Between the Summer of 2022 and the Spring of 2024, Community Food Strategies partnered with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to bring together a passionate and talented group of individuals from North Carolina’s food system development sector. This diverse group included workers, activists, organizers, visionaries, and achievers, all united in exploring how the principles and practices of “Solidarity Economics” could enrich efforts for developing equitable and sustainable food systems across North Carolina communities.

The motivation behind this endeavor stemmed from an observation that while systemic change in food systems is increasingly discussed, specific details as to what this change can or should entail tends to lag behind. Solidarity economics, with its progressive values-based framework, provides accessible community-based approaches toward advancing conversations on equitable food system development.

Through this cohort initiative, members discussed real-world systemic change practices within the realm of solidarity economics. Some of these practices, many of us know well (CSAs, food co-ops, collective farming, community land trusts, and so on). Other practices may be less familiar, more emergent, or tied to other sectors less directly related to equitable food, like housing, though still definitely related to equitable food. The cohort discussed practices holistically (many from the cohort’s own diverse experiences) to envision what an equitable and sustainable food system might look like as an ecosystem of interconnected efforts.

As the cohort dug into solidarity economics as a framework and a set of community-centered practices, they reflected on how these concepts resonated with them individually, as a group, and potentials for practices to be more holistically embraced by their respective home organizations, communities, and the broader food coalition network in North Carolina. Community Food Strategies wants to open this conversation up to the wider food coalition network in North Carolina.

As our cohort time came to a close, members offered reflections on what solidarity economy holds for them as an economic framework that honors: 

• Relationships as a meaningful metric of impact because more is possible together and our individual brilliance, simply as people with lived experiences, combines through conversations to create a full spectrum of possibilities.
• Intentionality, mutual care, flexibility in meeting ourselves where we are and recognizing our wholeness as both humans and as a collective — with space for our brokenness and tender heartedness.
• The importance of systems thinking and naming practices that are appropriate for the tasks at hand (namely, meeting chronic problems with long-term solutions rather than short-term crisis responses like perpetual charity). 
• Showing what’s possible through practice and experimentation.
• “The way food keeps time” can serve as a more organic and less commodified marker of time’s passage. This can include: seasonality; the warmth of communal gatherings; the passage of time during meals and honoring meals as places of checking in with and caring for one another; ways it continuously creates and is created by culture, creates and is created by community, and creates and is created by pleasure.

Community Food Strategies wants to continue to explore and stoke this conversation, so we would love to hear what you think about potentials for highlighting and employing more value-aligned practices like these in our food system development efforts. 

Read more about food systems & solidarity economies here.