Growing Our Food Systems Together: The Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership

Imagine a food system that breaks down silos, fosters innovation and collaboration, and creates sustainable food access for all Missourians that is supported through a robust, equity-focused statewide Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI). This is exactly what the Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership came together to accomplish on April 3^rd when 33 participants representing 23 organizations convened in Columbia, Missouri for our inaugural meeting. Participants included representation from the healthcare industry, state agencies, financial institutions, local and regional food banks, markets, farms, gardens, and universities. Hosted by Empower Missouri in collaboration with the HFFI grant partners, University of Missouri Extension, IFF, and Missouri Coalition for the Environment, the meeting brought together stakeholders from across the state to better understand the Missouri food system landscape.

Missouri is not the first state to create a Healthy Food Financing Initiative. One common marker of success in prior HFFI projects has been the quantity of retail square footage and jobs created. While these are both excellent goals, we understand that in many areas of Missouri this is not a sustainable way to increase healthy food access. If it were profitable to put a grocery store in the middle of a food desert, that most certainly would have already been done. The lack of sustainability for traditional grocery stores in today’s Mega-Corp controlled food environment is one of the reasons areas of low food access exist. Rather than taking a conventional approach to solving the problems of food access by only building retail space, the Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership has chosen to view food access as an overarching theme in all sectors of the food system and leverage the collective brilliance of partners to create an HFFI framework that will be as unique to our state as our food system is.

The University of Missouri Food System Model separates the food system into eight different sectors: Grow, Produce, and Harvest; Deliver and Process; Market and Distribute; Display and Purchase; Prepare and Consume; and Surplus and Waste. While we were convened, MRFAP partners were asked to answer the following questions for each sector of the food system:

How does this part of the food system contribute to increasing healthy food access in low access communities?
What are the current barriers and challenges to working in this sector in Missouri?
What are our greatest strengths and opportunities in this sector right now?
Who is working in this sector within Missouri?
What do innovation and entrepreneurship look like in this sector of the food system?

Food Systems | MU Extension

The responses to these questions showed common trends across different sectors of the food system. Participants highlighted both barriers and opportunities in all sectors of the food system related to culturally relevant foods, infrastructure, scalability, mobile markets/pantries, and access to capital. These insights will directly inform the creation of Missouri’s HFFI framework. We have convened some of the most brilliant and passionate players in our state, and through our efforts, we will most certainly increase healthy food access in the areas that need it most. The Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership consists of people who do not view this work as overwhelming or impossible but rather view this work as essential to the liberation of ourselves, our neighbors, and those who will come after us.

To learn more, please visit Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership – Empower Missouri