Greater Good Blog

We need to build a Good Food policy strategy that enables funders, investors, advocates, and others to coordinate efforts and increase the impact of the Good Food movement. Here’s how we can get started.

 

Last week, we launched Arabella’s Good Food practice and wrote about our three ingredients for a Good Food future: Culture, Infrastructure, and Policy.

This week, we’re excited to announce Arabella’s list of 12 Good Food policy priorities, which you can download below as a simple one-page guide. We offer this guide as a conversation starter and invite you to share it, comment on it, and help strengthen it.

Download our 12 Good Food Policy Priorities infographic now

We developed this list in collaboration with Arabella’s two newest senior associates—Melody Barnes, former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Marland Buckner, founder and CEO of ForeverView Farms. Melody and Marland, a dynamic husband-wife team, bring deep policy expertise as well as first-hand experience as Good Food entrepreneurs. We’re thrilled that they joined the Arabella Good Food team and that our clients can now benefit from their consulting practice and their insights into policy strategy, business, and more.

All of us believe that a policy environment that better supports Good Food is both possible and essential. A better policy environment can produce Good Food jobs, spur needed innovation and remove barriers to business expansion in our food system, increase access to good food in communities across America, and help make our food system more sustainable.

We hope our list will help drive a discussion about building a shared, ambitious, yet realistic Good Food policy strategy—one that enables funders, investors, advocates, and other stakeholders to  effectively coordinate efforts, leverage one another’s resources, and extend the impact of the food movement. The forces that work counter to a Good Food system have a policy strategy, and they execute against it well. To counter their influence, we need a strategy of our own.

We recognize that many more policy changes than we could list are needed, and that much more will need to be done to realize the Good Food future we want. At the same time, we know that a cohesive movement strategy is about making difficult choices; it means choosing to focus on some things and not to focus on others. A realistic strategy won’t make everyone happy on every point, but it will ultimately enable us to drive needed policy improvements at multiple levels. With that said, we offer these priorities as a conversation starter:

Download our 12 Good Food Priorities infographic now

If you have other ideas about policy priorities—especially for philanthropists and impact investors—we would love to hear from you. Just post a comment below or write to us at goodfood@arabellaadvisors.com.

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As founder and a senior managing director of Arabella Advisors, Eric Kessler has built a social venture firm dedicated to making philanthropy more effective. Eric is now focusing his energy on leading Arabella’s Good Food practice.