“By leveraging the power of big institutional contracts, we can demand that food corporations live up to our community values or make way for suppliers that will.”
Food Chain Workers Alliance, HEAL Food Alliance, and members of the Good Food Communities network have released a landmark report with lessons learned from ten years of the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP). In their words:
Over the last decade, Food Chain Workers Alliance and HEAL Food Alliance have worked with grassroots leaders to challenge the corporate control of institutional procurement markets and replace it with a different model: values-based food purchasing. The mechanism for carrying out this strategy is the Good Food Purchasing Program. When public institutions purchase food according to community values, our taxpayer dollars contribute to a more democratic and equitable food system. By leveraging the power of big institutional contracts, we can demand that food corporations live up to our community values or make way for suppliers that will.
After successfully passing Good Food Purchasing Policies in ten cities—thereby influencing over $540 million in public food dollars—our members and close partners created the Good Food Communities (GFC) campaign to define the next iteration of our collective work. The GFC campaign builds on past successes by focusing on strengthening supplier transparency and justice for frontline workers and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities…
[In this report] we examine how public food procurement in its current form contributes to corporate exploitation, explore the origins of the Good Food Purchasing Program, spotlight the key role of grassroots leaders, and draw from a decade of lessons learned to make key recommendations for the road ahead.
AJP is a member of the Good Food Communities national campaign, and our Food Justice Certification standards are a part of the GFPP’s “valued workforce” guidelines. Read the full report, watch the launch webinar, and read more about AJP’s work with institutional procurement and Good Food Communities.
