Melissa Ilana Cohen has spent the past 10 years of her life dedicated to food activism from the ground-level of a small food co-op in the college town of Isla Vista, CA. Her inspirational lectures around food, culture, cooperative business, solutionary change-making, and participatory activism have become a mainstay at UC Santa Barbara and around the wider community. Her project management work at the Burning Man and Lucidity Festivals have facilitated the incorporation of mechanisms for integrating cooperative principles, cooperative organizational structures, and sustainable food access solutions into highly participatory temporary and transformative environments. Melissa is currently the General Manager of the Isla Vista Food Co-op, the 40-year old people-powered community-owned natural foods cooperative that received global recognition for it’s historic crowd-fund building purchase project in 2013, Project We Own It. Her most recent project, $31.50 Worth of Food for Thought: A Food Stamp Experiment, tracks Melissa’s journey spending a week living on a government food assistance budget along with subsequent experiential reflections. Melissa is the sustainable commissary food procurement lead and edible access logistics coordinator for the Mindful Feeding Program at Lucidity. Her talk will speak to everything mentioned above and more, as she weaves together the story of how last year’s Lucidity brought her a new lens with which to begin a true journey as a food justice and food access ally.