Food Democracy in LA: Creating Policy Ideas for a Healthy, Fair Food System

Access to healthy food

Obesity

Resilient communities

County of Los Angeles

City of Los Angeles

Los Angeles sits at the heart of the largest food producing region in the nation, yet many low-income communities in Los Angeles County lack access to affordable, nutritious food. Small and medium-sized local farmers struggle to compete in global market channels, which threatens the resiliency of local and sustainable food production for our region. The result is the paradox of hunger and obesity disproportionately impacting low-income communities and communities of color, environmental degradation, exploitation of food workers, and economic loss for small farms and food businesses.

The Los Angeles Food Policy Council serves as a space where stakeholders of diverse communities, and representing every sector of the food system, come together to generate solutions.

We unite farmers and gardeners, entrepreneurs and activists, government officials and community members who care about health disparities and diet-related disease, hunger and access to healthy food, working conditions for food workers, and the resiliency of our soil, seed, water and food economy.

Through our dynamic public events- which we call “the Network”- and eight open Working Groups, we have been successful in passing policy related to urban agriculture, food stamps, farmers markets, healthy food access, and school and government food programs.

Now it’s time to generate the next big policy agenda!

Our proposal for the next 12 months is to ramp up outreach and engagement to generate a visionary and comprehensive policy platform for the NEXT 5 years. Utilizing our Food System Dashboard – which aggregates almost 200 metrics that depict the health, sustainability and fairness of our local and regional food system – we will engage a diverse and expansive network of food advocates, practitioners and residents to generate policy recommendations for the City and County of Los Angeles.

Prioritizing the lived experience of those most impacted by a broken food system, we will partner with organizations working with youth, seniors, mothers, workers and those living in neighborhoods with limited healthy food access to ensure policy recommendations holistically reflect our communities.

The campaign for the new Good Food for All Agenda will utilize a three-pronged approach:

(1) Engage the LAFPC Network for feedback and build new partnerships with organizations representing those most impacted in the food system

(2) Use data to inform policy ideas and

(3) Creatively use social media to get the pulse of needs and opportunities throughout our local food system.

Using these three strategies- and your help- we will generate a new Good Food For All Agenda, which will offer concrete action steps to create a healthy and fair food system that makes LA the best place to LIVE.

We will measure success through:

(1) Reach - Develop a New Good Food for All Agenda that aggregates the policy priorities of hundreds of organizations and community members. Our goal is to release the Agenda at our annual Food Day event— the city’s largest civic engagement event on food. The report will also be available through our website. We will document the number of organizations and individuals who contributed to the process, and use web analytics to determine the reach of the report’s dissemination.

(2) Capacity Building – We want the process of developing the new Good Food For All Agenda to be empowering for everyone involved. We will gather feedback and input at 3 public Network meetings, approximately 20 Working Group meetings, and 3 community workshops to ensure holistic policy recommendations are grounded in the experience of communities. We will also offer 3 public trainings on data we are collecting about the health, resiliency and fairness of our regional food system. To measure the impact of the process itself, we will survey participants at each convening to evaluate changes in knowledge, skills and relationships.

(3) Diversity – It's important we hear from the most impacted communities in LA’s food system – youth, workers, low-income mothers, etc. We will conduct robust outreach, collect appropriate demographic information, and ally ourselves with community-based organizations representing diverse and underrepresented communities.

Money

Volunteers

Advisors/board members

Publicity/awareness

Infrastructure (building/space/vehicles

Education/training

Community outreach

Network/relationship support