Working Groups
Our working groups are led by members of the Community of Practice. We meet regularly to share learning, collaborate on shared action, and build strategies together.
Find out more about becoming a member.
Right to Food at Local Levels
We offer a peer-to-peer space to learn, share, and workshop the right to food work at local levels. Each of us brings experience, expertise, and hard/soft skills to the group and our work together. Change can be powerful, progressive, and swift at local levels, so as a group we will leverage this space and each other in our local initiatives.
Co-conveners
Emily Mattheisen and Em Settlecowski
Poverty, Public Policy, and Politics
We seek to address the links between food systems and public policies that impact poverty and income and wealth inequality. We believe that the Right to Food is inextricably interwoven with other basic rights such as housing, transportation, and healthcare, and that an adequate income from work and public income supports is necessary to realize these rights. Public policy, including but not limited to, minimum wages, gender and race pay equity, protections for labor organizing, adequate income supports, scale-appropriate policy for agricultural and food producers, and redistributive tax policies, is crucial to achieving the Right to Food. Effective advocacy for these policies is limited by the concentration of wealth and power. Thus, serious engagement with policy must be mobilized to confront and transform the underlying inequalities of wealth and power through active political participation.
Co-conveners
Jan Poppendieck and Joanne Burke
Narrative Change
We support members of the Community of Practice to shift the story about the problems we are facing and the solutions we need to advance the right to food in the United States. We develop collective narratives to help members more effectively and efficiently communicate about the goals, obstacles, and solutions of a right to food approach in their own work locally. We also develop narrative change tools to strengthen a coordinated narrative about the value of a right to food approach in our work towards a food system where people and the planet thrive together.
Co-conveners
Chelsea Marshall and Shane Rogers
Global Linkages
We work to understand the global connections that the Community of Practice has, and the links between the movement for food sovereignty and the right to food in the U.S. and abroad. This working group aims to understand how we can use our global linkages to facilitate these two movements, and how we can participate in international processes at the United Nations.
Co-conveners
Photini Kamvisseli Suarez and Josh Lohnes