Changing Entrenched Values to Promote Equity-Oriented Practices: Lessons from Chicago Metropolitan’s Good Food Purchasing Initiative

Keywords: Food Justice, Policy, Research Collaboration
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 9

Abstract

The Good Food Purchasing Initiative of Metro Chicago (GFPI), collaborates with local BIPOC food suppliers and workers and connecting them to resources, technical support and networking at multiple nodes to advance transparency and racial equity in public agencies’ food supply chain expenditure, leveraging the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP)’s mandate to shift to a values-based food procurement system.
Metropolitan Chicago’s food system mimics sharp, broader disparities seen in the US. Promoting systems change requires food justice work with stakeholders across nodes and scales of the food supply chain where impediments arise. On the purchasing side key work includes reshaping procurement pathway values, reflected through policies, procedures, contractual language and biased practices. On the production side, small-scale BIPOC producers and processors articulate visions of food sovereignty, that emphasize reproductive justice, care and community stability. They couch exchange around food primarily in terms of its use value, while addressing the need to revise pricing to reflect the costs of just food production including broader community directed and culturally-affirming skill- and resource-distribution practices.
Implementers and evaluators consider stakeholders’ pluralistic visions of food justice, as much as GFPI implementation, in responsively setting goals, identifying resources and developing research activities towards building equity for BIPOC stakeholders in the food supply chain. The GFPI multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional evaluation team will discuss the friction of systems change, drawing on implementation baseline assessments identifying entrenched and emerging barriers encountered in agencies, as much as stakeholders’ emerging and divergent analysis and engagement with the GFPI program.