Regional Food Systems
Today’s food systems are increasingly understood to embody most of the key concerns facing the world in the 21st century, while at the same time offering potential solutions to most of those same issues. The anonymous, large-scale, industrialized, commodity-based food system that predominates in the United States contributes to major problems such as climate change, water scarcity and pollution, food-borne illnesses and antibiotic resistance, species and habitat loss, obesity and its attendant diseases, food insecurity and market concentration among a relatively few multinational corporations.
In an effort to provide countervailing models, the goal of the Regional Food Systems Program is to strengthen New England’s expanding market for regionally and sustainably grown food with innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the supply chain. The program’s exclusive focus is the six-state region.
Objectives
- Expand and streamline the supply of, and demand for, regionally and sustainably produced food in institutional markets through efficient regionally focused supply chains
- Effectively channel growing demand for regionally and sustainably produced food among New England’s large institutional food purchasers—hospitals, schools, colleges and universities, and military facilities, among others—through efficiently operating networks of producers and distributors
- Build and support innovative models for successful, regionally focused supply chains for non-institutional regional food markets
Strategies
- Supporting centrally positioned organizations with experience in institutional procurement within key sectors: education (primary, secondary schools schools and colleges and universities); hospitals; government (state and municipal agencies and facilities); and the military (bases and Veterans Administration hospitals)
- Leveraging grantmaking by building collaborations that include NGOs as key partners to facilitate institutional market scaling and tipping points with stakeholders across sectors
- Strengthening the capacity of food producers and distributors to satisfy institutional customer demand
Note: This program was previously known as the Rural New England Program.
2011 Grants
Food Systems
|
$50,000 |
| To further develop a locally-based, sustainable food system by piloting a farm-to-institution program in the town of Hardwick that uses local food sources and implementing region-appropriate infrastructure development. |
|
$25,000 |
| To support programs that include developing business plans for up to 20 low-income refugee farmers; improving access to healthy food for hundreds of low-income consumers; and providing job training, community organizing and leadership opportunities for up to 60 high-school age youth. |
|
$200,000 |
| To enable Farm-to-Institution New England to build a stronger regional food system by connecting New England farms to its institutions through cross-state collaboration and infrastructure development. |
|
$50,000 |
| To plan for making New England the first discrete regional focus within the national Healthier Hospitals Initiative. |
|
$40,000 |
| To develop the framework and partnerships necessary to scale the Close the Loop composting model to a statewide program that builds the infrastructure and collection systems needed to convert all of Vermont's food waste to an agricultural resource by 2017. |
|
$100,000 |
| To develop a regionally scaled agriculture model that gives farmers Maine farmer access to more customers for their products, especially in the institutional market, and supports their scaling up to meet those customers' demands. |
|
$65,000 |
| To educate federal policymakers about the value of regulatory support for and financial investment in sustaining New England agriculture. |
|
$30,000 |
| To develop and implement a new technical assistance program model that meets the critical needs of Vermont's organic dairy farmers. |
|
$60,000 |
| To increase by $2 million the purchases of local, sustainable and humanely produced food, as defined by the Real Food Calculator, at New England's colleges and universities through student-led campaigns that can be widely replicated to induce a sectoral change in food procurement. |
|
$25,000 |
| To determine the feasibility of, and undertake the first steps in developing, a regional food center and distribution system that makes locally-produced foods available and affordable in southern Vermont and New Hampshire while providing a fair return for farmers. |
|
$20,000 |
| To encourage entrepreneurial farmers and food producers to develop entrepreneurial business plans in response to a statewide, public competition. |
|
$75,000 |
| To determine if a credit union can viably fill the financing gap facing small, local and sustainably managed farms in the Northeast. |
|
$10,000 |
| To provide grants support to Vermont farms of any size that have sustained losses in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene. |
|
$30,000 |
| To promote and implement a five-point plan that gains significant state investment for entrepreneurial development, midsized working lands enterprises, and strategic infrastructure that will position Vermont as a leader in the local foods movement, creative value-added processing, and innovative and sustainable natural resource development. |
|
$25,000 |
| To recruit students to its diversified farming curriculum; and to integrate the college's farm products into the Vermont State College food service system. |
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Photo courtesy of Amnesty International
