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.
On March 1st, CFF partnered with Philanthropy New York and the NYC Workforce Funders to host a briefing titled, Feeding and Funding Our City: Recovery for New York City’s Invisibilized Food Ecosystem. The session featured a discussion with organizers from Street Vendor Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos, moderated by North Star Fund’s Executive Director Jenn Ching.
On January 26th, CFF partnered with Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG) to host a webinar titled, A Regional Imperative: Making The Case for Regional Food Systems. In it, authors Kathy Ruhf and Kate Clancy present an overview and key findings from their new report of the same name, which updates and greatly expands on the authors 2010 working paper, It Takes A Region.
On December 1st, CFF partnered with Engage New York and Neighborhood Funders Group to host an event titled, For Us, By Us Farm-Based Education: Land, Language, and Liberation. The session brought together three farm-based education programs in New York State that are all rooted in culture and community, and designed specifically to serve the population that its instructors and organization are representative of: the Akwesasne Mohawk community for Akwesasne Freedom School; low-income BIPOC communities for Farm School NYC; and the queer community for Rock Steady Farm.
On October 12th, CFF partnered with The Martha and Hunter Grubb foundation to host a briefing titled,Scaling Regenerative Agriculture in the Northeast.The session started with an overview of regenerative agriculture and all that the term entails, to provide a framework for the rest of the discussion. We also recognized that these principles and practices are not new at all, but come from indigenous cultures who were stewards of the land for centuries. In fact, if native people were not forcibly removed from the land, we likely wouldn’t need to have conversations like this or be in this dire predicament.After the opening framing, we heard from several practitioners in the northeast working to implement and expand regenerative agriculture in our region.