Building Community Power: CFJA Kicks Off a New Year of Food Justice Advocacy
We were excited to host a community leader training this week for the Community Food Justice Alliance (CFJA), officially launching the Alliance for the upcoming year.
Led by our Community Power & Partnerships team, the Alliance brings together community leaders, advocates, and organizations committed to advancing food justice and creating a more equitable food system across our region. This year marks an exciting new chapter for the Alliance. Rather than operating as a single statewide cohort, we are launching regional cohorts in the North, Central, and South regions of our service area. This new structure allows us to better connect with communities where they are, strengthen local leadership, and create opportunities for deeper collaboration around the unique challenges and opportunities each region faces.
Alex Perez, Latine Business Development Program Director with the Northwest Agricultural Center, who attended the leader training, said “I am excited to learn and contribute as much as I can to see how we can make more effort to have more things happen around food security.”
Amanda Sparks, Executive Director of the Orcas Island Food Bank, who also attended the training, said she’s looking forward to “learning how to pull together a cohort and pull together enough information to take people who aren’t necessarily used to advocating, and educating them down that road to being able to advocate with their own voices to represent their community.”
The leaders who attended the training will go on to facilitate the three regional cohorts. By organizing our work through regional cohorts, we are building stronger relationships across the 17 Western Washington counties we serve while creating pathways for local leaders to learn from one another, share resources, and develop collective strategies for change. Each cohort will provide a space for community members to identify priorities, elevate lived experiences, and advocate for solutions that address the root causes of food insecurity.
The Community Food Justice Alliance is grounded in the belief that those most impacted by hunger and inequitable food systems should help shape the policies and decisions that affect their communities. Through leadership development, advocacy, and regional collaboration, participants will help drive meaningful change at the local and state levels.
Through this work, we are building long-term grassroots leadership, sustainable organizing infrastructure, and community-driven policy solutions that increase access to healthy food, strengthen local communities, and create lasting systems change rooted in equity, accountability, and collective power.
We are excited to see what this year’s cohorts will accomplish and grateful to the community leaders who are helping make this work possible.