Regranting as Relationship: How Storytelling and Shared Resources Drive Food Justice in Central New York

Join the 2025 CFF Champion Award winner, Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA), for this year’s Champions Briefing, an event wholly designed and created by the award recipient:

Food justice organizations are often asked to compete for the same limited dollars – isolated from each other, measured against each other, and underequipped to tell their own story. It doesn’t have to be this way. What if the act of seeking funding could itself become an act of coalition-building?

For SOFSA, regranting is not a workaround or a side project. It is a core strategy for redistributing resources, deepening trust among coalition members, and shifting the local food system away from scarcity and competition toward something more collective. Through its Food Justice Fund, SOFSA moves money directly to food justice organizations serving residents of Syracuse, Onondaga County, and Onondaga Nation using a participatory model: a community Leadership Council selects finalists, and anyone 14 or older in the region can vote on recipients.

But the Food Justice Fund is bigger than the check. It’s a vehicle for matchmaking between funders and grassroots organizations, a platform for storytelling and visibility, and a lever for advocating – from the inside – for more equitable funder practices. Grantees gain partnerships, clarity of purpose, and a wider network. SOFSA gains the trust of its coalition and a concrete opportunity to ask funders harder questions about what real support looks like.

In this webinar, SOFSA’s team will walk through the full arc of the Food Justice Fund: why they built it, how it works, who it supports, and what they’ve learned. You’ll also hear from Amy Tao Woodley – an inaugural Food Justice Fund grantee who later joined the Leadership Council – whose own journey traces the ripple effects this model can set in motion over time.

Join us for a candid and interactive conversation about sharing resources, building networks, and raising the bar for each other – funders and organizations alike.

Learn

• How and why SOFSA landed on participatory regranting as a strategy – and how the Food Justice Fund fits within its broader movement-building work
• How the Fund operates in practice, including:
  • Gathering data to help set priorities
  • Governance through the FJF Leadership Council
  • Creating an accessible application and reporting process
  • Orchestrating a public vote open to every resident 14+
• How to tell your organization’s story in ways that resonate – with funders, with communities, and with the public – and why fund-seeking opportunities are often more valuable than the dollar amount
• What funders can do differently to make their support genuinely useful to the organizations they back

More about SOFSA

Syracuse-Onondaga Food System Alliance (SOFSA) was the 2025 winner of the Community Food Funders Champion Award. One of the perks of the award is to host a briefing with CFF on content of the awardee’s choosing. This event is the CFF “Champions Briefing” for this year. You can also read their winter update newsletter.

Established in 2019, the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA) is an independent food council in Central New York serving the City of Syracuse, Onondaga Nation, and the surrounding Onondaga County.

SOFSA is a network of changemakers working to reshape the food system in Central NY. Grounded in transformative justice, reciprocity, and collective impact, SOFSA brings people together across sectors to build community power and advance solutions rooted in lived experience. From participatory grantmaking through the Food Justice Fund to policy advocacy, civic engagement, and its annual Food Justice Gathering, SOFSA mobilizes relationships, resources, and shared leadership to build a just and thriving regional food future.