Staring on March 18, 2020 with an emergency funder briefing and strategy call, CFF began hosting weekly funder-only calls to discuss the philanthropic response to food system needs resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. The calls began with a focus on New York City, but have expanded to include funders and issues from across New York State. This page will be used to document those calls and any key take aways or next steps. We are also compiling an ongoing list of resources specific to philanthropy and the food/farming sector.
The last of these calls took place on June 17, 2020
Our conversations were largely dictated by the interests of those on the call, but followed this general format:
- Presentation from speakers (sometimes)
- Updates and insights from existing relief funds
- Open sharing on emerging strategies and responses
- Unmet needs we are hearing or anticipating from grantees
- Observations from CFF staff and steps we are exploring in response.
Past calls
June 17
Our final call for the time being followed the same format as other calls, with updates and insights from funders around the state. Given that this was our last call, we also spent time reflecting on what we have learned over the past 3 months and how we can better prepare ourselves and our field for future disruptions.
June 3, 2020
This week’s call came amid the wave of protests across the nation against police brutality and asserting that Black Lives Matter. It was impossible to speak only about food systems in this context, and so we spent a good potion of the call just checking in and sharing what we or our foundations are grappling with at this time.
From there the conversation largely centered around talk of state food plans, discussing work that each of the six New England states has completed, and how this could be applied in New York’s context.
May 20, 2020
After many weeks of having speakers join the calls, we returned to an open format in which funders can connect with one another to share ideas, concerns, and other observations from their work.
We heard updates from different response funds representing widely varied budgets and geographies, and were also joined by a representative from United Way Toronto who spoke about Covid’s impact in her region and Canada’s federal response. Adam then gave an update on CFF collaborative projects and response to the current crisis.
May 6, 2020
Notes available here.
Video recording here.
On Saturday March 21 Mayor De Blasio named Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation commissioner, to the newly created position of COVID-19 Food Czar. We heard from two leaders in this office about the work they have been doing to date, including the $170M pledge from the City to feed hungry New Yorkers, and how this pandemic can shift the City’s long term approach to food supply thinking. Our speakers were
- Mandu Sen, Senior Policy Advisor, NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations
- Louise Yeung, Director of Resiliency, NYC Department of Transportation
April 29, 2020
Notes available here.
Video recording here.
Slide deck for Kingston Emergency Food Collaborative.
We had guest speakers for the majority of this call, representing two different county-wide efforts to create a local food and farming response to surging hunger needs as a result of the Covid crisis.
Ulster County and the City of Kingston have created an impressive and multi-faceted coordinated response involving farms, food pantries, restaurants, nonprofits, city and county government, and a vast network of over 500 volunteers. These collaborative efforts, Project Resilience and the Kingston Emergency Food Collaborative, are providing thousands of meals and hundreds of households with groceries on a regular basis. Stephanie Alinsug and Sarah Brannen shared how the system came together, how it works, and what needs/gaps still remain.
We then heard from Maggie Cheney and Sarah Salem, two members of a more nascent collaborative in Dutchess and Putnam counties who are trying to take some of the lessons from Ulster County and apply it in their context. They shared the challenges and roadblocks to working collaboratively towards these goals when the infrastructure and investment isn’t already in place like it was in Ulster, which is a much more common scenario throughout New York.
Both groups agreed on these key steps if trying to recreate something like this in your area
- Communicate with farms now, as quickly as possible, so that the food gets planted instead of fields staying fallow which is what some farmers are considering given the absence of reliable markets
- A landscape assessment or asset map to understand where and how existing organizations and institutions could plug in to any efforts, where kitchen and storage capacity might exist, and other key pieces of infrastructure
- Grassroots and community organizing groups that can mobilize people quickly to form a volunteer base and do outreach so that services reach where they are needed most
- Infrastructure for aggregation, processing, and packing to operate at a County-level scale or greater
April 22, 2020
For the first half of this call, we heard from two school food reps, one from NYC and another from the Binghamton area, both of whom are also affiliated with the NY School Nutrition Association.
- Stephen O’Brien, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Policy, Office of Food and Nutrition Services, NYC Department of Education
- Mark Bordeau, Senior Food Service Director, Broome Tioga BOCES; President, NY School Nutrition Association
They shared updates about how their operations have shifted to meet the food needs of students and families while schools are shuttered, and about the challenges that lay ahead as this crisis stretches on.
The rest of the call proceeded as usual with funders sharing ideas and observations with each other, looking for examples of effective practices and learning about steps taken from around the state.
April 15, 2020
We made a concerted effort to include funders from around New York State this week, and participation grew accordingly with 57 funders joining the call. We learned that the NYC Covid-19 Response & Impact Fund and the Robin Hood Relief Fund continued to grow in assets, and continued to disperse grants on a weekly basis. Both funds have released lists of grantees to date (available in the notes). In addition, we heard from other relief funds in Dutchess & Orange Counties, Western NY, Long Island, and from the NY Women’s Foundation.
The rest of the call was open for folks to share questions and offer ideas to one another. A request was made to share dockets so that foundations can identify what groups may be falling through the cracks. If you are open to sharing this information, you can email CFF your grants list in whatever form you have it and let us know in what ways it is ok to distribute (email to other funders only, publicly on a website, etc).
Toward the end of the call we conducted a poll about what areas people were interested to dive deeper in and potentially fund, and the results are listed in the notes.
April 8, 2020
Like other weeks, the call began with updates from the Robin Hood Relief Fund and the NYC Covid-19 Fund hosted at NY Community Trust. A lot of the conversation that followed then turned towards coordination for the rest of NY State, what needs are emerging, and how funders could be helpful. Future calls may cast a wider net and invite funders from around the state and region.
It appears that we might be entering a next phase of this crisis – one in which the immediate emergency relief efforts that were created weeks ago somewhat successfully met the need at the time, but now as the need continues to grow in unprecedented fashion, these systems are being stretched and new efforts/resources are needed.
April 1, 2020
We began with updates from two of the larger relief funds in NYC (Response & Impact Fund at NY Community Trust, and Robin Hood Relief Fund). Then we heard from staff at NYC Council who are hearing about specific needs in every council district both from the Council Members, but also the many community projects that receive discretionary funding from the council.
From Community Food Funders’ perspective, here are a few things we will be tracking
- How to help bring some of the focus and coordination that is happening in NYC to the rest of NY state and surrounding region?
- Is there a method, and/or a need, to collate all the food-related applications that get denied by some of the larger funds in the city and create a repository for them so that funders can easily find where some of the unmet demand is?
- We discussed the possibility of a pooled fund targeted to food access and specifically those smaller groups who might be falling through the cracks. Two-thirds of call participants expressed an interest in possibly supporting such a fund.
March 25, 2020
This was the first dedicated funder call since the emergency call last week, and so the bulk of time on this call was dedicated to updates from the past week and general sharing between funders of observations, needs, and resources that are emerging. Some key learnings from the call include:
- The $75M NYC Response & Impact Fund is now receiving applications, and a good portion of the money will go to food needs. There is no specific percentage or allocation at this time. Nonprofits are only eligible for this fund if they have an existing government contract with the City or State.
- As a result, some funders are interested in addressing those groups that will fall through the cracks and not be served by this larger fund. Council Speaker Johnson’s office shares this concern and is interested in coordinating with philanthropy. A representative from that office will likely join next week’s call.
- There is a need for more coordination between emergency food providers and food distributors / food banks. The Plentiful app has been great to connect patrons with 200 food banks, but could possibly be utilized to do even more during this crisis.
- The topic of an assessment/evaluation of our food system during this crisis came up on the call. We discussed the value of a deep comprehensive look at what happened, what worked and what didn’t during this unprecedented time, with the hopes of making our system more resilient in the future and being more prepared when the next crisis hits.
March 18, 2020
Notes and a recording are available.
This was our first call, planed and put together in a matter of days by CFF and partners. A full recap and recording are linked above. The first hour of the call served essentially as a funder briefing, with 30min afterward for a funder-only discussion.