Community Food Centres Canada
Community Food Centres Canada resources and strengthens the community food sector and mobilizes with its partners across the country for progressive policy change. We believe in a country where the right to food is realized for all and where every community has a place for food that nurtures health and well-being, belonging, and social justice. In working towards this vision, we partner with our network of more than 350 food organizations to build inclusive, culturally responsive community food centres, facilitate knowledge exchange, create new health-focused programs, and advocate for equitable systems-level policies to address food insecurity. Knowing that food insecurity is a problem of inadequate incomes, not a lack of food, we advocate for policies that put money directly into the pockets of people who are experiencing food insecurity and poverty. Throughout all our work, we consistently strive to embed equity, inclusion, reconciliation, anti-oppression, and access, which strengthens us by recognizing and valuing a full representation of perspectives and experiences that exist across the country.
Food First
Food First NL is a provincial non-profit organization with more than two decades of experience collaborating with communities and organizations across Newfoundland and Labrador to advance food security in the province. Food First NL’s mission is to advance everyone’s right to food in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it envisions a province where everyone can eat with joy and dignity. To accomplish this, Food First NL follows four strategic pathways: advocating (for policy and income solutions), organizing (individuals and organizations to work collectively on food issues), taking direct action (by operating and funding local initiatives that support food security), and valuing people (by supporting lived and living experience engagement). Between 2022 and 2023, it led an engagement process to reimagine food charity in Newfoundland and Labrador. Throughout the process, it consulted with people with lived and living experience of food insecurity, food charity staff and volunteers, and other actors through surveys, focus groups and a large in-person gathering. The process culminated in a final report that puts forward 23 recommendations for the food charity sector, government and systems-level organizations.
Nanâtohk Mîciwin (Universal School Food Strategy) – Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission (MESC)
Founded on the principles of Cree culture, tradition and language, the Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission (MESC) emerged after extensive consultation, research, planning and negotiations between four Indigenous communities in and around Maskwacîs, Alberta. MESC is the education authority operating at arms’ length of the Four Nations of Maskwacîs, governing a total of ten K-12 schools. The primary goal of MESC is to shape Maskwacîs’ future by helping students connect with their language and culture, do well in school and become leaders. One of the ways it ensures student success is through its Universal school food program, which goes beyond simply feeding students. MESC developed its own Central Warehousing collection & distribution system for getting traditional foods to schools. The program is proud to have relationships with local food producers working to create and sustain a local food system both within and beyond the nations, and strengthening connections and access to traditional foods and food practices. Students are taught about food in their Cree classes and are given the opportunity to participate in land-based food activities and harvests. The school food program is based on the Cree Value of Wahkohtiwin – kinship and sharing, fulfilling its social responsibility and addressing Indigenous food sovereignty – and has full autonomy and control over the foods students receive in Maskwacîs schools.
Regroupement des cuisines collectives du Québec
Regroupement des cuisines collectives du Québec (RCCQ; Quebec’s Collective Kitchens Association) is a provincial organization representing more than 1,200 collective kitchens from across Quebec. It is dedicated to fostering the creation and expansion of collective kitchens across Quebec and developing collaborative networks between them. The RCCQ strives to be indispensable to the collective kitchen movement and advocates for the movement’s values among the public and government. Guided by the principles of popular education, its work is grounded in a collective approach to food security as it works towards and advocates for the development of individual and collective food autonomy through collective kitchens. In accordance with this commitment, it is advocating for the right to food to be recognized as a fundamental human right. It has recently begun developing a framework bill on the right to food which it intends to submit to the Gouvernement du Québec.