Home » Esurio

Editorial Board, Advisors, and Reviewers

EDITORIAL BOARD

Vass Bednar, HBaSc, Managing Editor. Vass is currently engaged with her Masters in Public Policy at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy & Governance. She has previously worked as a Research Fellow with the OAFB, contributing to the Cost of Poverty Project and the OAFB's response to the Cabinet Committee on Poverty Reduction (Our Choice for a Better Ontario). Prior to that, she was the Coordinator of the McMaster Food Bank and Meal Exchange Chapter, where she graduated her Honours Bachelor of Arts & Science with the President's Medal for Excellence in Student Leadership.  Vass continues to contribute as a research assistant to a project on AIDS media activism and is also a student on Meal Exchange's Board of Directors.

Susan Eckerle Curwood, MA.  Susan is a PhD student in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to her return to academia, she coordinated Tamarack's Vibrant Communities, a pan-Canadian poverty reduction initiative. Her other experiences include two years in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria and three as training manager for the Missouri Association for Community Action, where she was instrumental in developing the Community Action Poverty Simulation and the Step Up to Leadership program. Susan is active in her community, serving on the Board of Directors of the Kitchener-Waterloo Volunteer Action Centre and the United Way's GenNext committee and volunteering with Saint John Ambulance and Grand River Animal Rescue. She lives with her husband Cam and an escape-artist dog named Bear ben Houdini.

Fiona Knight, MA.  Fiona has worked as Program Director of FoodShare (Metro) Toronto and Program Director for the Ontario Child Nutrition Project, which matched school and community based child food programs with resources.  She was part of the Canadian Working Group on Food Security until 2000, and assisted in preparing Canada’s Action Plan on Food Security, which provided a vision for Food Security work in Canada. In 2006, she coordinated Food Secure Canada, the only national interest group aligning zero hunger, a sustainable food system and local safe and healthy food supply in Canada.  She has recently graduated with a Masters in Policy and Public Administration from Ryerson University in Toronto.

Sean Park, MA, Public Education Projects Co-ordinator, Ontario Association of Food Banks.  Sean is an experienced student development facilitator with a background in inquiry and experiential education. He teaches a course on education and complexity science at McMaster University and examines the role of contemplative practice and lived experience in his research. His work with the OAFB has enabled him to build partnerships with faculty and community organizations around a vision and plan of action for engaging students in service learning and opportunities to think, reflect, communicate and act on addressing hunger and poverty.

Joanne Johnston, MA(c).  Joanne is currently pursuing a collaborative Master’s of Arts Degree in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.  Her thesis topic focuses on investigating how poverty is represented in the research literature.  Prior to attending graduate school, she spent almost 10 years servicing a diverse range of individuals impacted by poverty both in Canada and abroad. Through these experiences, she has been exposed to the hard realities and barriers of drug abuse, mental illness, disabilities, and criminal status.  She is currently serving Metis youth facing barriers to employment. 

Ajoy Bista, MA.  Ajoy, a native of Nepal, and permanent resident in Ontario, received a Masters Degree in Economics in 1993 from Tribhuvan University, Nepal and received a second Masters Degree in Regional Development Planning in 1997 at the Dortmund University, Germany and the University of the Philippines.  He completed a research in Development Economics at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan in 2004.  Mr. Bista did a Graduate Diploma in International Rural Development Planning from University of Guelph, Ontario in 2005.  He has worked as a Planner, Economist, and Evaluation Officer for the Government of Nepal for seven years where he was involved in planning and evaluating agricultural and rural development projects. In recognition of his works in Nepal with women farmer groups he won the International Prize for the Promotion of Youth in Agriculture from the German Agricultural Society in 1998.  He is currently doing a Ph.D. in the Rural Studies Program at the University of Guelph where his research focuses on household consumption inequality and rural poverty.

ADVISORS

Dr. Mustafa Koc, PhD., Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University.  Mustafa's research and teaching interests involve sociology of food and agriculture, food security and food policy, sociology of development, sociology of immigration. He is a co-founder of the Centre for Studies in Food Security, Food Secure Canada, and the Canadian Association for Food Studies and has been involved in various national and global debates on globalization, social change and development, food security, and peace.

Judith Maxwell, C.M., O.C.
Research Fellow, Canadian Policy Research Networks Inc.  Judith is founder and past President of Canadian Policy Research Networks Inc. from 1995 to January 2006, is a former associate director of the School of Political Studies at Queen’s University and a former Chair, Economic Council of Canada. She was appointed Member of the Order of Canada in 1996.  Judith is a member of the Board of the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB).

Dr. Mark Stabile, PhD., Director, School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto.  Professor Stabile received his PhD and MA from the Columbia University. In addition to teaching economics at the Rotman School of Management and the Department of Economics, he has served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Minister of Finance for the Government of Ontario from 2003 to 2005. He was awarded the 2002 Visiting Research Scholar to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and the 2005 Visiting Research Scholar to the Centre for Health and the Social Sciences, University of Chicago. His academic honours include the John C. Polanyi Prize in Economics in 2003 and the 2002 Harry Johnson Prize from the Canadian Economics Association.

Adam Spence, B.A. Executive Director, Ontario Association of Food Banks. Adam is responsible for setting the direction of the organization with feedback from the membership, maintaining and building relationships with government and major partners, acting as the organization's spokesperson, and ensuring that the OAFB's vision, mission and goals are met. During Adam’s tenure with the organization since 2005, the OAFB has doubled the amount of food distributed, tripled its media coverage, doubled the size of its operating budget, and successfully lobbied for investments including the new Ontario Child Benefit for low income families.  Adam’s work has been featured in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Hamilton Spectator, and other major newspapers.

Overview (condensed version; a more detailed version is available by contacting the OAFB).

(Last Updated: October, 2008)

The Esurio Editorial Board is responsible for overseeing the publication of Esurio. The publication process involves a series of stages including calls for articles, reviews and comments, correspondence with authors, copyediting, layout and dissemination.  The Editorial Board (EB) will be assisted by advisors, layout/copyeditors and reviewers, who take on various roles throughout the process, including the following positions:

• Managing Editor
• Editors (Senior & Associate)
• Advisors (Advisory Board)
• Reviewers
• Copy/Layout

Esurio will be electronically housed through Open Journal Systems (OJS) on the server of the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB).  OJS will serve as the hub through which articles are submitted, blinded, distributed to reviewers, and eventually published.

Senior editors will have some strong experience editing, publishing and/or writing about issues of hunger, poverty and/or food security. 

A team of student editors will closely work with each other on an on-going basis as articles are received and will hold monthly or bimonthly meetings with the managing editor to discuss the journal’s review and publication process.  Depending on the geographical location of the editorial team, meetings will be web/teleconference and/or in person throughout the year.  An annual summer conference through Meal Exchange will bring together all the advisors, editors and reviewers to review the journal and elect new persons.

Assistant editors will have some experience editing and reviewing scholarly articles.  They will be selected for a one and one-half or two year term to co-facilitate review groups, including at least one senior reviewer (or senior/assistant editor) and one junior reviewer for each article to be reviewed.  Each assistant editor will be responsible for ensuring that at least two articles per year (every two issues) are successfully reviewed by one or more review groups in a timely manner. 

Advisory Board

A board comprised of poverty, hunger and food security ‘experts’ from communities and universities across Ontario will advise and lend guidance to the editors and reviewers.  The perspective and experience of the advisory board members will be critical in helping to ensure that the scholarship contributes to, and draws from, the dialogue around hunger and poverty in Ontario.  Members of the advisory board may, at their discretion, take on one more of the following tasks:

• connect editors to people, research projects, and resources that may contribute to and/or benefit from the journal
• advise on the design, analysis, and write-up of potentially high-impact research articles
• offer advisement on the review and reviewer development process
• assist in cases where there is disagreement between author and reviewer(s)
• assist editors in disseminating the journal   
  

Reviewers (10-15 Senior, 10-15 Junior)

A network of student content reviewers will be assembled to review and comment on articles.  At least one senior and one junior reviewer (a review group) under the guidance of an assistant or senior editor are required to review an article.  Senior reviewers (graduate and upper year undergraduate students) will ideally have some demonstrable grounding in particular issues within the literature on hunger, poverty and/or food security, as well as active engagement with their community.  Junior reviewers (typically first and second year undergraduates) are not expected to be grounded in the literature but must demonstrate a willingness to apprentice in the process and be actively engaged with their community in the areas of hunger, poverty, and/or food security.  

A standard review process will be developed by the editors and reviewers with the assistance of the managing editor and the advisory board.  

Copyeditors (2-3)

Once articles have been accepted for publication, they will be sent to the copyediting group for proofreading. 

Our Supporters