Our Approach - Feeding Cities

A New Voice and Approach.

Proven strategies to improve emergency food planning.

What is Sustained Emergency Food Planning?

Sustained emergency food planning recognizes the current reality that emergency food crises last not days but months and years. Cities will need to leverage more of their own food assets and rely less on external emergency aid.

How We Work

For cities around the world, resources and time are in short supply.

Our work is to develop emergency food plans built on established relationships, resources, and research. We begin this work by uncovering the unique characteristics of a food system in the location we are helping. Before developing a plan for a city, we gain insights from key stakeholders to learn how their system works.

Since food purchasing, distribution, and access differ significantly from one region to another, we customize our process and deliverables for each city.

We center our work where food systems, disaster risk mitigation, and community development overlap. Our focus is to address two critical issues: inadequate planning for emergency food situations and hidden critical food system vulnerabilities.

Inadequate Emergency Food Response

We help cities create and implement Sustained Emergency Food Plans using tested principles, strategies, and asset mapping.

The planning table includes non-profit, philanthropic, and public and private-sector organizations.

Urban emergency food plans were not created to respond to the scope and frequency of the disasters we are experiencing today. The systems we have in place are not able to recover as quickly as communities need —often taking months to respond instead of days. What we have found is that the emergency institutions at the core of food system plans cannot adequately mobilize and respond to growing demands. This is where Feeding Cities Group comes in to work effectively with teams to prepare them for an adequate response to imminent disasters.

Critical Food System Vulnerabilities

We use a groundbreaking urban food system framework developed by our founder Kim Zeuli.

It’s a systems-based framework that enables us to help communities uncover critical vulnerabilities and prioritize their food system investments. Using this framework allows us to help cities fill emergency food gaps and identify the most significant factors for their sustained emergency food plan.

A Call for Change

It’s time we change the narrative around emergency food response.

National and global food system dialogues are too broad and do not address the urgency of the situation. Real change requires cities to narrow their focus and shift their food system resilience planning efforts to address more immediate disaster scenarios.

We are here to offer a new platform to advance the concept of sustained emergency food planning. Our focus is to publish, present, and provide testimonies on the effects of building better emergency food response and recovery plans.