Envisioning a collaborative foodshed in Kansas City

KC Healthy Kids, along with partnering organizations Groundwork Northeast Revitalization Group (NRG), Mid-America Regional Council and New Growth, have received funding from the USDA's Regional Food System Partnerships program to connect and strengthen our regional foodshed.

The partnering organizations bring together diverse networks from urban, suburban and rural communities. The project area includes: Allen, Douglas, Leavenworth and Wyandotte in Kansas and Cass, Jackson, Lafayette and St. Clair in Missouri. They also bring complimentary expertise in community planning, research, stakeholder engagement, food system justice and community development.

​Katie Nixon, Food Systems Director with West Central Missouri Community Action Agency and member of the New Growth Team, believes this project "will give us an opportunity to understand our local food system from new perspectives and help guide future work that will help make the region more resilient and food secure."

Alyssa Moncure, who coordinates the Northeast Grocers Project for Groundwork NRG, is "especially interested in seeing how we can assist our BIPOC farmers to self-organize and implement their visions for a more integrated and locally-reliant regional food supply chain".

The main goal of the project, led by the Greater KC Food Policy Coalition, is to identify actionable strategies to develop a sustainable, systematic connection between food producers and consumers in the regional foodshed by:

1. Bringing together diverse stakeholders to build connections, collaboration and a shared understanding of the current food system and establish a collective vision for a resilient food system.
2. Conducting an equity-based food system assessment to understand inequities in the regional food system and highlight structural barriers as well as identify assets and opportunities, including an inventory of food system organizations.
3. Developing recommendations and an action plan for building a collaborative, resilient and equitable food system.​

For Marlene Nagel, Director of Community Development at MARC, "this project is important to our region in understanding food security needs and how to best leverage existing resources and determine where additional support is necessary."