I love the RI Food Policy Council for many reasons.
One of them is the way the organization continues its remarkable way of growing, evolving, and expanding. Watching this process is like watching a time-elapsed film of an acorn germinating, becoming a sapling, and growing its roots, branches, and leaves, hosting an ever-growing colony of fungi, bacteria, insects, and animals. What’s the similarity? Like an acorn, the potential for the Council’s growth was somehow embedded in that first seed that was the Council 10 years ago, but we don’t exactly know how, and no one could have imagined what it would look like today, let alone ten years from now. Like the oak tree, the Council grows organically in a complex dance between the members and their environment. As the Council network adds more and more people, they grow the Council’s structure, reaching it into new communities and hosting a growing colony of projects and impacts.
The Council took a huge step this year and formally changed from a limited-member organizational structure to an open-member organizational structure. The council board, staff, and members had been discussing this change for years, testing ideas with each other, and holding brainstorming sessions. The change finally occurred when those discussions started to coalesce around a particular open-member structural concept that felt ‘right’ to more and more network members. From the outside, it looks like the Council made a big change in 2023. From the inside, it feels like we have been changing all along.
Structural change isn’t that interesting unless it impacts the world in a tangible way. For the Council, the change has sparked all sorts of new impacts – unique workgroups and projects have formed around urban agriculture, wasted food recovery, composting, farmland conservation, healthy school meals, underserved food businesses, second-stage food businesses, hunger elimination, local produce in our emergency food sites, the employee ‘benefits cliff’ facing many Rhode Islanders, our state’s food strategy, and other issue areas. Many Council members, including myself, have found new energy, new resources, and new relationships in their work. Partners and funders have responded by strengthening support. Staff and board have broadened their roles and services.
The world needs every scrap of good news it can get this year, and we feel very lucky to share that 2023 was a banner year at the Council. Thank you to the hundreds of Council members who are co-creating this beautiful living network.
Here’s to an amazing 2024!
DIANE LYNCH, President
RHODE ISLAND FOOD POLICY COUNCIL