Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investment to Transform Communities

This month, the Federal Reserve Bank launched a report entitled Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investment to Transform Communities. This publication is a curated collection of research, reports, and essays written by community development experts that explore the potential for local and regional food system investment to change local economies, with the explicit end goal of improving equity for low and middle income households and communities. The essays provide insight from a variety of perspectives including finance, government, academia, philanthropy, and more.
 
Overarching takeaways include the imperative of cross sector collaboration, and the necessity for a wide variety of capital to meet diverse needs of local and regional food systems at differing levels of production. This and other key lessons from the report confirm CFFP endeavors to build knowledge including the Ecotrust Regional Food Market Research, accompanying lender analysis, and exploration of a relationship with the CDFI Craft3.
 
CFFP Coordinator Tim Crosby spoke this month at the launch of the report in Washington DC. In tandem with its release, CFFP has prepared a high-level synopsis with bulleted takeaways from each chapter as an entry point to the full publication. Read the synopsis below, and find the full report online here.

Download: Harvesting Opportunity Synopsis