Food Policy Resources

A guide to orienting new members of the policy working groups (i.e. subcommittees) of the Denver (Colorado) Sustainable Food Policy Council. One of the primary purposes of the Denver Sustainable Food Policy Council is to “Provide Recommendations to the City on Regulations and Policies” by providing Mayor and city staff detailed policy analysis and recommendations. To accomplish this purpose, the council established policy working groups made up of city staff, council members, and interested community stakeholders.

On June 19, 2017, Baltimore (Maryland) City Council passed unanimously City Council Resolution 17-0029R: Request for City Action - Supporting the Paris Accord. The resolution requests that the City recognize the importance of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; oppose the ill-advised decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement; and commit to practices that disrupt short-sighted trends in consumption of natural resources and degradation of human health to create a liveable, economical, equitable, and just energy future for all Baltimoreans regardless of age, race, income, or zip code.

This resource is intended to facilitate a shared understanding of the early care and education sector and the natural opportunities to integrate farm to school initiatives into early care and education settings. This shared understanding can support enhanced connectivity between the local food and early care and education communities in order to advance farm to early care and education across the country. This resource includes a basic overview of the early care and education sector, information for getting started with farm to early care and education, and a list of state early care and education agencies and contacts.

Across the country, food banks are looking at their mission through a number of new lenses: health, education and technical assistance, farming, economic and workforce development, business enterprise, and community empowerment and advocacy. Feeding the Line, Or Ending the Line? Innovations among Food Banks in the United States, a new report by Reinvestment Fund and Bank of America looks at how food banks are adopting a variety of approaches within each of these categories to feed the hungry and permanently end food insecurity. These findings emerge from interviews conducted with 16 food banks and hunger-relief organizations.

Created by Patricia Smith, Tess Hart

The objective of this report is to provide insights into the factors that enable the development and delivery of urban food policies and how these enablers can be harnessed and barriers overcome. By exploring a series of case studies, the report shares lessons that cities of all sizes and at all stages of food policy development — from small towns that are taking their first steps in designing food-related policy, to big cities that are striving to maintain highly-developed, integrated policies — can learn from as they work to improve their food system.

Created by Corinna Hawkes and Jess Halliday

This report examines the differences in characteristics between producers who sell direct-to-institution and those who do not. It delves deeper into the practices of producers that sell direct-to-institution and explores sales to institutions through intermediaries like food distributors, food hubs, and food service management companies. This report presents in-depth findings and makes specific, data-driven recommendations for farmers, producer service providers, government officials, funders, and institutions. 

This Prospectus presents a road map for how Washington might achieve its food vision and provides a framework for collaboration, engagement and shared responsibility. The Prospectus provides the opportunity for alignment across sectors, distributed leadership, and continued development of strategies over time. From 2012 to 2017, the Washington State Food System Roundtable, a diverse coalition of public and private partners, developed this Prospectus through a process that included research by consultants, university faculty and graduate students, and input from a variety of interests through a statewide engagement process.

This toolkit was developed to help food councils host a successful events so that decision makers see your food council as a local expert on issues related to food, health and agriculture.  The toolkit includes tips and steps for organizing candidate forums and common best practices for these types of events.

Community health advocates and planners can use this resource to explore how local community planning efforts to support the health and well-being of Kansans by incorporating public health goals into traditional planning elements. The guide includes specific examples from existing local community plans in Kansas to illustrate how language around health can be incorporated into the plans. This resource is merely a starting point to provide guidance on how community health advocates working across Kansas can better leverage local community planning to advance efforts to build a healthier Kansas.

Transformation of the food system rests, in part, on changing the rules by which all actors play. Many of these rules take the form of public policy, whether they be laws, regulations, government spending or other tools used to impact markets. So concerns are raised when local groups in the food movement are reluctant to politically engage to change these rules. This chapter begins by outlining the concepts of food democracy, civic agriculture and civic food networks and their relevance to the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). Then the ACF is used to organize a case study of the Franklin County Local Food Council and its transition from a civically-oriented group to an advocacy coalition through the use of a technical tool: the food policy audit. The chapter concludes by suggesting that community-based food groups have a responsibility to span the civic-political divide and bring food system governance back into balance.

The Food Counts: A Pan-Canadian Sustainable Food Systems Report Card brings together already existing measures of social, environmental, and economic well-being to help researchers, policy makers, and practitioners examine food systems at the national level. The report card uses a food sovereignty framework to reframe food within an integrated systems perspective and makes connections to a global movement focused on food as a means for collective social change. As one practical tool for reimagining Canadian food systems, the Food Counts Report Card acts as a benchmark, identifies gaps in data and where case studies can elaborate on successes and limitations, and informs policy making at all levels of government.

Created by Charles Levkoe, Rachel Lefebvre and Alison Blay-Palmer

A handbook for new members to orient them to the Denver Sustainable Food Policy Council. The handbook covers everything from the Council's mission and values statements to it's membership structure to the group's meeting norms.

The Food Turn Up Report is an educational and visual tool that shares practical ways to prevent and reduce chronic disease by creating a stronger and more local food system. Created by the former River Region Food Policy Council, now Montgomery Roots, this report was crafted intentionally for the Black people in Lowndes, Macon and Montgomery Counties of Alabama after two years of a community food assessment process completed in rural and urban settings in the Black Belt. 

While the opportunity for sharing commercial kitchen space is growing, shared-use kitchens in the United States suffer from regulatory ambiguity that limits their potential. This report explores the struggles of shared use kitchens in navigating the tricky waters of local departments of health, conflicting state and county policy, and inadequate licensing options, and the national policy landscape for shared-use kitchens to help identify best practices and policies to support the emerging industry.

Created by Ashley Colpaart, Wendy Grahn and Devon Seymour

Pittsburgh Public Schools were early adopters of the Community Eligibility Provision, which ensures that all children in the school district receive free breakfast and lunch each day. This memorandum covers strategies to improve the nutritional quality of school meals, on ways to increase participation in school meal programs and access to food during the school day as well as after school, and on ways to incorporate healthy foods into the school curriculum and change school culture to encourage kids to eat healthy foods.

Created by Erika Dunyak, Daniel Edelstein, Henry Thomas, and Ona Balkus

This report distills current research to reveal the human, environmental, and social impacts of the production of high-protein foods other than meat to arm hospitals and other institutions with key information to design the healthiest plate. The findings and associated Purchasing Considerations guide the complex decision-making process encountered when applying an environmental nutrition approach to food purchases, specifically when reducing and replacing meat on the plate.

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. This paper draws on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada.  Based on synthesis of the results of this survey, the paper describes six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. This paper demonstrates that a wide range of objectives drive UA and that political orientations and discourses differ by geography, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes.

Food councils examine the local food system and provide recommendations to improve that system. Food councils have proven to be an effective entity for reviewing and recommending state and local food policies. One of the first steps a food council should take is to draft and enact bylaws. Bylaws are written rules that govern the internal operations of an organization and define the organization’s purpose, membership requirements, and the management of its operations including how meetings should be conducted and how offices are to be assigned.

This report sought to identify, document and analyze successful community-based innovations in the U.S. food system. The research targeted projects grounded in community and utilize innovative strategies to produce or provide healthy, fair, affordable and sustainably grown food. Individually and in combination, these community-based projects are transforming the way food is grown, processed, distributed, marketed and
consumed in the United States.

The FPN project welcomed Dan Glickman, former Secretary of Agriculture for the USDA and Bob Ehart, Senior Policy and Science Advisor for the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture for a conversation about the role of the USDA in the current administration and how federal changes will potentially impact state departments of agriculture, and food and farm policy, regulations and programs.