Project Overview & Focus

The Better Food Policy Fund was created to support food policy councils across the United States – groups that work at the intersection of community and government to shape healthier community-based food systems. From the beginning, we knew this fund couldn’t be designed behind closed doors. If it was going to reflect the values of participation and civic collaboration, it had to be built with the participation of the councils themselves.

My role was to design a process that brought this larger community into the conversation at critical points, in ways that felt accessible and meaningful. The goal wasn’t just to inform people of what was happening, but to build a culture around the fund itself – one that was transparent, participatory, trauma-aware, and celebratory.

Systemic Context

Food policy councils know about scarcity. They are often underfunded, overburdened, and stretched across complex challenges like food access across urban-rural divides, navigating policy fragmentation, building local resilience in a food system dominated by market concentration and industrial scale production. The field has been marked by cycles of hope and discouragement, with organizational trauma showing up both within councils and in their relationships with funders.

Traditional philanthropy tends to reinforce those wounds – creating competition, extracting time and energy from applicants, and concentrating power with donors. We wanted to flip that script. Rather than build the fund and then invite food councils to operate within what was built, we chose to co-develop the fund with the groups that would ultimately receive the benefit of the fund.

What the Fund Needed

Although people were excited about the opportunity to have a say, we needed a way to engage with councils that wasn’t extractive. They needed transparency about what decisions were being made, opportunities to weigh in without heavy burden, and reassurance that their lived experience would shape the direction of the fund. Just as importantly, they needed to feel some joy and recognition – to be seen and celebrated.

That engagement showed up in big and small ways. Councils helped define the criteria for funding, shaped how accountability would work, and even gave the fund its name. The identity of the Better Food Policy Fund came directly out of the community’s own words and choices.

My Role & Approach

At key moments, we invited the larger network of councils to shape priorities, criteria, and practices through surveys, focus groups, asynchronous platforms, and interviews. But it was how we went about it that mattered. Because trauma responses were showing up in the field, we built life-affirming elements into all aspects of engagement.

• Early newsletters carried an open invitation: “We do not yet know the strategic priorities for this money – and would like you to help us figure out what makes the most sense.”
• We were careful to limit the amount of time we asked of people – providing focus on what was most essential in a moment. When input required more time, we designed engagement to yield additional benefits to participants, so their time was more effective. This included networking time and peer learning, as well as following up with resources or other support based on what was shared during the sessions.
• When trauma surfaced in focus groups, we named it openly, drawing on the words of Dr. Resmaa Menakem: “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma in a people looks like culture.”
• We made relationship and celebration a regular practice – encouraging people to connect with speed networking, sending out celebration kits before online events, sending handwritten thank you notes after focus groups, and lifting up stories of councils across the country.

The tone was critical. People told us, “This is the most inspiring, creative, inclusive, thoughtful and exciting communication I’ve seen in a long time.” That kind of feedback let us know we were succeeding in creating a different kind of relationship between fund and field.

And of course, we created ways for councils to reflect on their own strengths and values and bake them into our process. As one participant put it, “I love this approach and the intentional way that criteria have been generated and evaluated.”

What Shifted

These strategies grew a community from 0 to 600+ people during our co-development phase, who collectively drove decisions around what to call the fund, how to use the funds, who should decide who gets the funds, and what criteria they should use when deciding.

The result was that community members who engaged began to see the fund not as an external program but as something emerging from their own collective wisdom.

Reflections & Insights

Engaging the larger community this way required constant balancing: enough openness to be authentic, enough focus to move forward, enough information sharing to build trust without overwhelming people with details.

The lesson for me is that participation isn’t about volume, it’s about attunement. When people feel they are shaping decisions at critical moments, and are invited with care, they show up differently. They bring excitement and earnestness when they join in. It truly feels like joyous co-creation.