ABOUT Northeast Food System Partnership

The Northeast Food System Partnership is a collaboration of participating organizations and individuals who jointly share sponsorship of several regional projects:
· the Northeast Food System Directory
· the NE-FOOD-L regional listserv
· the community food meeting mini-grants program

Partners are:
· Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG)
· Hartford Food System
· Maine Coalition for Food Security
· School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University
· USDA Community Food Security Liaisons from the Universities of Connecticut and Vermont

Why: The problems of our food and farming system reach across geographic and interest-group borders: globalization and corporate concentration in agriculture, declining health and poor nutrition, decreasing farmland and increasing poverty, loss of quality of life, farm income, and biodiversity. While local food producers struggle to access markets, inner-city consumers struggle to obtain fresh, healthy food. These are problems that require systemic solutions --- solutions that depend on links among constituencies. Conservationists must engage with consumers. Farmers must dialogue with food safety advocates.

Food system activists are working to overcome the disconnection between rural landscape protection and anti-hunger campaigns, between concerns about water quality and food quality, between rural and urban economic development, to forge a truly sustainable and secure food system. They are working to expand food choices in the Northeast by promoting locally-produced food, increasing access to healthy food for all, and fostering produce food in a clean, environmentally-sound way.

The roots of this regional and cross-sector partnership of food and agriculture interests grew from the 1997 "New Connections in the Northeast Food System" conference in Hartford, CT. Conference attendees expressed interest in improving networking and communication among organizations in the Northeast involved in various sectors of the food system. The Partnership was formed to promote cross-sector communication to foster effective work toward our common vision of a more sustainable and secure regional food system.

How: The overall goal of the Partnership is to build a common working agenda among sustainable agriculture and food interests in the Northeast region. We hope to spark dialogue and create alliances among people and organizations that may have similar ultimate visions but different priorities and objectives.

The Partnership's current projects focus on networking and sharing information. It sponsors website and the Directory. It also manages an email list called Nefood-l, produces an email newsletter called Potluck News (posted on Nefood-l), and offers information-gathering services outside the scope of the database searching available on this website.

Funding to support Partnership projects is provided by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group through support from the Lawson Valentine Foundation, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and the Wallace Genetic Foundation.

Subscribe to Nefood-l
Nefood-l is an electronic mail list devoted to the topic of food systems in the Northeastern states. It is an open, unmoderated list. Subscribers post messages to one address; it is then automatically distributed to all other list subscribers. There are currently over 350 people subscribed. Subscription is free.

Subscribing to Nefood-l is easy:

To view an archive of Nefood-l messages, click here.

To download a one-page document about Nefood-l with instructions to subscribe (hand them out at your next conference!) click here.

School of Nutrition Science and Policy | Tufts University
132 Curtis Street | Medford, MA  02155 | 617-627-3223

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