Food System Focus Areas

Produce on the loading docks of Hunts Point Market

A “food system” includes all activities involving the production, processing, distribution, purchase, consumption, and disposal of food.  Due to the vast network of people, places, and entities involved, a food system is intricately linked to many (if not all) other systems and institutions in a society.  For more reading, please visit this page from CFF member GRACE Communications Foundation.

Because the food system permeates so many aspects of daily life, many philanthropic organizations may be active in food system funding even if that is not a stated goal of their grantmaking.  For example, a foundation focused on alleviating poverty may fund health and nutrition workshops, or one focused on youth development may fun urban agriculture projects with young people.

As a result, we have made efforts to come up with a distinct categorization system that aims to include all aspects of food system work, and thus grantmaking efforts in those areas as well.  While this system is not perfect, and assuredly won’t match perfectly the way all foundations describe their work, we use it to group funders in our Food Funder Directory.  We also use these focus areas to categorize the many news stories, resources, and events that get posted to this website.  To view all content  in any given focus area, click on the name of that focus area below.

Please use the contact us page to provide feedback on our categorization system.  We are constantly striving to better reflect the many aspects of food systems work in our region.

Communications & Narrative Change

Refers to a set of tools for an organization to engage, inform, and persuade their public audiences, and to recruit, involve, motivate, and equip their membership, donor, and activist constituencies in an intentional, consistent, and persistent way in order to advance short-term goals and set the course for far-reaching change. Strategic communications has many forms: public education and issue advocacy campaigns, digital communications, earned media, compelling media products, and much more. When combined with organizing, strategic communications can disrupt narratives that maintain oppressive conditions, and replace them with community-centered analysis and vision for what’s possible in our food and farm systems.

Community-Controlled Food Systems

This term comes from CFF co-founder Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and implies a collective effort to redirect or change parts of the food system that is important to community members.  It differs from food sovereignty (exemplified by La Via Campesina movement) in that it is not necessarily all encompassing leading to control and autonomy over all aspects of a food system including trade policy.  Rather, this designation refers to the self-determination of communities to define what is important, and to have the ability to change those aspects that are deemed unsatisfactory.

Farm Preservation and Land Access

Refers to the creation, preservation, and continued viability of agricultural land, and the ability of current or new farmers to have access to these lands to keep them in production.

Farm to Institution

Refers to the movement of locally produced goods from small and mid-sized producers to institutional customers such as school systems, universities, and hospitals.

Finance and Investment

Refers to the many ways in which food enterprises receive funds to start, maintain, or grow their business.  Such mechanisms may include slow money or impact investing, program related investments, or community loan funds.

Food Chain Workers (labor)

Refers to the rights and well-being of the 20 million people employed by the food system in the US (one-sixth of the entire US work force).  These workers range from migrant farm workers, to food packers and truckers, to grocery sales clerks and restaurant staff, and all the people in between.

Hunger / Food Insecurity

Refers to the issue of food insecurity in which people do not have reliable access to sufficient food.

Immigrant, Refugee and People of Color Farmers

Refers to issues faced by marginalized populations as it relates to food production, such as barriers to entry, maintaining control of farmland, and discrimination or oppression.

Infrastructure & Supply Chain Logistics

Refers to everything that is required to get food from the farm to your plate.  This includes processing, aggregation, distribution, storage and more.  Food hubs fall under this category, though the category implies more than just food hubs.

Nutrition Education and Food Literacy

Refers to education around food and health issues, including cooking, nutrition, food science.

On-farm Practices and Ecology

Refers to the environmental and ecological issues that arise with conventional farming, and the practices performed to mitigate some of these problems. Organic and biodynamic farming would fall under this category, as well as permaculture.

Policy, Advocacy, and Organizing

Refers to policy on all levels that impact our food system, and the community organizing and advocacy aimed at changing or shaping these policies.

Public Health and Healthy Food Access

Refers to efforts undertaken to improve public health and access to nutritious foods.

Urban Agriculture

Refers to the practice of growing food in urban and suburban settings, most often on a smaller scale than rural farms.

Waste and Compost

Refers to the final step in the food system, discarding of food waste.  Compost is the practice of letting food scraps break down organically to be used as fertilizer and returned to the soil.

Youth Leadership

Refers to youth development efforts that are undertaken through the lens of any of the above categories in a food system.  For example, training youth to be leaders and give cooking classes in their communities, or grow food in urban gardens.

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