Annual Report 2020
Message from the Board Chair
This has been a year of unprecedented challenges here in Newfoundland and Labrador. Nowhere is this more true than in the food security space. We began the year with a catastrophic snowstorm in Eastern Newfoundland that showed both how fragile our food systems can be, and how resilient our community networks of support really are. Two months later, pandemics and lockdowns brought very similar experiences to the whole province.
The experiences of this year have shown just how vital Food First NL’s work is. We have served as a crucial coordination point for information, for funding, and for ideas about a better future. As you’ll read in this report, Food First NL was able to respond to the events of this year with flexibility and speed and to support thousands of people from hundreds of organizations in their work on the ground.
Food security, and especially access to food, is a more publicly prominent issue than at any other time in our organization’s history. This is an incredible opportunity. We owe that not just to the events of the year, but also to the incredible work of the whole staff team, who are consistently punching far above their weight. This year was also the first year of new leadership at the CEO level, and the Board is very happy to see Josh begin to make his own mark on the work.
Throughout all this, we have tried to keep our eye on the big picture, with a vision for what comes next both in the focuses of our work and in the structures behind it. As a Board, our own journey continues. We are welcoming new Board members recruited through an open provincewide process and saying goodbye to some longstanding faces.
The Board sees immense potential for Food First NL in 2021, building not only on the unexpected events of this year, but also on the foundations of years of work in some of the key areas - from institutional food systems to deep community dialogue - that have the potential to redefine our food landscape in Newfoundland and Labrador. Thank you all for being a part of this journey with us.
Tom Cooper
Chair, Board of Directors
Message from our CEO
In this pandemic year where “in unprecedented times” has quickly become a cliche, we have a story to tell you.
It’s a story about resilience, flexibility, and innovation alongside incredible hardship. It’s a story with a cast of thousands, growing every day, working at every level to change our food systems for the better.
This report is going to throw our usual Annual Report format out the window. A project-by-project highlight reel wouldn’t share the realities of 2020 in any meaningful way. Instead, we’d like you to spend some time walking the path we walked through a year of endless unpredictability - and incredible opportunity.
This report has three core elements:
The Timeline: follow along season by season through the events that defined our year
Deep Dives: in-depth items about some of the key parts of our work in 2020
Impact Snapshots: some key metrics and numbers to give you a sense of scale
This strangest of years also lines up perfectly with my own first year leading our team at Food First NL. They are an absolutely incredible group of people who have taken every sharp turn of the last year with grace and with grit. What an amazing asset to this province, and a testament to the leadership of my predecessor, Kristie Jameson, and our Board of Directors.
With my own first day on the job marked by a snowstorm, my first month by Snowmaggedon, and my first year by a pandemic, it hasn’t exactly been a normal onboarding experience, but I am nonetheless incredibly grateful to be here. Over this last year, Food First NL has made a difference, and that’s just about the best thing we can ask for in times like these.
As I turn my attention to 2021 and beyond, I see an incredible amount of opportunity. Never before has food security, and food insecurity, been so top-of-mind in this province. Never before has there been such a window of opportunity for profound systems change. We have a lot of work to do, and we thank all our partners and supporters for taking this journey with us.
Joshua Smee,
CEO
In This Report
Winter 2020
Spring 2020
Summer 2020
Fall 2020
WINTER 2020
New Leadership
Photo: Ritche Perez
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
In January 2020, after an extensive search process, Food First NL welcomed our new CEO, Josh Smee. A familiar face in the province and in the food movement, Josh came to Food First NL with a background in policy, planning, and engagement that has seen him work closely with organizations and communities all over Newfoundland and Labrador.
This brought to a close months of extraordinary work by Program Manager Sarah Ferber and Manager of Finance and Administration Ashton Lane, who had stepped in to serve as co-Executive Directors during the final months of the search process.
Thank you to Kristie Jameson
In fall 2019, Kristie Jameson stepped down as Executive Director of Food First NL after ten incredible years of growth and partnership-building.
When Kristie took the reins of what was then called the Food Security Network in 2010, it was a small organization that had made some great strides in putting food security on the map as an issue and bringing together a network of grassroots organizations. Through her patience, vision, and team-building, Kristie helped build the movement, built and grew a great team of staff, and solidified food security as a key policy issue in this province.
Snowmaggedon
On January 17, 2020, the Avalon Peninsula was hit with a record-setting blizzard that shut down St. John’s and the surrounding communities for 8 days.
Snowmaggedon surfaced many challenges and gaps in our food systems, and the lessons we took from it would be critical in the pandemic months to come.
Snowmaggedon
Read more about our response to Snowmaggedon and our lessons learned.
Photo: Ritche Perez
Trip to Nunatsiavut
Since 2009, Food First NL has been involved in Community-Led Food Assessment processes in Nunatsiavut as part of our Our Food NL project. This project was led at the community level by the Hopedale and Rigolet Inuit Community Governments, with funding provided by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Food First NL’s work on this ten-year project came to an end in March 2020, and that month saw staff travelling to Hopedale and Rigolet for an annual site visit and program updates to community members.
In Hopedale, with snowmobiles roaring into town for Cain’s Quest, a committee meeting reflected on 10 years of work that grew from the initial food assessment. Several long-standing original members were still active, alongside a new ‘food security worker’ in a new position supported by the Nunatsiavut Government in Hopedale.
In Rigolet, we met with longstanding and new team members and planned for how some of the initiatives that grew during the project would continue on, or transition into something new.
Our Food NL
Read more about our work with the Our Food NL project.
Pandemic Begins
Josh and Sarah returned from Labrador two days before the first COVID-19 case was announced in the province. Our experience with Snowmaggedon had taught us a lot, but we had no idea how much our work was about to be redefined.
SPRING 2020
Launching a Pandemic Response
When the Public Health Emergency became a reality in Newfoundland and Labrador, our focus immediately shifted to emergency response.
Pandemic Response
Food First NL’s pandemic response was extensive.
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
Our Team Goes Remote
In early March, we began to change some of the way we functioned around the office in order to prepare for an anticipated shutdown, and by March 16th, Food First NL staff were working exclusively from home with all activities moved online. As is the case with many organizations, there was a learning curve to working from home and we had to make some adjustments to the way we plan our work.
Some previously planned initiatives were put on hold this year in favour of emergency supports for COVID-19. Some of this was out of necessity, as much of our typical programming relies on in-person communication and collaboration, but the shift was also because of the massive impact that COVID-19 has had on food security in our province.
Despite the lack of in-person gatherings and collaboration, Food First NL still received a number of requests for virtual presentations, letters of support, and requests for information. We have 82 outreach requests since April.
Our work has changed, and our working model along with it, but many changes since the onset of the pandemic have been positive, workable, and will inform our work into the future. In particular, this has made it much easier to have a truly province-wide team - a critically important thing for a provincial organization like ours.
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
Our team spent a lot of time this year having important conversations about equity.
Laying Foundations for Post-Pandemic Work
Much of our spring was spent on pandemic response, particularly early in the season. However, we did take the opportunity to lay the foundations for some exciting projects that would take place later in the year.
One of these projects was the St. John’s Food Assessment, and another significant project that began to take form in the spring was the Humber Valley Food Hub, our first social enterprise.
Of course, pandemic response took priority in our work, but starting the process for some exciting and particularly useful new projects set us up for a very productive fall.
Pivoting our Focus and Funding
Food First NL’s bread and butter is convening - bringing people together to start projects, come up with ideas, or feed back on policy. As Newfoundland and Labrador headed into lockdown, much of this work stopped. We had to pivot, and many of our partners and funders were pivoting too.
Through the spring, our team worked with our funders to redirect, re-envision, and reshape our work. We took travel budgets and program budgets that couldn’t happen and poured them into supports for grassroots pandemic relief.
A New Communications Coordinator
Communications is a core part of Food First NL’s work, and our Communications Coordinator is a critical member of the team. After a few long months of dividing up the communications work across the team as the position sat empty, we knew it was time to hire - even if we couldn’t meet face to face. We welcomed our new Communications Coordinator, Danika Carter, in May (and we did eventually manage to pull the whole team together for a socially-distant picnic).
SUMMER 2020
We Launched the Community Food Action Space
In early June we (re)launched a huge resource for community-based food security work.
Formerly known as Healthy Eating in NL, the Community Food Action Space emphasizes resources specifically for community organizations running food programs in Newfoundland and Labrador. Connecting organizations with each other, and quality resources, supports food security and healthy eating in our province.
On the Community Food Action Space site, there are three categories: a Local Program Map, Resource LIbrary, and information “For Your Health”. The Map shows over 200 listings of community gardens, farmers’ markets, meal programs, and food banks and community freezers across the province. A direct link to Food First NL’s database of emergency food programs during COVID-19 has been included to keep emergency food program information as current as possible. In the Resource Library, organizations will find a rich collection of toolkits and other media to successful run food programs. This provides insight on topics such as: Running a Community Food Program, Healthy Food Policy, Teaching Food Skills, Community Planning for Food Security, and Sustaining Programs. The section, For Your Health, links to trusted sources of health information, including provincial health promotion resources.
Community Food Action Space was developed by Food First NL in partnership with the Department of Children, Seniors, and Social Development, with input and support from many partners in Food First NL’s network.
Maintaining Our Pandemic Response
In Summer of 2020, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic had found its rhythm. We strengthened and maintained that response by:
Adding additional funds for community partners
Streamlining the Helpline service
Hosting regular province-wide check-ins
The Community Food Helpline is still operating, with funding to keep it going until March 31, 2020. We have also continued our Food Security Working Group calls on a biweekly basis and have had one session where we broke into groups to discuss changes we’d like to see at the systemic level.
Operating the Community Food Helpline
After Snowmaggedon, it was clear that there was a disconnect between how vital food programs are and how accessible they were. We discovered that there was no one place to find a list of community food programs throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, and so, we developed the NL Food Programs List, which is available on our website.
When the pandemic hit, the digital divide became apparent; while some folks could access the Food Programs List, many people did not have access to the Internet, and while others did not have the knowledge to use it. We and our partners also anticipated an uptick in the number of new food bank users, which made it essential for people to have all the information they needed in one place.
With help from the Jimmy Pratt Foundation, PAL airlines, and many other community partners, we were able to offer Food Program navigation, arrange deliveries, and distribute gift cards until July 31st.
In September, the line shifted to navigation-only, as resources for hampers, gift cards, and deliveries dwindled. However, our partnership with Connections for Seniors and the Local Wellness Collective made deliveries possible again starting in October, and a new partnership with End Homelessness St. John’s will allow us to distribute gift cards in St. John’s.
The Community Food Helpline has reached 852 calls, with the actual number of support requests likely being higher, as this number does not include email requests or connections with social workers. Food First NL has secured funding to operate the Helpline until at least March 31, 2021.
Organizing for a Just Recovery
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. Alongside dozens of partners, we started work on a vision for recovery.
Read about our Just Recovery Efforts
Celebrating Sarah Ferber's 10 Years with Food First NL
Photo: Ritche Perez
Food First NL’s biggest strength is its people, and one of our staff hit a big milestone in 2020. Sarah Ferber, our Manager of Programs, celebrated her 10th anniversary with Food First NL.
Over the years, Sarah has been involved in every kind of work Food First NL does. These days, she oversees our project portfolio, handles our reporting, writes a ton of grants, and lots more. Just as importantly, Sarah is a huge support and source of wisdom to the rest of the team and to our community partners all over the province.
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
FALL 2020
Eat the City: St. John's Food Assessment
This year we launched a St. John’s Food Assessment to engage, inform and take action on food. We’re involving many people, across sectors, to ensure this assessment reflects the diversity in our local food system.
Community engagement is the essential part of an assessment. Respecting the COVID-19 guidelines means shifting to online and to small group meetings. This fall we hosted online webinars, a garden tour, and focus groups with partners. Residents and organizations are encouraged to pitch ideas and creative content to share their story about food in the city. Support for small equipment, materials, and a honorarium for participation is available through March 2021.
Development and implementation is in partnership with the St. John’s Food Policy Council, and guided by a multi-stakeholder working group including appointed work roles and volunteers with lived experience of food insecurity.This process helps us take on complex issues by working together and using our strengths.
Visit foodstjohns.ca for upcoming events and how to get involved!
Starting Work on a Humber Valley Food Hub
We’re always looking for innovative solutions to food security challenges, and in the spring, we got the idea to pilot of a new multi-location “food hub” to connect customers with local food in the Humber Valley in Western Newfoundland.
Our Food Hub is based on a successful model from Cape Breton. The Online Food Hub involves creating an online store that connects consumers to multiple local producers simultaneously, as well as a logistics operation that provides multiple order pickup points around the region. Those pickup points will be staffed by a team of youth facing barriers to employment, with wraparound support provided by staff from Choices for Youth. In Corner Brook, the Western Environment Centre is providing local support and logistics coordination, and the Cape Breton Food Hub is on board as an advisor.
Funded by the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, the project has now kicked off with the hiring of a Project Coordinator, Annette George. An engineer and farmer by trade, based in Irishtown on the Humber Arm, with long experience in economic and business development, Annette is a familiar face to many in the region.
Over the Winter and Spring, Food First NL will be getting the website ready, organizing logistics, and working to recruit local food producers and local businesses around the Humber Valley interested in serving as order pickup points. Food First NL anticipates a launch of sales in June 2021 with the pilot period running through to October followed by an evaluation period and, if successful, planning for continuation.
Progress Toward a Just Recovery
Photo: Ritche Perez
The recovery from COVID-19 will be a long and challenging road, but it is also a chance to reimagine and reinvest. A Just Recovery has the potential to make a huge difference to food security. With that in mind, as the public health situation stabilized, Food First NL began playing a convening role at three tables, bringing together community agencies to develop shared agendas for recovery. The tables:
The Coalition for a Just Recovery NL, which brings together more than 30 agencies serving a wide range of populations across the province
Everybody Eats: Our Everybody Eats leadership team developed a food systems recovery agenda for Newfoundland and Labrador
Atlantic food systems agencies: we have been convening our partner food systems agencies around Atlantic Canada to develop shared priorities for the recovery
The recommendations from these processes have been getting traction. In particular, there is a growing conversation happening around the idea of a basic income, with a committee being formed by the House of Assembly to study it.
Food Security and the New Cabinet
In August, Newfoundland and Labrador swore-in its 14th Premier, and with the arrival of Premier Furey came a cabinet shuffle.
When the Premier released each Minister's Mandate Letter, Food First NL took the opportunity to analyze each of the letters to find areas in which their mandates overlapped with food security work - and we found common ground in all 14 letters.
With this in mind, we wrote response letters to each Minister highlighting potential areas of collaboration and requested meetings with each one. We’re happy to report that we received responses from 13 Ministers and the Premier, and have so far met with six ministers and their senior staff to discuss areas where we can work together to better support food security efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador.
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
Institutional Food Work Restarts
For much of 2020, our Institutional Food Work (namely, our Farm to School and Farm to Healthcare initiatives) were largely put on hold due to the necessary shift to pandemic response efforts.
However, in the fall, some of our institutional food work restarted.
We’re working with Eastern Health on both large-scale work implementing the local buying provision in their new food contract, and developing a site-specific farm to healthcare pilot. As well, our partner organization, Nourish, recently launched their new Anchor Collaborative Program, which supports healthcare leaders in working with Indigenous and community partners to build health for people and the planet. There’s great potential to further develop Farm to Healthcare initiatives in Newfoundland and Labrador through the Anchor Collaborative Program.
Many Farm to School initiatives were put on hold because of school closures early in the year, but despite the challenges, Helen Tulk Elementary in Bishop’s Falls received a start-up Farm to School Grant from Cafeteria Canada.
We plan to build on our Institutional Food Work in 2021.
Deepening Our Work with Emergency Food Programs
Our role in the pandemic response meant we were working more closely with food banks and community food programs.
Operating the Community Food Helpline has strengthened our relationship with many food banks and other community food programs across the province, which we value very much. These important relationships allow us to offer the Helpline service, which includes updates to the NL Food Programs list (which now contains information about holiday hampers), as well as to facilitate conversations between community programs.
In the new year, we’re planning on convenening food banks from across the province to facilitate some important conversations and allow folks to make connections. This meeting was in the works for 2020, but had to be rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll be releasing details early in 2021.
IMPACT SNAPSHOT:
Shoutout to the Jimmy Pratt Foundation
Our key community partner for much of our pandemic response work has been the Jimmy Pratt Foundation. They operated the St. John’s half of the Food Helpline, pulled together resources for supplemental food supports, and put researchers on the ground to gather lessons learned.
Growth and Change on the Board
We recruited new members this year and said farewell to a few others, including Eleanor Swanson, longtime chair, who is concluding her year in the Past Chair seat.
As well, to accompany our equity lens for staff and for programming, we developed a new equity process for board recruitment. We launched an open recruitment process that generated a list of dozens of great Board candidates and developed an assessment tool for the board to identify gaps in skills and lived experiences.
We also changed our Annual General Meeting structure, opting instead to have a separate Board meeting to work through the formal business and a longer, more flexible Community Update for the public that provides a more interactive and meaningful conversation with folks about our work.
Food First NL in the Media
FED UP - CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
FED UP is a partnership between Food First NL and CBC Newfoundland and Labrador to develop a four-part series on food insecurity in our province.
So far in the series there was a dialogue about Single Parents and Food Insecurity, as well as a series of stories focusing on COVID-19 and Food Insecurity. You can find a list of all the FED UP stories here.
Here’s some more great media stories featuring Food First NL this year.
Issues and Answers - NTV
On November 1, our CEO sat down with Michael Connors of NTV for his show “Issues and Answers.”
Community Food Program Support Fund - VOCM
Early in the pandemic, we sat down with folks at VOCM to discuss additional funding for the Community Food Program Support Fund.
The Telegram - PROOF Study on Food Insecurity
David Maher of The Telegram interviewed us about the PROOF study that outlines how 1 in 6 St. John’s households experience some level of food insecurity.
CBC NL - Just Recovery
In this article, we spoke with CBC Newfoundland and Labrador about the Coalition for a Just Recovery NL and Food First NL’s involvement in it.
Newfoundland Quarterly
The Fall 2020 issue of the Newfoundland Quarterly features a graphic essay on Food First NL.
DEEP DIVES
Learn more about some of our most important work this year.
Our Food NL: 10 Years of Action
Our Pandemic Response
Snowmaggedon and the Aftermath
Steps Towards Equity
Towards a Just Recovery
The Community Program Support Fund
Looking Forward
Both figuratively and literally, 2020 was a stormy year. As we look forward to 2021, we can see our way through some of the doors those storms blew open. We will enter the year with a stronger and more collaborative network of relationships across community and government, and with a real sense that something different and better is possible in the food system.
There’s still a great deal of uncertainty about what the world of 2021 will look like, but there are a few things that are likely to be defining parts of Food First NL’s work:
Maintaining pandemic supports
With the first doses of a vaccine already landing in the province, we are beginning to see our way to the end of the pandemic - but it will be a long road yet. As long as we are walking that road, Food First NL will continue to be engaged in providing additional emergency supports and coordinating action between the many partners in this work. We will also be thinking carefully about which parts of this work should continue even after we return to “normal”.
First steps into social enterprise
In November 2020, Food First NL launched a pilot “Food Hub” project in the Humber Valley. Based on a successful model from Cape Breton, the Online Food Hub model involves creating an online store that connects consumers to multiple local producers simultaneously, as well as a logistics operation that provides multiple order pickup points around the region. Those pickup points will be staffed by a team of youth facing barriers to employment, with wraparound support provided by staff from Choices for Youth.
As a convening organization in the food system, Food First NL hears a lot about infrastructure and gaps in it. This will be our first experience at taking an active role in filling one of those gaps and in building out a revenue-generating business model. We’re very excited to see if this can be adapted for an NL context.
Mapping opportunities in St. John’s
For over a decade, Food First NL has been leading “community led food assessments” - intensive community consultation processes to map out a local food system, the gaps in it, and the opportunities for change. So far, our food assessment work has been on the ground in small, remote communities - Rigolet, Hopedale, Nain, Rencontre East, Pool’s Cove, and Miawpukek - but we are now deep into a much larger scale food assessment process in St. John’s. We have a team of on-the-ground “food animators” conducting a wide range of engagement activities, working hard to find ways around the barriers put up by the pandemic.
We are looking forward to hearing from a huge range of voices through this process, especially voices of people who have experienced or are experiencing food insecurity. On the other side of it, we hope to see a wealth of ideas that can drive the next generation of food systems work in the city.
Rethinking the emergency food system
The events of 2020 put a tremendous strain on the system of meal programs, food banks and other supports available to individuals facing a food insecurity crisis. Their staff and volunteers put in countless extra hours adapting their operations to the new reality and to meeting a sharp increase in demand. We also saw many new organizations come into this space, stepping in to fill gaps in their community or for the demographics they serve.
We also saw some of the gaps in the system quite clearly this year. Interacting with this system can be deeply challenging for individuals facing food insecurity, for many reasons ranging from stigma to dietary needs to rigid policies to the challenges of finding a program who can help.
Where does that leave us in 2021? Ready for an important conversation about how to rethink this system for the future, and rethink this system’s relationship with the broader social safety net. Food First NL will be investing time and capacity to bring together emergency food programs and have those conversations together.
Opportunities in Institutional Food
As a province we have ambitious targets around local food production, and one key way to get there is by leveraging the buying power of our big institutions - health care, education, prisons, and others. We anticipate some major progress on this file in 2021. Food First NL is working closely with Eastern Health to support the implementation of their new 10-year food contract, the first to have included local-buying provisions within it. We also hope to see and support local farm-to-healthcare pilot programs at the single-site level, and to continue our work with farm-to-school efforts.
Engaging on social policy
2021 has the potential to be a transformative year at the policy level, with multiple overlapping processes reimagining many of the areas in which government decisions impact food security. We will see a report and recommendations from the Premier’s Economic Recovery Team delivered, a new Poverty Reduction Strategy get moving, intensive consultations for the new 10-year Health Accord, recommendations from the Oil & Gas Industry Task Force and whatever big-picture efforts the Government of Canada will be making as part of the pandemic recovery process.
Taken together, this is an opportunity to rewrite our social contract in this province in a way that could have a transformative impact on food security, and on the key driver of food security at the household level: poverty. Food First NL will be at every table we can find, bringing along as many partners as we can.
Food First NL Staff
Josh Smee - CEO
Sarah Ferber - Program Manager
Ashton Lane - Finance and Administration Manager
Alison Bennett - Program Assistant
Suzanne Hawkins - Program Coordinator
Sarah Crocker - Program Coordinator
Annette George - Program Coordinator
Danika Carter - Communications Coordinator
2020 Board of Directors
Tom Cooper - Chair
Carolann Harding - Vice Chair
Eleanor Swanson - Past Chair
Krista Burton - Treasurer
Lisa Browne
Melissa Caravan
Jamie Jackman
Darryl Legge
Craig Tucker
Janine Woodrow
Funders and Partners
Our work would not be possible without generous support from our funders and partners:
Government of Canada
Government of Newfoundland and Labrador
Maple Leaf Centre of Action on Food Security
Community Food Centres Canada
McConnell Foundation
International Grenfell Association
Farm to Cafeteria Canada
Chevron Canada
City of St. John’s
Eastern Health
Terra Nova development, which is operated by Suncor and Memorial