For three intense days, a Food & Water Watch team of interns, fellows and staff crammed into a conference room for a marathon summer session of organizing training. Some report, were it not for the endless supply of coffee, tea and bagels --supplemented by the occasional Subway, Chipotle or Pasha falafel pick-me-up -- they would have been in way over their strategizing heads.

The first day of training included a broad overview of grassroots organizing and issue briefings from the food, water, and fish teams. While a nine-hour day of organizing training could be much like waiting for an S2 bus and simultaneously watching paint dry (not that we’ve done that or anything), it turns out that when you gather a bunch of highly motivated, impassioned people together the energy flows like delicious, federally-funded, publicly-owned tap water.

If it wasn’t for Sarah Alexander and Annie Weinberg’s hard work and enthusiasm (we're not sure if they ate or slept last week to be honest), we could never have hoped to be as productive as we were or as well-prepared as we are now.

And thanks to Erin Greenfield and Erica Schuetz from the communications team, we learned how to not make cheesy headlines like the one seen above.

The second and third days of training were led by Jackie Kendall from the Midwest Academy. On these days we were not only instructed in such actions as petitioning and calling reporters, but we were actually sent live into the lion’s den (the genetically-altered, factory-farmed, super-vindictive kind) by calling reporters to pitch a media event and post-carding in Dupont Circle to  talk to passersby about cloned animals in the American food supply.

In spite of our initial apprehensions, this tactic proved to be a realistic preparation for which we are grateful.

Jackie’s anecdotes and wealth of knowledge were invaluable to the training experience.

Thanks to the training, the interns and field fellows from different projects and states were able to get to know each other much better, creating a real Food & Water Watch summer team. And we all know that you can’t spell “team” without M-E-A-T (the non-irradiated, carbon-monoxide free version)!

The Intern Nook

Food & Water Watch interns Julie Mierwa, Siobhan Thomas-Smith, Eric Hoffman, Sally Goodman are among the organizers recently trained and they are now ready for action.