Dear friends,
There has never been a more important time than now to love ourselves and our communities: the places we live, the people with us, our plant and animal relatives. Through floods, pandemics, oppression, displacement, conflict, resistance, and rebirth, the love that flows from being with community, where we are free to be ourselves, is our lifeline.
Reflecting on this past year, we are so proud of the way San Diego County’s community food system—our small-scale farmers, fishermen, food business owners, food and farm workers, organizers, and allies—showed up in fierce love, weaving alliances and working in solidarity. Interdependence, kinship, cooperation, and self determination are top of mind in our region. This spirit of healing and transforming together was not always so prevalent. To those who never ceased to speak up for love and tend to this vision, we say, thank you.
In our Year in Review below, the Alliance humbly shares what our team is proud to have contributed in 2023 to this greater arc of change.
As stewards and participants of this movement, we are thrilled to be on the collective adventure of cultivating justice, fighting climate change, and building resilience through food, with all of you.
In solidarity,
The San Diego Food System Alliance team
Highlights
We regularly engaged over 5,000 people with our programs, email newsletters, social media, events, community tables, workshops, personal outreach and dialogues, and more.
Through our Local Food Economy Lab, we made enormous strides in co-designing and offering support services for small-scale farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and food businesses owners in San Diego County, hosting four workshops and supporting 16 small businesses with ongoing, tailored coaching to support their long-term viability. We received significant federal funding to continue co-designing more support services in the future.
At our 3rd Annual Gathering, themed kinship, we convened over 525 engaged San Diegans for a full day dedicated to immersing ourselves in dialogue about the intersection of food with racial justice, climate change, and our region’s resilience. That’s 525 people in our region who have dedicated themselves to ensuring that how we grow, move, and share food in our region is a reflection of our deepest-held values.
We hosted a Resource Organizing Workshop series for peers who are in this movement with us, and who are also fundraising for a more just food system. Together, we asked, what currently feels harmful about the way money moves (or doesn’t move) into and throughout our spaces? How can we make fundraising for this essential work of our time more equitable? We committed to building a bridge to the equitable practices we collectively imagined are possible, and welcome all to cross it with us.
We remain guided by the 3 goals and 10 objectives of San Diego County Food Vision 2030, three years after it was co-developed by 3,000 people in our region. We are approaching the Vision’s five-year mark in 2025, the halfway point to 2030, with excitement, anticipation, and an even larger community around us.
The Alliance exists because we all need a home—a political and cultural home—for the work we have been called to do: to deeply love our community and our food system, to push back on the structures of power that were designed to disconnect us from each other and from the Earth.
A home where we can explore this longing, grow in this work, and connect with others, is a collective need, now more than ever.
These are just a small selection of highlights from an incredible year. We are carrying this momentum, with all the collective joy, heartbreak, resilience, and love we have felt together this year as a community, into 2024 and 2025. So much more still needs to be done: political work, cultural work, fundraising, transitions in power, not to mention the day-to-day labor of growing food, our businesses, families, teams, and trust in ourselves.
The Alliance is a home for it all. We welcome you to walk through our doors, gather around our table, talk, laugh, cry, be. This is where we grow.
With gratitude and solidarity,
The San Diego Food System Alliance team
Please consider making a donation to the San Diego Food System Alliance to support our work.
Donations from our community enable us to create lasting change in the food system and provide important support, resources, and advocacy for food system organizations in our region—including farmers, food workers, local food businesses, and nonprofits.
