Lessons on Food Systems Leadership

Photo by iStock/FangXiaNuo

What will it take to create systems change in our food system? Because of food’s centrality to how we all live—a centrality which produces complex relationships and interconnections across multiple scales—our food system is difficult to transform. For exactly this reason, it is all the more important that we find ways to do so.

Talking about “systems” can be very abstract. Let’s bring it down to earth (literally). Imagine a parcel of peri-urban farmland owned by an older farmer who is ready to retire. One path leads to this arable land being sold to a developer and turned into a small strip mall. Another path leads to it being purchased by a “farm incubator” who will make it available to refugee farmers growing culturally meaningful crops and contributing to their economic mobility. Next, imagine where these crops go after harvesting. One path leads to a conventional wholesale buyer who pays below the cost of production, since prices are forced down by cheap, subsidized imports. Another path leads them to an urban “food hub” that purchases them at a fair wholesale price, funded by health-care community investments, and packs the produce into weekly “farm shares” distributed for free throughout the urban core to individuals who have been diagnosed with diet-related disease, whose health improves as they substitute this food for the mostly non-perishable, often low-quality, and sometimes downright unhealthful food that is distributed by food banks (in turn, bringing health care costs down). Finally, imagine the food scraps left over in these community members’ kitchens. One path leads them to a plastic garbage bag, picked up and transferred to the nearest landfill, where they decompose under anaerobic conditions, which creates methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more powerful than CO2. Another path leads them to a 5-gallon food scrap bin kept outside the door, which is dropped off weekly at a community garden-based compost site where they break down through biological processes, turning into a nutrient-rich soil amendment that is returned to local gardens and farms.

This is complicated! It’s not necessarily hard to understand, or to appreciate the difference. But locating leverage points for making positive changes means we do have to engage with the complexity of our food systems: where food production and disposal methods cause environmental and climate damage, where food processing creates economic disparity and labor abuses, and how public health is negatively affected by consumption patterns, such as prevalence of fast food or the absence of retail outlets offering fresh produce. To create change in such a system requires systems leadership. But food system leadership requires (and offers) something different than most other systems, precisely because of how central and omnipresent food is in everyone’s lives. There are so many players with critically important inputs, about personal, family, and community nutritional, cultural, religious, and other dietary needs. In this sense, the food system is unique: because it provides the essential fuel for all human life, we not only all have a shared experience of it, but everyone is an “expert” about food (at least in terms of the food that is best suited for themselves and their families). This has consequences for how we think about what food systems leadership must do and what it can accomplish.

In my 30 years working to create more just and resilient local food systems in the United States, I have come to believe the food system presents a special case when it comes to leadership: not only is a special type of systems leadership—food systems leadership—possible, requiring distinctive structures and skills, but it presents a unique opportunity for increasing civic engagement across society. In contrast to systems like energy, transportation, or health care, where expertise is more well defined, food expertise tends to be irrefutable, requiring no advanced degree or professional experience. Moreover, the food movement has been instrumental in creating awareness about how this complicated system works, and how to create change within complex systems. This means the food system, and food systems leadership in particular, can provide a template and launchpad for stakeholder engagement in other systemic domains, like health care, education, and energy (which are also important but less obviously intertwined with everyday life).

First and foremost, food systems leadership offers opportunities for new relationships, connecting groups as diverse as farmers, emergency food providers, food waste management companies, and environmental justice advocates. As food systems networks emerge and establish high-performing structures, members will become able to identify and respond to systems needs efficiently and collaboratively. At the highest level, food systems leaders cultivate synchronous network conditions that catalyze new partnerships and advance a shared vision for the future.

The Rhode Island Food Policy Council

A food policy council is an example of what food systems leadership can look like: local, state, and regional networks that bring together diverse interests to collaborate to find common ground, representing diverse interests in public health, anti-hunger, food production, education, government, health care, labor, social justice, and economic development.

For example, the Rhode Island Food Policy Council (RIFPC) is the backbone network for the people, businesses, government agencies, and community organizations that make up Rhode Island’s food system. Composed of over 200 members with vastly different interests, experiences, and capacities, we cultivate relationship building toward finding common interests. Pairing these network building activities with capacity building opportunities prepares our members to engage in food systems advocacy efforts, as well as creating opportunities to advocate for self-identified policy priorities on municipal, state, and national levels.

Along the way, aligned benefits can arise in unexpected places. For example, commercial fishers and West African immigrants have different needs and assets. But during the pandemic, when the bottom dropped out of domestic and international seafood markets—and the rate of food insecurity skyrocketed—their needs and assets suddenly matched: Rhode Island’s commercial fishers needed new nearby markets, and local immigrants needed access to free and affordable, culturally appropriate food. Though these two groups lacked shared culture, community, or geography, food systems leadership—as practiced by RIFPC—enabled a quick connection to be made between them. The existing network of interests and relationships meant there was a pre-built pathway for the leaders of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island and several immigrant and refugee-serving community-based organizations to come together in a time of need.

RIFPC was built to generate this type of synergy, and to build on it. In this case, it led to the establishment of the “Seafood for All” program by the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island and these community-based organizations, a program which has brought over a half-million pounds of healthful, fresh, seafood to families in need. The potential for this market was known, but it remained untapped until the pandemic created an environment where the need on both demand and supply sides was strong enough to create change. Yet that change could only happen, efficiently and effectively, because network connections had already been established through RIFPC: what they needed to be activated was a food systems leader who could generate the necessary spark. And although established as a contingency, the program has led to permanent change: Hundreds of pounds of fresh seafood are transported in a branded refrigerated box truck, unloaded into a stationary, centrally-located refrigerated semi-trailer, and picked up by about 10 CBOs for local delivery to nearly 500 families weekly.

RIFPC didn’t help start the Seafood for All program with a goal of becoming a fishmonger, of course. This program belongs to the seafood businesses and community leaders who run it. A network is built to distribute rather than aggregate power, responsibility, credit, and knowledge. But our value comes from our ability to connect, educate, build capacity, support new programs and projects that fill critical gaps, communicate, advise, and coordinate advocacy for good food policy.

In doing this work, five key food systems leadership practices have emerged. The ability to put these practices into play is critical for food systems leaders at any scale to be effective in nourishing positive food systems change.

1. Learn new structures

Food Policy Councils take different forms. According to the Food Policy Network—a project of the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future—of the more than 300 food policy councils in the United States, a third are grassroots coalitions, while another 40 percent are nonprofits (or housed in nonprofits). About 20 percent are seated within government.

When RIFPC was first formed, it was intentionally made independent from state government, to protect it from shifts in political will or administrative priority. A decision was also made to refrain from holding “seats” for particular organizations or agencies, no matter how central to the system they might be. In fact, members serve as individuals rather than organizational representatives, enabling leadership to emerge from anywhere within the system (instead of being limited to predetermined actors).

Our mission and vision have remained substantively the same over time, but our activities have changed considerably. Perhaps the most foundational change was the expansion of RIFPC’s undertakings from a focus on partnership building and policy advocacy to encompass high-impact projects to fill critical gaps, which opened up new fundraising avenues and required increasing professional staff capacity; for example, we perform research, outreach, and fundraising support for Rhode Island cities and towns that want to start food waste composting programs. The constant, however, remains reliance on convening an organized group of stakeholders from various sectors that work to address high-priority food system challenges and opportunities through policy.

For example, RIFPC held a “Produce Prescription Summit” in February 2024 to advance innovative “Food Is Medicine” initiatives in the state. Over 80 people, including food access workers, accountable health care entity executives, funders, and health care workers mingled, met, and created a plan to establish the first statewide “Produce Prescription” program in the country. It was critical to set the stage for the opinions of each stakeholder to be valued, to share and make explicit collectively created “meeting agreements” that laid out how we were going to treat each other, and to integrate time for introductions and group exercises of different sizes (from individual thought work, to pairs and dyads, to foursomes, and full group conversations) to allow people with different comfort levels with speaking in public to contribute.

2. Redefine engagement

Not everyone has the ability to show up at the State House to testify when a bill that is important to them is set for a hearing. This holds especially true for farmers at the start of the growing season, when they are at their busiest. When the farmers are recent immigrants who face transportation and language barriers, the challenges can seem insurmountable. Before and during the 2023 state legislative session, RIFPC worked with a group of urban farmers to advance a piece of tax equity legislation. To engage with these farmers, we could not simply invite them to attend our monthly Zoom calls. We needed to go where they were comfortable. In this case, that meant building on an existing relationship with an urban land trust, and working with them to meet the farmers on their land. Relationships were built over informal conversations in fields rather than meetings around a conference table. We supported them in creating an advocacy video with English subtitles to share their thoughts with decision makers in case they could not come to the State House for hearings. Our partnerships with these community organizations, our structure, and our commitment to relationship building led to the trust needed for marginalized community members to provide honest input that was essential to identifying the underlying problem, informing legislation, and creating pathways for engagement and advocacy that made sense for the farmers. Although this piece of legislation did not pass in 2023, it had successful and well-attended hearings in both houses. Now, RIFPC is collaboratively planning with the same farmers and community groups to plan for the 2025 legislative session and beyond.

Having input from a diversity of community members, especially economic diversity, is essential for effective food systems work. Direct, honest input from people who have been food insecure or faced challenges accessing funding for their small food businesses is a must. No efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, will achieve their highest or best outcomes without it. Yet many of the people who are hardest to engage have structural and mental constraints around when and how they can contribute. This includes language barriers, transportation challenges, work schedules (e.g., shift workers in fast food and night workers in baking), and seasonal work cycles (e.g., farmers and fishers who are very busy in the spring and have more flexibility in the winter). Some don’t have internet access or discomfort using online meeting platforms. Others simply feel their contributions are not important and have been given no reason to think otherwise. These challenges that thwart engagement must be overcome, and effective groups do the hard, time-consuming work to address them. In addition, there is the matter of trust. There are deep, sometimes multigenerational layers of mistrust in American communities. These are justly built on a foundation of extractive practices on the part of power holders who were using different forms of leadership that caused harm. Building trust is essential for creating safe environments needed for transparent interactions, negotiating power differentials successfully, and supporting equity. Here are three keys we’ve uncovered through our work:

1. Go where the people you need to reach are comfortable. Don’t expect members of disenfranchised groups to feel comfortable coming to your offices downtown. Find out where they gather and reach out to see how you can set up a meeting there. This might be a community center, a church, or a public park. Adjust your ideas about agenda and outcomes based on where you are meeting. Informal conversations that touch on a series of pre-set questions can be as useful as a round robin or report-out sitting around a conference table.

2. Understand that trust is the foundation of progress. You can’t rush the building of trust. Showing care and supporting the priorities of the people and organizations you need to reach is essential. As much as possible, make their priorities your priorities. This work takes patience. There is no way around it. Everyone will be better off for it in the end.

3. Provide support and build connection with “front porch organizations.” There are groups in the communities you are working with that are trusted. They have had years of trust building with these stakeholders, whether they are members of a marginalized neighborhood, refugee farmers, or farmers. Get to know their programs, their staff, and their strategic plans. Look for areas of intersection. Perhaps you have a skill that could help their staff or clients that you can offer. Maybe they are working on a grant application that you have had success with in the past. Maybe they need a connection with a municipal or state leader you already know. When they trust you, they will introduce you to their clients as a trusted partner and the possibilities of working toward your goals together becomes greater.

3. Focus on facilitation

Because we are all food system stakeholders—all experts in at least one aspect of food systems, our own needs—there is tremendous diversity among stakeholders. Food system leaders need to engage with stakeholders who have little or no experience being in a facilitated meeting before and people who have extremely different, and sometimes strong and potentially problematic, definitions of what leadership means.

Here are three keys we’ve uncovered through our work in this sector:

1. Shared Meeting Agreements: How do we want to treat each other? How can we stay accountable to ourselves and others? How can we stay on track toward our goals? Openness to the way the group wants to define its terms of engagement is foundational to creating a safe space for individuals with vastly different life experiences to feel they belong. For example, our meeting agreements explicitly call out those who are normally verbose to “step back” and those who generally stay quiet to “step up” so all voices are heard.

2. Establish what “leadership” means, in the context of the shared work. Because not everyone is going to read articles about systems leadership before getting to the room, it’s our responsibility to take time up front to define what we mean. How does leadership in this context differ from “old school” leadership that attempts to operate from the top down? What is distributed leadership? How can we work this way without devolving into chaos?

3. Go slow to go fast: Do not pack your agendas. Time for introductions, group exercises of different sizes (from individual thought work, to pairs and dyads, to foursomes, and full group conversations) are crucial. Different people have different comfort levels with speaking in public, and this can help even the playing field and ensure that stakeholders from all backgrounds have a comfortable way to contribute.

4. Break bread together

When working to create a just and resilient food system, the food at your meetings is an important facilitator. Sharing a meal builds community: when people eat together, they are better able to connect, collaborate, and compromise. Do not hold meetings without food!