Mission

California Foodshed Funders (CFF) facilitates relationship–building, learning, and collaboration toward a vibrant, responsive funding and finance ecosystem that supports the transformation of California’s food and agricultural systems – and relationships with the land and among people – toward regeneration and justice.

Goals

We seek to address the following goals, all aimed at restoring soil health, the cascading benefits in nutrient density of food crops, water conservation, productivity of the land, and health of all who work the land:

Relationship with Land: Shift culture around relationship with land and each other toward kinship, healing, reciprocity.

Farmer Programs: Increase Technical Assistance/Education/Land Steward support.

Leverage Public and Private Resources: For regeneration and justice.

Land Access: Create access and financial support to get farmers on the ground.California Foodshed Funders (CFF) facilitates relationship–building, learning, and collaboration toward a vibrant, responsive funding and finance ecosystem that supports the transformation of California’s food and agricultural systems – and relationships with the land and among people – toward regeneration and justice.

Values

Regeneration: Accountable to and compatible with relationships to people and land as defined by Kincentric Ecology; Practices that promote continuous and self–perpetuating improvement in soil, water, and other ecological systems affected by agriculture; a social and ecological practice capable of repairing past harm and improving future outcomes.

Right Relationship: A relational approach characterized by authenticity, a learning stance, just relations, and reciprocity. Humility and appreciation are core, and we understand that relationships are everything.

Emergence: An appreciation for the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions, that the system as a whole is larger than the sum of its parts, and that we emphasize critical connections over critical mass.

Responsiveness and Adaptability: Ways of being which are opportunistic, iterative, that account for the conditions around us, and the constancy of change.

Resilience: Tenacious, teachable, adaptable, and fecund – creating more opportunity when faced with crisis and conflict.

History

California Foodshed Funders began informally in 2006 when a handful of grantmakers convened to begin discussing how they could make a bigger impact on California's agriculture and food systems.  In 2014, the organization became a fiscally-sponsored project of Community Initiatives.