Food: Community Plan

A disaster may result in power outages or damaged infrastructure, leaving a huge amount of food at restaurants, grocery stores, and feed stores to go to waste. Creating memoranda of understanding (MOUs) between food suppliers and the community will benefit all parties and make sure all that food is put to good use.

To launch your Food Plan at the Community Level, implement the following steps:

Step 1. Create a Food Resilience Team for your community. Identify team leads and recruit volunteer members. Target your recruitment efforts at expert groups like Master Gardeners and graduates of permaculture design programs. Read more here.

Step 2. Address ongoing food insecurity by supplying your local food bank with fresh food from public farmland, the food forest, and privately owned gardens.

Step 3. Launch an emergency food distribution plan in the community spearheaded by the Food Resilience Team. Read more here.

Step 4. Launch a public farmland program and food forest in the community. Recruit volunteers. Raise money for the effort. Read more here.

Step 5. Start a gardening education program in your community. Consider partnering with the local library or a local nursery. Read more here.

A community whose residents don’t have enough food is already experiencing an emergency even before a disaster. For this reason, you will want to address any food insecurity problems in your community in addition to implementing your Food Plan.