The biggest overarching theme emerging from the pandemic was that our current systems simply aren’t working. While we had always been aware that poverty was the root of food insecurity, the evidence was particularly striking in the first few months of living with COVID-19. 

The economic impacts of the global health crisis were devastating and were not distributed equally. We recognized that the lull in our economy, when we were forced to take a hard look at the systems in place, was the appropriate time to discuss social and economic change. We, like so many others, saw recovery from the pandemic as the time to rebuild our economy and systems in a way that better serves the population as a whole; that is, in a way that would make us a just and equitable society. 

We lent our voices to a number of Just Recovery efforts, calling on the Federal Government to prioritize individuals who were the most disproportionately impacted by the pandemic when discussing recovery efforts. We did this in three ways. 

Coalition for a Just Recovery NL 

The Coalition for a Just Recovery NL is a growing list of agencies who have come together to outline a vision for an inclusive, empowering, and just recovery for Newfoundland and Labrador. Together, the Coalition developed a list of 10 Defining Initiatives that outline areas where the Government of Canada’s investments could do the most good. 

To read the open letter to the Government of Canada, and to learn more about the 10 Initiatives, you can visit the website here. 

Everybody Eats

Since 2015 Food First NL has been the backbone organization for a “collective impact” process around big-picture change in the food system - Everybody Eats. As we moved into planning for recovery and thinking about what that would mean for the food system, we worked with the Everybody Eats Leadership Team to go back through the results of the many community conversations held through the Everybody Eats process and pull out the key themes that could be transformed into a set of recommendations for a Just Recovery in our food system here in NL.

Atlantic Canadian Colleagues

Within our province wasn’t the only place in which we advocated for change. We also started bringing together food systems organizations across the Atlantic provinces to develop a common vision for how the recovery process could support a stronger food system.

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