Grantee Newsletter
A monthly newsletter for CFP recipients.
August: Mobilizing Community Engagement
Community engagement is an essential piece of a Community Food Project. It allows the people you are serving to be more than just passive recipients, but active participants in shaping the features and functions of your project. By building relationships and empowering individuals to engage, you can shape a project that more accurately and successfully meets the needs it seeks to address. It can also create a process for feedback and participation that allows for more flexible and nimble adjustments in the future. Philosophically, mobilizing community engagement is about inclusion of voices; practically, it strengthens the effectiveness of your program. As you read through the resources included below, think about how your project has made space for community voices, the benefits to prioritizing these voices, and perhaps also reflect on the challenges you have faced in opening up a dialogue that perhaps diverges your work into an area you did not anticipate.
July: Mental Health in Food Systems
Mental health intersects with food systems in many ways. The food insecure suffer stress and anxiety over how they will feed themselves and meet their basic needs. Faced with an ever-increasing array of natural disasters and a changing climate, farmers are experiencing mental health crises, as their livelihood is under threat. Farmworkers are pushed to the brink by rapacious contractors, physical demands, and an increasingly unstable immigration context. And non-profit employees in the food space burn out from low pay, poor benefits, and expectations that they will work long hours, despite what can be very rewarding work. Covid-19 has exacerbated this situation in so many different ways.
While the mental health crisis passes largely unseen in our society, it has risen as a concern in food systems work in recent years, with organizations such as the National Young Farmers Coalition leading the charge in talking about the toll it can have on those engaged in this work. It is essential to dedicate attention to supporting the mental well-being of yourself, your colleagues, and your greater community.