The Mississippi Food Policy Council
In the fall of 2017, after deeply listening to Mississippi’s Black, Brown and Indigenous communities who are farmers, fisherfolk, food chain workers, grassroots environmental justice activists and community cultural workers, we began to set in motion a series of internal reflections. Through honest conversations and navigating much discomfort, we realized that we, as a food policy council must engage in deepening our analysis of power, inequities, and disparities from the perspectives of race, class, gender, and region. We committed to engaging in transformative processes to build capacity of the council and our communities to inform transformative policy that ultimately results in system change.
- We embraced the beliefs, values and principles of the MS Food Justice Collaborative as our framework for developing a sustainable culture of policy stewardship.
- We are building our capacity to center racial equity, economic justice, environmental justice, labor rights as human rights, healthy communities, ethical leadership and food sovereignty at the core of how we engage on policy.
- As members of the MS Food Justice Collaborative, we are working with partner organizations to build their capacities along with ours to center racial equity, economic justice, environmental justice, labor rights as human rights, healthy communities, ethical leadership and food sovereignty at the core of how we collectively strive to transform Mississippi’s Food Systems.
- We are developing our people centered food systems agenda, as informed by the legacies and truths of our communities through the lens of public health and ethics, to be responsible stewards of policy.
As the MS Food Policy Council, we engage in our community education, grassroots organizing, value centered coalition building and long term advocacy processes.