Community Food Advocates

In a state as large as New York, a steady stream of smart, innovative work is coming from NYHealth grantees and non-grantees alike that is relevant to NYHealth’s priority areas of Building Healthy Communities and Empowering Health Care Consumers and its focus area on Veterans’ Health. These organizations should be elevating their work and informing key stakeholders at regional, statewide, and national conferences, meetings, and other convenings. Yet, because of a lack of resources, they are often unable to do so. To address this issue, NYHealth is awarding grants through its Sponsoring Conference Participation in Support of Healthy Communities, Consumer Empowerment, and Veterans’ Health Request for Proposals (RFP). Through this RFP, NYHealth is sponsoring low-resource organizations to attend and present at local, State, and national conferences related to these areas. In 2019, NYHealth awarded Community Food Advocates (CFA) a grant to participate in this initiative as part of its efforts to build healthy communities.

Under this grant, a CFA staff member attended the Power of Procurement: Good Food for Our Future conference, which covered institutional food procurement, a new advocacy area for CFA. Presenters discussed how food service institutions can exercise their buying power and incorporate good food purchasing practices into their work to influence supply chains and transform our food system to better benefit children, families, and communities. Attending the conference allowed CFA to learn from and engage with regional and national food system leaders and explore best practices from partners around the country to inform its NYC Good Food Purchasing Policy Campaign.

View a complete list of conference participation grantees.