. We will also be including an educational component that will be in the form of tri-folds. There will be a tri-fold for each vendor that will include a biography and information on the business itself, in order to educate the community about their goods, background stories, and much more. Additionally, we will be including an outreach component through the form of supplier diversity pledge. The Supplier Diversity Pledge can be found on our website (uwsupplierdiversity.com), and was created by program participants with the purpose of gaining feasible metrics that will allows us to measure the support for our programs mission. We will have student volunteers staffing the event, and they will be asking the UW community to sign the pledge to show their support for the use of these historically underutilized businesses.