Food for the People

Entering 2024, our fifth season, we are taking a step back from delivering CSA boxes to focus on community building and education. We will be hosting farm based workshops: food processing, living rurally for QTBIPOC, and partner event support.

We have finished our fourth season and thus far distributed over 5,500 CSA boxes for free to our BIPOC community while paying local farms over $100,000. We do this work in relationship with farmers, community members, organizers, and the land to build a food system by and for the people. We do more than just distribute food and pay local farmers. We are helping to build skills and relationships in the food sovereignty movement. To date we have hosted slaughter your own chicken and sheep classes and volunteer work days mobilizing workers to labor on partner farms. We do this work to build our capacity to feed our people, invest in our farmers who feed us, and ultimately build a food system that is liberatory. 

We are fundraising for our fifth, 2024 season! The past four years we have distributed CSA boxes for free to our BIPOC community, host more slaughter your own and other skill building workshops, organizing community meals with our program, farmers and community of volunteers.

Some feedback from our program recipients:

"My partner and I have been struggling to make ends meet this year while navigating underemployment and chronic illness. This project has been the most awe inspiring, healing, life sustaining gift and reminder of abundance during a time when everything else feels so scarce. We opened the box each week with awe at the bounty and beauty, and let ourselves be reminded that we all deserve access to healthy food from and connection to the earth. I am so grateful to the organizers, farm workers, volunteers, funders, and soil for making this happen.'

"You all are so amazing!! Thanks for all your hard work. The CSA box was one of my favorite parts of my summer/fall and was something that brought me a lot of joy each week. I also really really appreciate that you all were able to drop off at my house, since I'm on my bike and pick up would have been more challenging. I'd love to learn more about the program next season!"

What is next? Future building towards:

• Offer farm educational workshops 

• Seed saving and growing at home

• Community building events to strengthen the local movement for food sovereignty

• Develop long term plan for community owned food production to create long term sustainable sourcing of food for distribution 

• Preservation of the Sacred relationship with food and plant medicine in our communities

• Keeping farmers paid and thriving off of this work

Our past seasons. 

In 2020, thrusted into auto pilot after the murder of GEORGE FLOYD, our first season we distributed 1,134 FREE CSA boxes to Black, Indigenous and People of Culture in our communities during the first summer of the unrest. Farmers were paid $30,000. 

In 2021 we provided 1,708 FREE CSA boxes full of fresh produce, eggs, herbs and farmed treats to Black, Indigenous and People of Culture in our communities, hosted a hands on chicken slaughter workshop, 2 lamb slaughter workshops and paid farmers over $50,000.

How to help this third season?

• Directly donate on this page.

• Share with your platforms and communities

• Spread the word

• Contact us with additional ideas or to get on the volunteer list at (email)

DNA X FFTP

foodforthepeople@gmail.com

We believe access to fresh, nutrient dense food from local farmers should be a human right.

We believe that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves.

We believe producing food for our community should be a dignified/living wage job. 

We believe in the power of building a local food system controlled by and for the community.

Historically the food system is one of the first victims of colonization. When we are well fed, connected to land which nourishes us, and able to freely engage in culturally appropriate food ways, we are a healthy people. 

Long term thoughts...

Problems identified in the twin cities food based mutual aid:

• Thousands of dollars donated to mutual aid projects - funds used to buy food from big box stores - putting money back into the industrial food system. 

• No long term plan for community owned food production to create long term sustainable sourcing of food for distribution. 

Solutions to identified problems:

• Partner with existing mutual aid organizations to direct a certain amount of funds to buy food from farmers to source food for distribution.

• Build capacity with existing farms to direct a certain portion of harvest to mutual aid distribution. 

Long term solutions:

• Create farming space dedicated to food production for mutual aid distribution in the twin cities foodshed.