Local farms can strengthen food systems and communities. Photo: EcoPhotography
In part three of our blog series on CLF’s work around food justice and food sovereignty, we’re highlighting the work of the Legal Food Hub and the Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund and the incredible organizations and people that they support. Part one of the series focused on food justice, the principle that everyone should have access to nutritious food. Part two focused on food sovereignty, the principle that people should have agency over the food they put in their body.
Small, local farm and food businesses are crucial to healthy, thriving communities. But unlike the big corporations that dominate the industry, smaller-scale organizations can struggle to access legal help, investment capital, and other forms of institutional support. That’s where the Legal Food Hub and Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund come in.
CLF’s Legal Food Hub connects food and farm businesses throughout New England with free legal services. We see this support as integral in ensuring these businesses thrive despite social, economic, climate, and environmental challenges. “Farmers and food businesses can change the trajectory of New England’s food system,” says Mary Lovell, the Legal Food Hub’s program manager. “Good legal support can be the difference between a food and farm business feeding thousands and their farm and farmland being bought and developed.”
CLF and our partners at MHIC developed the Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund after realizing that small, local businesses and nonprofits are often the least able to secure the funding they need to grow and expand. “The Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund demonstrated that strategic investment in the building blocks of healthy communities – such as food system enterprises – can create meaningful change,” says Alex Linkow, CLF’s director for impact investment. “Now we’re building on that foundation by developing the Healthy Enterprise Fund, part of a broader strategy to invest in the housing, clean energy, and local enterprises healthy neighborhoods need to thrive.”
By providing hard-to-find legal expertise and funds, these programs create stronger, more sustainable food systems and communities. Here are just a few of the farmers and businesses that these CLF programs have helped:
Revival Road Farm
Siedric White and Anna Pierce-Slive take pride that they’ve shaped Revival Road Farm to embody food justice and food sovereignty principles. “We think that a big part of the food justice movement for us is small, regenerative, ecologically minded farms and people stewarding those lands. When you have smaller, more community-tied enterprises, they’re focusing on their neighbors and the people in their communities,” says White. Their regenerative farm, located in Beverly, Massachusetts, grows more than 100 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Pierce-Slive hosts educational events, while White uses his background as a chef to entertain guests.
They say that the Legal Food Hub has been “an extremely vocal and available partner” since they founded Revival Road. The pair were longtime farmers but first-time business owners. “If we were drafting a lease or figuring out liability, that would be taking us away from the land and the people we’re trying to support,” says White. The Legal Food Hub connected them with an attorney who helped them handle their lease and liability for events held on their property.
About Fresh, Fresh Truck, and Fresh Connect
Josh Trautwein and Annika Morgan feel proud to bring fresh food to communities where it may be absent. Core to their approach is “choice, agency, and community involvement,” says Morgan. Trautwein and Morgan co-founded About Fresh, a nonprofit with a mission of providing healthy food to communities that cannot afford it. Their Fresh Truck program, which has become its own nonprofit, provides a mobile market that allows people to select produce that’s right for them and their family. Their Fresh Connect program offers people who have been “prescribed” healthy food by healthcare professionals with prepaid cards that enable them to buy fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables.
The Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund provided a nearly $1 million loan to unlock matching funds from hospitals and health plans that are meant to improve health in lower-income communities. This allowed About Fresh to expand their Fresh Truck and Fresh Connect programs, reaching more people with free, nutritious food. The pair says this work is especially important today, as a struggling economy makes it harder for people to afford groceries.
Southside Community Land Trust
The Southside Community Land Trust in Providence, Rhode Island, supports small local farmers and gardeners, mostly immigrants and refugees, by providing land access and institutional support. According to Margaret DeVos, the executive director, “when people own the assets of the food system, they make sure their communities are fed.”
In addition to managing farms and community gardens, the organization develops retail space, pools resources for marketing and technical support, and even takes on many of the costs of repairs and maintenance of farm equipment. They also conduct educational outreach, focusing on teaching young people about gardening and healthy food.
Most of the food grown by local farmers is distributed at no cost in their own communities, always in areas where fresh, healthy, affordable food is hard to find. The organization purchases the crops, then sends grocery bags of fresh produce to food pantries, daycares, low-income housing, and senior centers.
That’s why it was especially frustrating when land Southside Community Land Trust had managed for years was suddenly disputed by the Providence city government. City officials wanted to sell an adjacent parcel and claimed they had the right to shift the dividing fence further into the garden. According to DeVos, “community gardeners revitalized and maintained this area for decades while the City had no interest in taking any action on this blighted, vacant land.” The Legal Food Hub connected them with an attorney to oppose the city’s plan, and today, farmers are still tending to their land and producing food for their communities. The fence hasn’t moved.
The Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund also stepped in to support the nonprofit. A $2.15+ million loan enabled them to renovate a 12,000 square-foot space for new office space, facilities to help farmers prepare their food for market, space for up-and-coming food entrepreneurs, and more.
Niweskok
For some people, the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty don’t fully encompass the work that they do. Alivia Moore serves as a co-director of Niweskok, a Maine nonprofit that revitalizes traditional Indigenous food and medicine practices. They embrace the concept of “rematriation” in their work. “For our work as Wabanaki people, we understand rematriation as restoring matriarchal principles on the land … and the way that that looks is centering nurturing and regenerating in our food systems,” Moore explains. Moore is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, which is part of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
The Legal Food Hub played a key role. “We would not have been able to do some of the actual historic things that we’ve accomplished without their [connections to free] legal support and guidance at various points,” says Moore. When Niweskok successfully fundraised to purchase a farm and return the land to Wabanaki ownership, the organization had to figure out how they could best legally accept responsibility for the land. Two of the Legal Food Hub’s volunteer attorneys helped them incorporate as a nonprofit and handle the farm purchase transaction.
SUSU CommUNITY Farm
The SUSU CommUNITY Farm also needed support with structuring their organization. The Afro-Indigenous farming community in Vermont needed to ensure they had clear, uncontested access to their land. “It’s important to do this because one of the things that colonization attempted to take away from us is… our ways of listening to the land, of being in relationship with the land,” says Amber Arnold, farmer and co-founder of SUSU. The Legal Food Hub’s assistance was vital for one simple reason: SUSU’s work is “happening on the land that [an attorney has] been helping us with.”
The pro bono attorney provided by the Legal Food Hub freed the organization to do what they are passionate about: providing food and healing to their community. SUSU specializes in providing culturally significant foods that might be harder to find in stores, like okra, Alabama Blue collards, and Lagos spinach, as well as medicinal herbs. They distribute these foods, often free of charge, to their community.
Arnold’s background as a healer was essential to her work. The organization hosts healing retreats, with a focus on people who are trying to do good in the world. Arnold explains, “People are really wanting to have safe places where they can land and rest … where they can feel a sense of belonging and community.”
These are just a few of the many organizations that the Legal Food Hub and Healthy Retail and Commerce Fund have supported over the years. “By providing legal resources and funding, these programs free up farmers and food businesses to focus on what they do best: strengthening our local food systems, supplying healthy, affordable produce, and building up communities,” says CLF’s Mary Lovell.
