Featured Organization: FoodChain

How does FoodChain partner with others to catalyze systems change? 
FoodChain has a long history with partnerships that span across city services, nonprofits, and private businesses in our communities in order to best serve our neighbors and also to facilitate new, more efficient and malleable logistics. Because we work to re-imagine systems, especially to reduce waste or redundancies, we’ve been able to collaborate with unlikely institutions, both in terms of funding sources and programmatic offerings. Additionally, we see partnerships as a means to become more resilient by dispersing the burden on a wider base and accessing a deeper network of potential problem-solving resources.

How has COVID-19 impacted your community and how has FoodChain responded?
Similar to most communities under Covid-19, emergency food access was one of the most critical needs that arose. While FoodChain is not explicitly a soup kitchen, we have always had communal eating as a piece of our programming, with deep ties with food insecure communities and services. Meanwhile, we also have strong networks within local food businesses, who saw their markets collapse and overwhelming layoffs due to the pandemic.

Lexington’s food pantry institutions were quickly swamped, and we realized that a role we could serve was to help prepare and distribute scratch-made meals to marginalized individuals. To sustain and grow this effort, we joined forces with our visitor’s bureau, VisitLEX, as well as the historic area racetrack, Keeneland, to develop a fund called Nourish Lexington. To date, we’ve distributed nearly 250,000 meals through this program, and of equal importance, been able to invest nearly $750,000 back into our local food economy with local restaurants, caterers, distributors, farmers, and food professionals who have assisted in this work.

The pandemic has caused many regulations to be loosened and new partnerships to be formed. Of the changes you have seen and made, which would you like to maintain moving forward? Are you seeing steps that food systems leaders can take to ensure lasting change? 
Through the crisis of urgent need, and by not having the luxury of lengthy planning time, FoodChain, through Nourish Lexington, was able to stitch together unlikely industries and logistical operations in order to address the immediate need for quality food access. As we look towards systematic changes and more sustainable operations, we’re hopeful that we can keep the benefits of changes on the systems level. We hope to continue to not be limited by siloed thinking and operations. In our experience over the last year,  more collaborations have led to more innovative thinking and more comprehensive solutions. This includes from a funding level, in leveraging traditional grants and reimbursement programs typically targeting qualifying individuals and merging them with private foundations and corporations who see the benefits of investing in their local economies. Fundamentally, FoodChain is committed to showing that fresh, quality food does not have to be disparate from emergency food, and that there are synergies to be gained by everyone when we rethink our current systems and the race to the bottom.

This country has seen ongoing protests around systemic anti-Black racism in 2020, and a violent fascist coup attempt at the start of 2021. Systemic racism is not new, but there are more conversations happening around dismantling racism at the local, regional and national levels. How does FoodChain work to create a more equitable and explicitly anti-racist food system?  
At FoodChain we recognize that food access and connections to fresh food are deeply impacted by generations of system exclusion of BIPOC individuals. Furthermore, oftentimes the sustainable food movement has been ignorant of the role in which culture and ethnic cuisines play a role in families taste preference, especially with regards to southern cuisine and the labeling of certain cuisines and “bad.” In fact, the local food movement can be fairly criticized for its idolization of traditionally white interpretations of good food – the stereotypical Whole Foods “foodie” persona. Given our urban location, along with the underlying conversations around gentrification in the quickly changing neighborhood, we sit at a crossroads between many different demographics, both socioeconomically as well as racially.

We see the first step in our role of helping dismantle the racism that exists both in our local food system as well as our community as a complex effort, though acknowledgement is a key first step. To move beyond platitudes and trite social media statements, however, FoodChain is committed to changing our practices as well to improve our own structures and programs. We seek to hire more persons of color for positions, especially those in leadership, both amongst our staff and board members, and are mindful of what barriers we might have in place that could unintentionally exclude minority individuals. We seek out partnerships with other BIPOC-led organizations working in our community and also prioritize BIPOC-owned businesses to spend our funds. For our services and programs, we also rely on other like-minded organizations to help us seek out historically marginalized and underserved individuals who might otherwise fall through the cracks. This includes efforts to work with non-English speakers and ensure that our materials are not just available in English. Finally, we recognize that we are a work in progress and that while we cannot rectify decades of injustices overnight, we are committed to the practice of becoming and acting as an antiracist organization.