Join the 2022 CFF Champion Award winner, Food for the Spirit, for this year’s Champions Briefing, an event wholly designed and created by the award recipient. Come together to learn about community-led food initiatives addressing issues of race and racism in the food system, and explore values and perspectives about how philanthropy can work in partnership with community to address these systemic inequities.
On May 31st CFF partnered with Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders to host a briefing titled Creating New Food Cooperatives with an Equity Focus. The webinar featured two justice-oriented food co-ops in the region: the Central Brooklyn Food Co-op (CBFC), a start-up food co-op working to open a store in Central Brooklyn, and Kingston Food Co-op, a co-op in Kingston, NY that will be opening soon. We also heard from Food Co-op Initiative (FCI), a nonprofit organization that provides free training, technical assistance, resources, peer learning opportunities and support to organizers starting co-ops across the country. FCI has worked with CBFC and Kingston Food Co-op.
On May 25th CFF partnered with five other philanthropic organizations to host a funder briefing titled Elevating and Mobilizing Voices from Across New York to Advocate for an Equitable 2023 Farm Bill. The session highlighted a statewide organizing campaign that engaged over 300 New Yorkers to create a NYS Farm Bill Platform. The leaders of the campaign, Equity Advocates, Black Farmers United NYS, and Food for the Spirit, prioritized outreach to and participation of BIPOC farmers, producers, and practitioners. The resulting policy platform represents a collective voice from NYS community food leaders, farmers, gardeners, land stewards, producers, & advocates.
On May 16th, CFF partnered with Philanthropy New York to host a briefing titled, Seeding Power 2.0: Leadership for Our Region’s Food Movement. Funders gathered online to hear about the relaunch of CFF’s Seeding Power Fellowship. Speakers included Kellie Terry of North Star Fund, Lisa Cowan of Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Adam Liebowitz of CFF, and Bianca Bockman of Riseboro who is also a Seeding Power alum.
On May 1st, CFF partnered with Mellon Foundation and Philanthropy New York to host a briefing titled, Elevating and Preserving Black, Indigenous, and Immigrant Foodways through Arts and Humanities Funding. The session featured an overview from two program officers at Mellon who participate in the foundation’s internal “food cluster” group that collaborates on supporting food-related projects in the arts and humanities. They offered an explanation of what it means to fund food work from an arts and humanities perspective, and specifically with a social justice lens.