A coalition of food systems actors in Dane County, Wisconsin recently launched a county-wide food action plan. The food plan seeks to institutionalize regional food system planning, and provide policy recommendations to fill in local food systems gaps.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture cites numerous benefits of a strong local and regional food system, from reducing food waste to improving the health of both people and the environment. And regional food systems planning that engages community members can increase health equity and strengthen community character, according to the American Planning Association.
Coalition partners also hope that a food plan will help commit more resources towards a 2012 Dane County resolution, which declared that food is a human right. “This community has determined that food is a human right, and our long-term plan should be ensuring that is an actual reality,” Noah Bloedorn, Food Plan Manager at REAP Food Group—a Madison nonprofit leading the plan’s coordination—tells Food Tank.
A literature review was the first step in the planning process, to “get a baseline understanding of what we know about our local food system,” Bloedorn says. And due to the large number of partners on the project, he adds that “this whole first year was really about internally understanding how we were going to work together.”
From there, the coalition began a community engagement process, what Bloedorn calls the “meat” of the project. “We’re viewing it as a way to understand both what the community’s needs, vision and values are, but also engage the community and empower them to start making change that they want to see in the food system,” he explains.
Abha Thakkar, the Owner of Mosaic LLC and lead on the consumer engagement process, tells Food Tank that the group is lucky to have “an abundance of resources,” when it comes to gathering community recommendations. “The model that we are embracing in this is really to decentralize feedback, so we’re using our resources…to support partners who already work [within] communities and have deep relationships and trust,” Thakkar explains.
While the plan and its policy recommendations are the main result of the project, Bloedorn says that food systems planning really works to “bring people together at a table towards a shared vision.”
Thakkar also emphasizes the power of the planning process itself: “For me, this is about breaking down silos in the food system, helping people meet each other across the different sectors,” she says.
With the food plan, Thakkar sees a rubric grounded in the vision and values of the entire Dane County community. In that way, Thakkar says “we can be constantly moving towards a world where food is actually a human right and functions that way.”
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Photo courtesy of Tim Wildsmith, Unsplash
