Reflections on 2025
Read a Message From Our:
A Message from Our Chair
On behalf of the Board of Directors, welcome to the 2025 Food First NL Annual Report. Our Board has given this organization an ambitious mandate and set of goals and we’re very pleased to share a year of significant progress with you.
At Food First NL, we remain committed to bringing new voices to the board table. Board members can serve a maximum of three terms, which means recruitment is part of our work almost every year. This year is no exception as we are again reviewing an intimidatingly excellent group of applicants. The other side of this model is that each year also includes farewells. A sincere thank you goes out to two longstanding board members who completed their terms in 2025. Carolann Harding and Janine Woodrow brought remarkable knowledge, care, and passion to Food First NL, and they will be deeply missed around the board table.
In reflecting on 2025, the Board recognizes countless achievements for which we are deeply proud and grateful. What stands out most is partnership. We watched Food First NL solidify a strong partnership with Stella’s Circle through the new Our Table space in St. John’s. We saw dozens of organizations come together as a new anti‑poverty coalition, supported by Food First NL staff. Across the province, our social enterprises continued to deepen their relationships within neighbourhoods and communities. As a network organization, partnership has always been at the heart of Food First NL’s work, and many of the successes we saw this year reflect exactly what our founders envisioned when they established the Food Security Network in 1998.
The Board was also pleased to help guide Food First NL into new and renewed partnerships with our funders. We are coming out of 2025 in the most stable and sustainable position we’ve ever been in, thanks to a series of multi-year agreements that have given the organization some room to really plan. In the nonprofit sector, that kind of stability is a luxury, though it shouldn’t be.
Having some space in our workflow for planning couldn’t come at a better time. We are heading into the final year of Food First NL’s existing Strategic Framework in 2026, and the Board will be diving into the renewal process. In the months ahead, many of you will likely hear from us as we connect with partners and the communities we serve to help shape a vision that will guide the organization through to 2029. We’re excited for that work.
As always, thank you to all our partners and supporters for helping to advance the right to food for everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Andre Myers
Chair, Board of Directors
A Message from Our CEO
In every possible way, 2025 was a big year — so big it could be numbing at times. World events that would have dominated the headlines in any other year just slipped by. If you’re the type of person who watches numbers and statistics, they told a pretty dire story. We saw food insecurity rates tip over 30% in this province for the first time — numbers so big that I started to hear people question the (solid) data behind them. If you care about the state of the food system, 2025 was a heavy year. I think it’s important to sit with that and really recognize the deep hardship behind those numbers and those headlines.
I firmly believe that we can and must sit with those hard realities and not fall into despair. In 2025, our team did just that. They did that with care. Care for our communities, our planet, and for each other.
That care showed up in small ways and big ones. I saw it in the conversations and questions we brought out to the community this year, whether that was about their dreams for school food systems or a new space to gather in their neighbourhood. I saw it in the many careful hours we spent bringing partners together and finding common ground. I saw it in how our on-the-ground programs kept improving from week to week as we listened to the people who use them. Most of all, I saw it on our team. Not a single day goes by without me feeling inspired by the people I get to work with.
That ethic of care is what sits underneath everything you’ll read about in this report — and there’s a lot to read about. The output, and more importantly, the impact of this team has never been bigger. I also think it tells a story about what a new vision of our food system can look like — a food system that supports and connects people working at every scale, integrates the right to food into how we buy and sell it, and keeps a focus on moving the big policy needles that need to move before everyone can truly eat with joy and dignity. I have a lot of hope that some of those needles really will start to move in the year to come.
Regardless, it’s safe to say we all have another hard year ahead of us. Let’s be sure to make space for care.
Joshua Smee
CEO