Background

Our project seeks to address the fractures and inequities in our food system by building a participatory, community-led process to design a ‘People’s Food and Farm Bill’ that will create a public funding mechanism and establish a regional governmental entity for food that will be accountable to Bay Area residents. In early 2020, we were funded to do a feasibility analysis on if it was possible to create a new regional governance agency for food systems. After concluding that this was a very real possibility, we moved into the second phase of this work in later 2020, galvanized by public funding through the USDA Regional Food Systems Partnership program. During Phase II, we facilitated the development of a participatory, community-led Vision for what a just, sustainable, and thriving food system can look like. That Vision came fully alive in October 2022 and now we are working on translating that to a regional policy platform.