Recap: Cultivating Food Systems Change

Posted on July 11, 2023

On June 27th, CFF partnered with Food for the Spirit to host a briefing titled Cultivating Food Systems Change. As this year’s “Champions Briefing”, the event provided an opportunity to learn more about and engage with the 2022 CFF Champions Award winner, Food for the Spirit.

The interactive Zoom meeting, planned and facilitated by Food for the Spirit (F4tS), focused on how community-led food initiatives are addressing issues of race and racism in the food system and explored how philanthropy can partner with community to address systemic inequities.

During the meeting, participants were assigned to breakout rooms for a grantee-funder relationships & values exercise that was originally designed by the folks at Black Farmer Fund. In the words of F4tS staff:

We offered the grantee-funder relationships & values exercise as part of our Champions Briefing because it is in alignment with F4tS’s mission and work, and because we hoped that it could help foster initial relationship-building between food actors and funders. We also hoped the exercise would provide new perspectives and insight into how philanthropy and community organizations can work in partnership to address systemic inequities.

A full recap of the session is offered below.

Presenters

Jared Strohl, Facilitator, Food for the Spirit
Rebekah Williams, Co-Founding Director, Food for the Spirit

To learn more about Jared Strohl and Rebekah Williams, read their bios here.

If you weren’t able to attend the event (or want to share it or watch it again), the recording and recap are provided below. You can also sign up for Food for the Spirit’s newsletter to follow their work and get involved.

The event involved a good amount of time in breakout rooms, which are not in the video below. You can use the time markers to jump to different sections of interest in the recording:

Start – Welcome by Adam Liebowitz, CFF Director
1:22 – Introduction to Food for the Spirit and F4tS team
17:55 – Breakout-room activity
23:16 – Full group discussion of experience
32:50 – Announcing and introducing the 2023 CFF Champions Award winner!

Resources

The following networks and partners were mentioned during the discussion:

RECAP

Part 1: About Food for the Spirit

Food for the Spirit is a base-building organization committed to racial healing, ecological justice, and equitable food systems. As a team of facilitators and organizers, F4tS’s team works by building relationships and organizing in place-based communities. The geographic areas where they work include: Buffalo and Western New York, rural and urban areas in the Genesee Valley and Finger Lakes regions of New York, and state-wide through partnerships. F4tS also works with partners nationally, connecting local place-based partners with the resources, opportunities, and strategic thinking of national movement organizations.

F4tS was established to ensure that Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other farmers and food actors of color are connected with each other, and connected with opportunities and funding to resource their work. Food for the Spirit is affiliated with and helped to establish several place-based networks, including: the Buffalo Food Equity Network, the Finger Lakes Accountability Network, and the Genesee Valley Black Farmers Collective. F4tS was one of the founding organizations that created Black Farmers United NYS, and Rebekah Williams has served on the founding steering committee since 2020. F4tS hosts skillshares for BIPOC farmers and food actors across the state, as well as virtual and in-person trainings on topics including farm bill advocacy, storytelling, and narrative strategy.

The F4tS core team members are all people who identify as BIPOC, and F4tS collaborates primarily with Black, Indigenous, Latinx and people of color partners to identify issues and determine solutions—because the people most impacted by racism have the solutions. The team works together at the grassroots level to align the work they are doing on the ground with their broader mission, and they are currently engaged in a strategic planning process.

Part 2: Breakout Room Activity: Grant-Making & Grant-Seeking

F4tS engages in funder organizing, connecting network members with funders to build relationships and engage in conversations. With support from CFF, Food for the Spirit has begun the process of developing shared values and principles related to funding for their network, with a goal of being strategic about applying for funds as a coalition. They are also exploring ways to connect their partners to funders, so that these community groups have more opportunities to educate funders about their work and access support.

For this breakout event, Jared and Rebekah led an activity that gave a sense of the type of conversations F4tS facilitates, creating space for community partners and funders to build relationships, share their perspectives, values, and challenges and hear from each other. These conversations allow community groups and partners to engage across differences and gain a better understanding of how to move the work forward and achieve change.

The activity Jared and Rebekah facilitated was created by Olivia Watkins of Black Farmer Fund, who led the exercise at a recent in-person gathering of funders and community partners (which Rebekah attended). The activity, which aligns with F4tS’s approach, provided an opportunity for participants to get to know each other and reflect on, share, and hear from each other about their beliefs and values around grantseeking and grantmaking.

For the first small group conversation, some participants were assigned the role of funders and placed in funder breakout rooms, while others were assigned the role of grant-seekers and placed in the nonprofit breakout rooms. Each room had 2-3 people, and the group was tasked with making up a name for their foundation or community-led initiative, and determining the following for their group:

values and parameters for reporting
grant-term restrictions
whether funding would be single or multi-year
relationship-building expectations
what is being measured
the application process
whether funds are restricted or unrestricted
development (capital)

For the second part of the activity, each funder group was joined by a community group and they shared what they had decided in their smaller groups. They talked together about areas of alignment and misalignment and negotiated possibilities for future relationships and funding—simulating a funding process.

The breakout rooms were followed by a discussion in the full group, where participants were invited to explore the following questions:

Based on the role you played, what surprised you about your experience?
What was your biggest takeaway?

A few themes expressed by participants are summarized below:

Feeling surprised that funders and organizations were so aligned in terms of their values and thoughts on what the process should look like
Finding it interesting to think from the funder perspective, as someone entrenched in the grantee side of things (the experience of thinking from the other side)
Making connections—being heartened by how work and interests aligned and by the generosity of spirit shared

The activity provides a process for discussing power dynamics and getting to know each other. It also offers tools for engaging together as funders, partners, and people.

Part 3: Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, 2023 Champions Award Winner

Before closing, Adam Liebowitz, CFF Director, announced the winner of the 2023 Champions Award.

Columbia County Sanctuary Movement was selected for the Champions Award for their food justice work, Comida Para la Gente, in the Hudson Valley. B Kennedy and JJ Kingman briefly shared about their community work and programs, which include partnering with farmers’ market vendors, preparing food for local community fridges, food pantries, and after-school programs, and providing grocery boxes for community members.

You will be hearing more from them in the year to come!