To name just a few highlights from 2024:

Our state advocacy tackled some of the most difficult and long-standing challenges in Rhode Island’s food system: preserving our dwindling farmland, growing our small and urban farms, reducing the wasted food clogging up our landfill, and ensuring that all of Rhode Island’s schoolchildren are fed well during the school day. Meeting each of these challenges is a multi-year process. The workgroups that supported state legislation in each of these areas educated lawmakers and built coalitions and will continue their work in 2025 and beyond. We celebrated one big win: placing $5 million in the Green Bond for farmland preservation.

For the second year a Council workgroup actively advocated at the federal level, focused on the Farm Bill. By joining the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), Council members were able to access real-time updates and analyses of Farm Bill negotiations and appropriations. Although Congress was too gridlocked to pass a new Farm Bill in 2024, network members and staff were able to educate our congressional delegates on which Farm Bill programs and funds were most important to the health of our local food system, and they will continue to advocate until the next Farm Bill is passed (hopefully in 2025).

The Council launched a multi-year program that brings together a broad coalition of local organizations and farmers to support the viability and growth of small, beginning, and traditionally under-served farmers in Rhode Island. Funded by the USDA, this multi-year program will allow local service organizations to better understand and meet the technical needs of these farms.

The Council led the development of a state-wide plan for ensuring adequate food access for all Rhode Islanders in the event of a prolonged disruption to our food system. Akin to other emergency management plans, this plan was developed with ongoing input from community-based organizations, state agencies, and emergency management organizations. The final plan will be published in 2025.

The Council brought together ‘Food as Medicine’ practitioners from across the state and region to understand how current efforts to increase access to healthy food for all Rhode Islanders are working, and to agree on how to increase access going forward. This multi-year effort will connect and coordinate the work of health service providers, community-based organizations, and local farmers and food aggregators.

We took a leadership role in the state’s annual composting conference and began working closely with municipalities across the state to develop ways to reduce food waste going to the landfill and increase composting capacities.

As part of our growth, our organizational structure continues to evolve. Our staff continues to experiment with the best ways to connect and support the individuals, communities, and coalitions that make up our network. We know that the strength of our network is our foundation for meeting the challenges ahead of us and we are preparing for another powerful year in 2025.

Yours,

Diane Lynch
Board President