The Greater Flagstaff Food Policy Council - History
In the summer of 2009, collaboration began between Flagstaff Foodlink and students and faculty at Northern Arizona University to bring together diverse community members to build a strong local and regional food system. Fanning out across the community, we held meetings with seed savers and producers, food processors, distributors and retailers, city and county staff and elected officials, backyard gardeners and neighborhood activists.
Six months later we convened a group now known as the Greater Flagstaff Food Policy Council. Our overarching goal is a robust SOLE food system in Greater Flagstaff: a system of Sustainable, Organic, Local and Equitable food. To realize our goal we assess Flagstaff’s food security needs and facilitate focused public action around policy changes to address them. We are concerned with the way the current food system impacts the health of Flagstaff residents, hunger and food insecurity in our community, and the economic viability of local and regional food enterprises. We believe that collective efforts are the best way to face the grave challenges of environmental and community sustainability as they pertain to our food needs in the high desert Colorado plateau.
We created a dynamic wheel as our organizational structure. Six “sites of energy” form the points on the outer rim of the wheel. They are: health/ nutrition, business/cooperatives, animal proteins, poverty/accessibility, growing, and water. Each has a lead organizer to help the groups self-organize, and all lead organizers meet together, forming the axel of the wheel. This axel group keeps fine tuning the structure, the pace, and the focus of the policy council as a whole, bringing in community members not yet at the table, and convening the Council as a whole at regular intervals.