The Montgomery County Food Council is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working to cultivate a robust, sustainable, equitable local food system in Montgomery County, Maryland. We are an active participant in urban and rural policy and process change, leading the way to a more healthful and sustainable community by bringing together producers, retailers, consumers, and educators in a coordinated effort to address the broad range of issues surrounding food and food sourcing in our county.
In 2017, we worked with our County government and partner organizations to create the Food Security Plan, a five-year plan to address and reduce food insecurity levels in Montgomery County. Recommendations of the Plan include standardizing data collection from food assistance providers, supporting capacity building, and analyzing transportation barriers to food access. We worked with CountyStat and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation to create FoodStat, a data analysis tool that synthesizes all relevant data available in order to identify food access barriers and resources in our communities, determine priority zones of highest unmet need and potential service delivery gaps, and facilitate collaboration, program efficiencies and capacity building. We are currently in Year 2 of the Plan, and are working to implement a ""Screen-and-Intervene"" program in partnership with local healthcare providers to screen for hunger during intakes, conduct SNAP outreach to maximize participation in federal benefit programs, increase retail food access, and more.
We work closely with local food and beverage producers and farmers to connect them to individual, retail, and wholesale customers and to highlight their products in markets, at events, and throughout the community. In 2018, we hosted two ""MoCo Made Days,"" each attended by hundreds of community members, to celebrate Montgomery County food and beverage producers. We've released three editions of the Montgomery County Food and Beverage Guide, each listing dozens of Montgomery County food and beverage businesses and farms. We distributed 2,500 copies of the 2017 Food and Beverage Guide and anticipate that we will distribute more than 3,500 copies of the 2018-2019 Guide. We created the MoCo Made logo in November 2017 in partnership with the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation, to increase the visibility of our local food and beverage sector, and we have distributed MoCo Made marketing materials to over 20 local retailers where products in the Food and Beverage Guide are sold.
Our staff, Council Members, and volunteers are also dedicated to ensuring that our food system has minimal environmental impact. We have organized and participated in gleanings at local farms to recover food that would otherwise not be harvested, and work with a food rescue organization to donate that produce to food assistance providers. We advocate for the expansion of commercial and residential composting, and have collaborated with County Council to create the Strategic Plan to Advance Composting and Compost Use, released in April 2018. We believe that the journey that food takes from the table to the waste stream is just as important as from farm to table.
Image credit: Massa Cressall and Catherine Nardi, Montgomery County Food Council; CLF Food Policy Networks Photo Contest, 2018