Big cuts are coming to food assistance programs in the U.S. thanks to the recently passed budget bill. About 12.4% of the U.S. population — or 42 million people — rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The bill, which President Trump signed into law on July 4, will reduce nutrition funding by $186 billion between 2025 and 2034.
Meanwhile, food insecurity is already a major and growing problem in the U.S. Data from USDA shows that in 2023, 13.5% — or 18 million — U.S. households were food insecure at some point during the year, up from 12.8% in 2022. For households with children, 17.9% — or 6.5 million — experienced food insecurity in 2023. USDA data also shows that Black, Indigenous and Latino households experience food insecurity at higher rates than white households.
Philanthropy has long played a role in providing funding for food security in the U.S. and around the globe. But while significant federal cuts demand greater action by funders — something we’ve encouraged here at Inside Philanthropy — philanthropy will not make up for all the funding that’ll be lost.
One big question for funders going forward will be whether to prioritize more traditional forms of direct relief, back uncertain public sector advocacy avenues, or, where possible, pursue projects that tackle questions of resource ownership and allocation at their roots.
One example of the latter is equitable food oriented development (EFOD), a community-rooted development strategy that centers food and agricultural systems led by and accountable to Black, brown, Indigenous and AAPI people. The EFOD Collaborative is a coalition of practitioners on the ground who use this strategy to create economic opportunities and healthy neighborhoods, focusing explicitly on building community assets, power and wealth in disinvested communities of color. It is part of a growing movement of other community-controlled funds that are changing how capital flows into communities, including the National Black Food and Justice Alliance and the Climate Justice Alliance.
“We wanted to come together as a body of practitioners to support and uplift this kind of work around the country, but also to resource ourselves,” said EFOD director and national organizer Trisha Chakrabarti.
Some of the work EFOD members have done includes reclaiming land for Black farmers, creating a food hub to revitalize local economies and create jobs in California, preserving Indigenous foodways in Alaska, and launching community kitchens. But according to Chakrabarti, when organizations approach funders for capital-intensive projects such as food and agricultural systems development, they often find funding unhelpfully siloed into categories like “workforce development,” “community development” or “health and nutrition.”
“There wasn’t really an understanding of the intersectionality of these types of projects,” Chakrabarti said. “And so we wanted to come together to both remove those barriers to doing work in a really holistic way, but also to create an integrated capital fund that was led by our communities of practitioners.”
Thus far, EFOD has raised $12.5 million. Its funders include the Kresge Foundation, which has awarded it $5.7 million over three years, as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The California Endowment, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the NoRegrets Initiative.
Since 2020, the EFOD Fund, one of the central tools of the collaborative’s work, has distributed a total of $8.3 million to 39 organizations, and an additional $2 million in fellowships to its steering committee member organizations. There are currently has 36 member organizations, including Agroecology Commons, the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, Boston Farms Community Land Trust, Chilkoot Indian Association, Ecotrust, El Departamento de la Comida, First Nations Development Institute, La Mujer Obrera, Oakland Bloom and Sticky Rice Club.
Why Kresge supports the EFOD Collaborative’s practitioner-led, collective governance structure
One of the key aspects of the EFOD Collaborative is that it prioritizes the lived experiences and knowledge of EFOD practitioners. “What makes EFOD really unique is… that it is practitioner-led. They have a collective governance structure that is centering power with and for the practitioners, leaders and organizations who are embedded in their communities,” said Monica Valdes Lupi, managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s health program. Kresge has been supporting EFOD since its inception in 2017.
According to Valdes Lupi, the EFOD Collaborative’s work is aligned with three of Kresge’s program focus areas: community-driven solutions, community health ecosystems, and community investments for health equity.
EFOD is led by a steering committee made up of nine organizations from across the U.S., which in turn aim to be accountable to the communities they serve. Members from three of the organizations — Communities in Partnership, Planting Justice and La Mujer Obrera — also sit on EFOD’s executive committee, which is responsible for setting the budget, providing strategic development and making time-sensitive decisions.
Members from the steering committee can also sit on the community investment committee, which is the leadership body for the EFOD Fund, an integrated capital fund that provides grant resources, technical assistance funding and nonextractive capital to EFOD practitioners. Rather than relying on conventional credit and asset-based requirements, the fund prioritizes community-led financing models. For the collaborative, “nonextractive capital” refers to 0% interest loans of up to $250,000 that are provided from anywhere between seven to 10 years. There is also a backbone staff that carries out the decisions and the vision of the practitioner leaders.
It’s this type of community-focused structure that Kresge is interested in supporting. “For us, it really has been a chance to think of ways that we share power and the ways that we’re doing grants on our team with the collaborative, rethinking the ways that different types of funding flows — capital flows — in communities, and hoping that by partnering with the collaborative and their members, that we’re truly investing in community-led economies,” Valdes Lupi said.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
How EFOD aims to build community wealth through non-extractive practices
Valdes Lupi noted that the EFOD Collaborative’s work to address food insecurity involves more than simply helping people access food, though that is, of course, important. More than that, though, it’s about shifting power and capital to create multigenerational opportunities to build wealth in place and build resilient and just food systems.
“We understand that we need to feed people. We really need to be solving why people are hungry in the first place, and so we’re really wanting to solve for those issues ourselves so that people have the funds, they have the systems in place that are built in dignity, built in respect, built in ownership and accountability, not extractive plantation capitalism, but systems that can be maintained where everyone has what they need to thrive,” said Camryn Smith, co-founder and executive director of EFOD member organization Communities in Partnership, which works in Durham, North Carolina.
Smith pointed out that despite billions of dollars in investment, including from philanthropy, the overall cumulative wealth of Black and brown communities in the U.S. remains low. Durham, for instance, was known as one of the first Black Wall Streets, she said, and has a robust educational system. Despite that, though, communities’ overall wealth doesn’t grow. “We have all this education, but we do not own anything,” Smith said.
To address this historical lack of wealth in communities of color, EFOD focuses on projects that can economically empower communities, address the challenges community businesses face, and disrupt systemic inequities that are rooted in capitalism. In a similar vein, EFOD also advocates for initiatives that secure community ownership of physical spaces and economic resources. “We want to have a community construct that’s built on respect, dignity and accountability, so that everybody has what they need,” Smith said.
The argument for moving beyond “charity” to building new systems as public funding is cut
In its recently published playbook, “Building Liberated Futures Through the EFOD Fund,” EFOD noted that this type of local, community-based work is particularly crucial at a time when federal funding is being slashed.
As one section of the playbook puts it, “In times of national uncertainty, local organizing becomes even more vital. Local action matters because it is where system change takes root, but it doesn’t happen in isolation… While federal and state policies may set the stage, it is these movements — grounded in cultural knowledge, community power, and deep accountability — that make transformation possible.”
While ensuring citizens have access to food is (at least in theory) the purview of the government, communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized, cannot rely on federal funding or even on traditional forms of charity. As EFOD notes, it is imperative communities find ways to safeguard themselves to deal with ebbs and flows of outside support.
“It’s not that we’re against charity per se, but charity is not solving the problems,” Smith said. “Charity is a placeholder until we can get to building systems so that people can feed themselves, they can solve their own issues, they can house themselves, they can educate their children properly, they can have dignified employment with healthcare and what it takes to thrive in this economy in the United States.”
Of course, while modeling more equitable community ownership is important, the bigger challenge is scaling it, especially against a backdrop of regressive federal policies and an economic system that heavily favors the “haves.” With that in mind, though, Chakrabarti also alluded to another way well-heeled funders could change their practices to stand in solidarity with communities and shift prevailing economic norms.
“As grants are getting out to community organizations or intermediaries like EFOD that are actually accountable to practitioners,” Chakrabarti said, “we’re also seeing on the flip side that many of those same foundations have their endowments invested in systems of extraction and exploitation that are actually undoing any of the good work that community organizations are trying to get through in their communities.”
