Students, reconnect with campus before summer is over! Grab your camera or smartphone and make a short video on UC research related to food security. Share your campus story in the World Food Day Video Challenge and win up to $1,000.

We’re crowdsourcing your knowledge and skills to bring deeper meaning and impact to the top-notch research happening across campuses.

When it comes to food challenges, big hurdles lie ahead. Even with recent progress, the numbers can be daunting: an estimated 3 billion people are still affected by malnutrition — ranging from undernutrition to obesity and micronutrient deficiency. This while climates are changing wildly, and the global population will soon add another 2 billion people.

Yet these big challenges are being met with big solutions from a big research system: the University of California. The broad array of research tackling these global numbers is what the World Food Center at UC Davis aims to highlight on the international stage through the Video Challenge. Building this awareness shows how the UC campuses and students are together taking on this generation’s greatest challenge.

How to share your story

Students of all levels enrolled at a UC campus for the Fall 2016 quarter can submit videos — three minutes or less. The stories must cover UC research or research programs related to the second goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.”

Students are encouraged to pool their research knowledge and creative talents into diverse teams to maximize video quality, while enriching the content and maintaining scientific accuracy. Videos can be submitted until Sept. 7, 2016.

Prizes and recognition

A diverse panel of non-UC judges will pick the top videos. Along with the cash prize, first place will include a trip (for up to three team members) to the World Food Prize International Symposium in October, where the World Food Center will host a UC Davis-led panel discussion on nutrition and food security. The symposium, called the Borlaug Dialogue, is the most prestigious gathering in food and agriculture.

Second-place winners will receive $500. All of the top five videos will be showcased during a UC Davis lecture on Oct. 10 by World Food Prize laureate Catherine Bertini. The event, which is in honor of World Food Day, will be professionally live-streamed.

The UC Global Food Initiative is sponsoring the prizes, while the Nutrition Policy Institute at the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources is a partner in organizing the competition.

The ‘World Food’ global connection

World Food Day began as a way to recognize the founding of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945. Today it is celebrated internationally on Oct. 16 as a way to take collective action against hunger.

Though similar in name, the unrelated World Food Prize annually recognizes individuals who have advanced “the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.” The prize itself was announced in June, while the symposium is in October.

The World Food Center, meanwhile, was launched as a way to lift UC Davis to the global spotlight as the top research university in food. It is bridging in new and transformational ways food research areas like agriculture, nutrition, veterinary medicine, public policy and many others. Through strategic initiatives, the center is magnifying UC Davis excellence for a greater impact on society and the planet's food systems.