The time is ripe for the Good Food Fight

Monday, February 08, 2010

The Good Food Strategies team went to go see Will Allen when he was in Seattle this week talking about Growing Power, the nonprofit he founded in Milwaukee with a mission to build community food systems.  Allen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award and was recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine.  We can see why!  Allen’s work to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds is incredibly inspiring.  One of the things Allen said was, “We’ve done a lot of talking. Now it’s time to take action.”  The same could be said about our Good Food Fight meetings. After a few weeks of thoughtful discussion and planning, we’re ready to put our ideas into action.

We’re excited because we’ve found a great software platform to build the Good Food Fight online tool - Wired for Change by Salsa Labs.  Wired for Change has been used successfully by many progressive campaigns and will enable us to build and manage a list of supporters and provide user-friendly ways to take action. Good Food Strategies’ new media organizer, Daniel Weisbeck, who has established a state-wide social network for Democratic party leaders in Washington state, provides us with invaluable technical skills that will make the building of Good Food Fight that much smoother. We are finalizing our RFP for a web designer and should begin building and designing of the website shortly. We’ve also begun work on a marketing and audience strategy which is, in turn, helping us develop and plan the kind of content and stories we’ll be publishing on Good Food Fight. 

In another step forward, we collaborated to write a project summary (see below), which we’re sending out to help us build partnerships with other organizations, as well as spread advance word of Good Food Fight. 

No single personal daily act has greater impact on our health or our environment than eating food.  How, where, and what kind of food is produced—by whom and for whom—determine not only what we eat, but are critical factors in a multitude of pressing issues running the gamut from hunger, malnutrition, diet-related disease like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and childhood obesity to climate change, disappearing farmland, the vitality of rural communities, fair labor and trade to the impact of chemicals, pesticides and antibiotics in our food, and more. Anyone and everyone who eats can make a difference in addressing these problems by becoming an advocate for a better food system, whether their food source is Whole Foods or the local food bank. 

The time is ripe for the Good Food Fight.

Good Food Fight will take the growing hunger for information about food, and feed consumers the tools to improve not only the way we eat, but to fundamentally improve the policies that have contributed to our current health and environmental crises. Through original on-line content, a blog, and a digest of breaking news stories, Good Food Fight will empower people with shared knowledge and targeted actions. It will create an online community of conscious eaters who will engage not only as consumers, but also as citizens with the ability to leverage influence on the marketplace and policy. It will provide opportunities for people to take meaningful actions, from choices they make in their own kitchen to becoming an advocate for change by communicating with policymakers and spreading the word to their friends.  Good Food Fight will build the online organizing capacity to fuel a grassroots movement for change that creates a more sustainable food system and increases access to healthy food for all people.

Good Food Fight is a project of Good Food Strategies being developed with seed funding from a grant from the McCormick Foundation’s New Media Women Entrepreneurs program administered by the Institute for Interactive Journalism, J-Lab, at American University. 

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