Shifting Food Systems

To kick off our 2025 Learning Journey, our group came together for a dynamic and thought-provoking session, where we dove into the complexities of food systems. This workshop was designed to uncover our current understanding, challenge existing assumptions, and set a foundation for learning and growth throughout the Journey.

The question of how to feed the world in the face of so many intersecting crises commands policy-making spaces, news headlines, and research. Our global food system is most often framed as a singular, complicated, monolithic entity. But in reality, food systems are a mosaic of countless territories, economies, communities, and cultures. To begin to imagine new possibilities, we must first confront the centralization that has come to dominate both food systems and the ways we think about them.

No matter our differences — religions, political orientations, backgrounds — we all eat. This session focuses on food as a reflection of culture, identity, and stories. Participants will explore the ways food is embedded in cultural practices, values, and traditions, and how dominant narratives often erase the human side of food systems by prioritizing data-driven and development-focused approaches.

Our first PEER CONNECTION session created an intimate space for members, highlighted the work of community members in the food systems space, connected the learnings from previous sessions to our individual and community growth, and began building the path to collaborative action....

PART ONE

Shifting Food Systems Learning Journey & Collective Action project introduces us to Raj Patel, Author and Research Professor, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Raj guides our community through a dynamic and revealing look at The Green Revolution, it's real intentions and the very real, lasting consequences to our food systems today.

Learn more about Raj Patel.

PART TWO

Our panelists, Raj Patel, Author and Research Professor, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, with Elizabeth Mpofu, Former General Coordinator of La Via Campesina, and Alfie Pulumbarit, National Coordinator at MASIPAG, focused on power imbalances, corporate consolidation, and why justice—not simply technological or scalable solutions—is central to sustainability.

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

It’s easy to think that the problems we face in agriculture are too complex to address, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Many of the solutions are already being practiced around the world — there just isn’t enough institutional support and too many roadblocks for them to thrive. Instead of finding ever-newer and shinier solutions, how can we reorient ourselves to building a culture of support for those who are already doing the work to transform our food system? 

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

We often think that the “right” solutions in agriculture can be found through the numbers, through looking at the right data. But which solutions we opt for depends far more on values than we often care to admit. Sometimes it takes unlearning the ways in which we were taught to see the problem in order to allow space for creative solutions to emerge. 

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

The systems currently draining all life on Earth are based around simple, transactional, extractive relationships. The shift towards life-centric systems means regrowing a complex web of balanced, reciprocal, liberatory relationships — with one another and with all beings. Agroecology is a pathway to do exactly this. What does agroecology look like in practice? And how does it mean different things for different people? 

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community, where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

The dominant culture — of competition and polarization — has eroded faith in our ability to build bridges across sectors. To grow the conditions for deep, lasting change, we must find common ground between civil society, the private sector, and government. How can we cultivate partnerships that recognize shared values while honoring differences? How can we confront pressing problems while working at the speed of trust? How can we make rooms for healing within spaces that don’t value it?

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community, where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

We are frequently told that it’s only possible for “producers” or “consumers” to be adequately supported — that our survival is contingent on a mentality of scarcity. But around the world, we can find models of communities cultivating abundance through reciprocal systems of care. However, it’s not enough just to create these systems — we must also create the infrastructure needed to incentivize and support their sustenance. 

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community, where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action. 

There is immense potential for philanthropic communities to support and nourish grassroots movements. Between these two spaces lies vastly different histories, contexts, and understandings of time. How can we move beyond the limitations of short-term funding cycles to create intergenerational relationships of nourishment? How can we relinquish the need for ownership over initiatives and create the conditions for them to evolve and reproduce?

This will be our facilitated space for learning and exchange within our community, where members will share knowledge and ideas, connect to each other deeply and and inspire collective action.