Phoebe Gooding, SAFSF Program Director, attended RAFI’s Come to the Table Conference: Food, Land, and Sacred Stories earlier this month. She shares short reflections from a workshop she attended that led her to dig deeper into what food charity, justice, and sovereignty are all about.

Earlier this month, I attended Come to the Table: Food, Land and Sacred Stories, a conference hosted by Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) where I participated in a workshop titled: Food Charity, Food Justice, Food Rights and Food Sovereignty—What is it all About?. Our facilitators, Chelsea Marshall, and Alison Cohen, led us through an exercise and discussion using a food systems change continuum they developed that progresses from food charity to food justice to food sovereignty. This continuum provides space to lay out the problem to be addressed, list actors involved, strategies you can use, and possible results or outcomes all while looking at it through a “charity, justice, sovereignty” lens. 

As we dug deeper into applying the continuum to our own work, participants reflected on where in the continuum their organization lands, and while most have aspirations for “justice” or “sovereignty” they shared that their day-to-day organizational activities often stay in a charity cycle. This led to the question that challenged the whole room, “if we truly desire systems change, then why are we doing business as usual?” More specifically, if the root cause of hunger is poverty, and poverty is inextricably linked to systemic racism and institutional discrimination, how will our organizations’ theory of change and day-to-day activities reflect what needs to happen to bring about the outcomes and results we are ultimately striving for? How do we move from food charity to food sovereignty? I left the workshop with a new tool to use as a framework for addressing not just the symptoms, but the root causes of food-related inequities. I challenge you to check out the National Right to Food Community of Practice’s food systems change continuum and take an inventory of how your organization can adjust and transform to break the charity cycle and move towards justice and sovereignty.