Clare Fox, Executive Director, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders
Interviewer: Miranda Wesley, Communications Specialist, Grantmakers In Health
Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders (SAFSF), a Grantmakers In Health (GIH) Philanthropy Support Partner, recently released their first documentary film, Digging In, in partnership with Masika Henson, Nathan.works, and Vatheuer Family Foundation. The documentary aims to help funders understand how land access, consolidation, and climate change affect U.S. agriculture, which are all factors that impact health and equity. To learn more about the creation and inspiration behind the film, GIH conducted the following Q&A with SAFSF’s Executive Director Clare Fox.
Tell me about Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders (SAFSF) and your current focus areas.
Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders is a national membership network of philanthropic and impact investment organizations who care about creating just and sustainable agriculture and food systems. Our members and partners are comprised of private and endowed foundations, public charities, impact investment firms, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and regranting organizations who seek to move mission-driven capital in more collective, strategic, and impactful ways in partnership with frontline communities, movement leaders, and nonprofit organizations who are implementing change on the ground.
Food and agriculture intersect with many aspects of our lives, including nutrition, hunger, food access, community health, worker safety, racial inequity, and climate adaptation and resilience, to name a few. In the past few years, SAFSF sought to focus on intersectional issue areas that we believe are critical for sustainable food and farming but require more attention. Those areas are climate change, consolidation and concentration, and land access. In 2024, we are undergoing strategic planning, which may shift these areas of focus. For the time being, we feel these areas need more attention from funders and, in general, need more awareness about how they impact communities across the country.
How does your new documentary, Digging In, contribute to your mission and work? What inspired the creation of the documentary?
Issues like climate change, market concentration, and the challenges of land access for farmers are incredibly complex and hard to understand, even for people who are deeply engaged in this work. To understand the challenges and possible solutions, we wanted to lift up the human stories behind these complex ideas.
For example, in the film Digging In, we meet Lateef Dowdell in Nicodemos, Missouri, which is the oldest all-African American town west of the Mississippi River, founded just a few years after the Civil War. For Lateef and other descendants of the formerly enslaved people who sought freedom and land in Kansas, the establishment of Nicodemus “gave them the opportunity to feed their families equitably,” says Dr. JohnElla Holmes, the Executive Director of the Kansas Black Farmers Association. “This was their opportunity to own their own land,” she continued.
Unfortunately, Lateef’s family fell into debt and encountered discriminatory lending practices where local banks and even the USDA would not support his family with financing (“until it was too late”). Under market pressure, Lateef’s family was forced to sell much of their land to larger, white-owned agricultural operations. This is an all-too-common story in American agriculture: systemic racism combines with market pressure and leads to dispossession of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), women, and other small and independent producers, which in turn impacts the communities they serve. As published in FoodPrint “Black Land Loss in the United States,” in February 2024, “The loss of more than 13 million acres of Black farmland over the course of the 20th century has had huge reverberations for both agriculture and the descendants of Black farmers. Lost farmland represents stolen potential to build wealth.”
When agricultural families like Lateef’s lose their land and farming footprint, the community at large loses a form of farming that promotes food equity and climate resiliency and addresses the racial wealth gap. We made the film Digging In because we needed a tool to open dialogue for tackling these types of complex problems in our food and farming system. As a funder network, we use the film as a tool to spur discussion and generate problem-solving through the lens of real human impact.
What are the impacts of land access (or lack thereof), consolidation and concentration, and climate change on health and equity?
The above example from the film is a great example of how land access and land loss are social determinants of health. The chronic stress and physical impact that comes from economic instability, predatory lending, housing insecurity, and diminished access to culturally relevant foods—all of these factors impact health outcomes. Racial disparities in land ownership have led to racial wealth disparities in our country, and we know income and economic well-being correlate to health outcomes as well. Health equity is achieved when people have social and economic stability and equal opportunities to live healthy lives, and this requires addressing the impact of generations of discrimination and systemic racism. Supporting small, midsize, BIPOC, women, immigrant, veteran, and other marginalized and community-serving farmers is one way we can support health equity outcomes, especially for rural communities.
The way climate change impacts our food and agriculture has tremendous consequences for health outcomes as well. For example, extreme weather events and increasing temperatures can destroy crops and damage food supply infrastructure, resulting in food shortages and price spikes that impact low-income communities in both urban and rural communities—we saw a version of this during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where lines outside food banks everywhere were astronomically high. Globally and even domestically, rising temperatures and climate disruption will increase mass migration of “climate refugees,” which correlates to increased food insecurity, labor shortages, and economic pressures on already strained rural and urban communities. This will inevitably lead to a need for more basic needs support, such as food, for vulnerable communities.
Market concentration—and resulting land consolidation under fewer companies—is harder to understand but also has a direct impact on our health. What we are seeing is a many-decade trend of a small number of large corporations essentially “buying” up land and market share to consolidate ownership of our entire food system. This leads to more profit-maximizing practices such as monocropping, use of petrochemicals, degradation of soil, and depletion of nutritional quality of food and access to food options. From a nutrition and health equity perspective, this means we all have less diversity of food choices and less nutritional quality. Low-income communities and communities of color who already have less access to nutritious food are even more impacted by the resulting influx of highly processed “food-like substances,” as the author Michael Pollan calls them. Consumption of high-calorie processed foods, as we all know, is linked to diet-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, which disproportionately affect communities of color.
What role can philanthropy play in creating more equitable agriculture, food, and fiber systems?
As mission-driven capital movers, philanthropy plays a key role in both rectifying the harms of the past and growing the viability of a more equitable and sustainable future. Philanthropy should nurture the conditions in which historically disenfranchised communities can lead, innovate, and develop solutions. Philanthropy can also be bold in supporting the farmers, producers, community leaders, and organizations that traditional capital overlooks as “too risky.”
Some specific ways that philanthropy can support equitable agriculture, food, and fiber systems is by filling the gaps in government programs and investing in organizations’ capacity to access government funds, for example, with matching funds, bridge loans, technical assistance, or grant writing. Furthermore, philanthropy should fund community organizing, leadership development, and movement building that is needed to create long-term systemic change in policy at federal, state, and local levels. Funders must apply their commitment to equity to their own grantmaking or investment strategy and regularly ask themselves: how are we shifting power and decisionmaking into the hands of the communities we support? The people closest to the problems are those with the greatest insights on the solutions, so how does this show up in our own funding approaches and practices?
What’s an example of bold action and committed collaboration aimed at protecting our collective well-being and resilience?
One example that comes to mind is from our SAFSF Forum last June. For the first time in our over 20-year history, nearly 100 funders from 34 states walked the halls of Capitol Hill together to visit over 30 Congressional offices, as well as staff members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, to lift up the perspectives of the producers, advocates, and communities we support. Funders in the SAFSF network log many miles every year walking fields with farmers or in communities across the country partnering for more equitable access to healthy food and public benefits. During the Forum, they had the opportunity to educate lawmakers on the unique challenges our partners face and the many opportunities we have to ensure a just transition into an inclusive and climate-resilient future of food. Funders highlighted how philanthropy and the federal government can work together to make our agriculture, food, and fiber systems more sustainable and productive for the benefit of farmers, communities, and a healthy population.
From what I’ve heard, this Forum was unlike any other! It was a moment for us to celebrate the past, take a look at the future, and really relish the impact that we have when we join forces.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Speaking of Digging In, we are making the film widely available for screenings and working on a multimedia discussion guide, so reach out to us if your organization is interested in screening the film. We are hosting several in-person strategic convenings, and the next will focus on climate, agriculture, and equitable outcomes for rural communities. The final gathering will focus on healthy food access and financing.
We also welcome partners and members to join us for virtual learning events throughout the year. As I mentioned earlier, we are embarking on strategic planning, so it is an exciting time of refining how SAFSF will make an impact for years to come, and we invite our partners to stay engaged with us!