GROWING JUSTICE Announces Its First $3.5 Million Grant Round from Pooled Fund

GROWING JUSTICE (Fund) today announced a total of $3.5 million in grants to 21 BIPOC organizations working to transform the food system.

WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES, November 28, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- GROWING JUSTICE (Fund) today announced a total of $3.5 million in grants to 21 Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC)-led and -allied community organizations working to transform the food system. Established in 2022, GROWING JUSTICE is a pooled fund co-designed by BIPOC leaders, underserved farmers, advocates, food suppliers, purchasers, and funding partners working in urban, rural, and Tribal communities nationwide. The Fund is committed to supporting BIPOC-led efforts to advance equitable good food procurement – the purchasing of good food from local and regional growers, suppliers, and distributors of color – as a means to shift markets and transform food systems.

The grant awards range from $50,000 to $180,000, reflecting the diverse scope and magnitude of the efforts. The average grant amount of $167,000 signifies the substantial support provided to each recipient, ensuring they have the resources needed to undertake meaningful work.

The Fund’s Advisory Committee, comprised of esteemed individuals with expertise and experience in food justice, health equity, and worker rights issues, carefully reviewed proposals from hundreds of BIPOC-led efforts across the country.

GROWING JUSTICE believes the selected organizations have clearly committed to addressing community-defined systemic inequities in local and regional food purchasing processes. The Fund recognizes that conditions, needs, and opportunities vary across urban, rural, and Tribal communities across the country. By providing financial support, the Fund aims to empower these initiatives to create more enabling environments for farmers, distributors, aggregators, food chain workers, organizers, and other builders of just supply chains to deliver good food to institutions.

"Our work with the Food Value Chain is based on a system created through generations of acquired knowledge of elders and medicine people. We are involved by supporting all farmers and backyard gardeners, giving them the resources and tools to develop sustainable practices, clashing ancestral knowledge with modern methods, and building a balance that we are comfortable with accomplishing. This funding will support work to assess the needs of community farmers while building a network of support, partnership, and resources to help meet the demand of the institutions on the reservation and provide the producers the support they need to get their businesses off the ground. " - Apache Farmers Co-op (White Mountain Apache Tribe on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation), 2023 Grant Recipient.

Addressing justice issues requires a comprehensive and collaborative strategy. The Fund’s Design Table team, with its diverse background and interdisciplinary approach, played a pivotal role in shaping the vision and values of the grant development process, working diligently to ensure that the Fund's grantmaking approach would be accessible, inclusive, and adaptable.

GROWING JUSTICE is supported by a group of funders, including The Rockefeller Foundation, Native American Agriculture Fund, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, the Clif Family Foundation, and Waverley Street Foundation. The funding group supported the leadership of people of color working on the front lines of the food system. Large funding institutions have an important role to play in ensuring their funding opportunities are designed and deployed in ways that are more deeply community-informed and led

“In order to scale and deepen our work, the organization must maintain staff salaries in a climate of heavy inflation, an increasingly competitive nonprofit job market, and our internal commitment to providing not just a living but a thriving wage. And this is to say nothing of adding new, essential roles that can expand our advocacy, our base, and our movement-building capacity in order to ensure values-based food procurement in D.C.'s correctional facilities and hospitals.” - DC Greens (Washington, DC), 2023 Grant Recipient.

These GROWING JUSTICE grant award winners promote justice, equity, and sustainability within the food system in their work every day. Together, these grantees showcase the diverse range of needs and efforts underway in the U.S. to seed, support, and strengthen innovations, advocacy, organizing, partnerships, and practices. Efforts like these promise to shift institutional procurement systems and build power for people of color and community-based organizations involved in local and regional food value chains.

“Grant funding will enable Wellspring to work with BIPOC farmers to expand the range and quantity of produce they can supply and increase markets to include local residents and institutional customers. This includes support for the Wellspring Harvest greenhouse to increase the production of herbs and lettuce to supply additional institutional customers.” - Wellspring Cooperatives (Springfield, MA), 2023 Grant Recipient.

For a complete list of the grant recipients and more information about GROWING JUSTICE please visit their website at https://growingjusticefund.org/¹.

ABOUT GROWING JUSTICE:

GROWING JUSTICE is a pioneering philanthropic fund dedicated to supporting efforts to advance justice and equity through equitable good food procurement. Through its grantmaking, GROWING JUSTICE supports efforts to shift institutional procurement practices and build just food value chains in ways that support the physical and economic health of communities of color. The GROWING JUSTICE fund envisions a society where fairness, equality, and access are upheld for all. GROWING JUSTICE is a Combined Impact Fund at the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation.

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¹ http://growingjusticefund.org/