"As the saying goes, knowledge is power, especially for those living in the margins," reads the public invitation for the 15th annual Evergreen Tacoma Spring Fair. The goal behind the fair, which goes down Saturday at the Evergreen Tacoma campus, is to provide useful information regarding social justice and culture to the Tacoma community.

This year the Evergreen Tacoma Spring Fair planning committee, made up of Evergreen Tacoma students, chose "Food and Culture" for the fair's theme. "The idea is to adjust the lens of how we view food and culture in our society," explains planning committee member Tasha Ina Church.

A central element of the fair is the presentation of student projects on the subject of Food and Culture. Student groups have spent the past two quarters researching subjects such as "Food on Trial" and "Childhood Obesity," and will share their findings and conclusions with fair attendees.

In addition to the presentations, the Spring Fair will also include a film screening, a mural unveiling and entertainment by Fab-5, a Tacoma-based nonprofit that provides local youth programming in Urban Arts. Fab-5 director Eddie Sumlin will host an entertainment showcase which will feature a local DJ, lyricists and b-boys.

Social justice students from Evergreen have created brief, roughly two-minute, "flash films" on the subject of "what community means to you." The students compiled the films into a longer project that was recently screened at the Tacoma Art Museum and that will be shown at the fair.

"The title of my group's film was I came for the American Dream?"says Church. "I worked with a group member from Estonia and one for Moldavia so we decided to focus on immigrants in Tacoma." Church says the films give voice to Tacoma residents who are often overlooked in the central community dialogue.

A theme of focus at Evergreen Tacoma's campus this year has been "With liberty and justice for whom?" With this subject in mind, four student artists have been working on a mural themed "What does social justice mean to you?"

"It's four of us coming together and expressing what social justice means to us, synthesizing those ideas into one collaborative piece" says Church, one of the student-artists working on the project.

[Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus, Spring Fair - Food and Culture, Saturday, May 14, 1 - 4 p.m., free, 1210 Sixth Ave., Tacoma, 253.680.3000]