Established in 1951, the WNY Foundation has granted more than $22 million over its 72-year history to support organizations in the region. More recently, we have focused our grantmaking on capacity building and enhancing organizational development to a myriad of nonprofit organizations across multiple sectors and throughout our seven-county footprint.

After thoughtful consideration, and given the challenges our region has faced in the past few years, the leadership of the WNY Foundation is shifting its focus to strengthening the regional food system. This new approach refocuses our ongoing efforts to support grantees that are changing our regional food systems and finding equitable solutions to long-standing problems. We will be supporting racial, social, and economic justice across our seven-county geographic funding area and prioritizing nonprofits focused on the wellbeing of Black, Indigenous, and People Of Color (BIPOC) communities, families disproportionally impacted by poverty, immigrants and refugees, and disadvantaged people in rural areas. We want to empower innovative people with the resources needed to create and implement sustainable solutions that will build a thriving and equitable food system that reflects the community it serves.

Since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic and because of the Tops Massacre on Buffalo’s East Side on 5/14, food has become an area of serious concern for a greater number of Western New York residents. There is more awareness about what a food system is and how it is integral to our existence. And along with this heightened awareness, there is growing concerns for rising incidences of food insecurity, system inequities and injustices, food-related health diseases, loss of small and mid-sized family farms, labor shortages and supply chain disruptions, environmental concerns, and inundated landfills, along with an enormous amount of food waste.

Western New York Foundation realized early in the pandemic that getting food into urban and rural communities, and supporting our local foodbank, was critical. We swiftly converted our grantmaking efforts to disbursements of microgrants to small grassroot nonprofit agencies and churches dispersing food to the public. We reached out to the area Cornell Cooperatives to learn more about the situation in other counties, and tried to keep our ears to the ground so we could understand the needs across our region.  As a funding member of the WNY COVID-19 Community Response Fund, we observed and appreciated that 65% of the emergency requests were in response to a food access and distribution crisis. We also learned that philanthropic investment in our regional food system represented far less than 5% of total philanthropic investment.

As COVID-19 has demonstrated, our current food supply chain is not supportive of local, small-scale agriculture and does not serve the most vulnerable, resulting in the under-resourcing of most low-income communities in both urban and rural landscapes. COVID-19-induced supply chain disruptions have provided a strong case for investing in smaller, more local food systems. 

To start to address many of these challenges and make a greater commitment to creating a more equitable and sustainable food system, a funders collaborative called Moving Forward Together launched the Western New York Regional Food System Initiative (WNYRFSI) in January 2021. The project sought to improve viability, resilience, and wealth-creating opportunities via a strong food system for communities throughout the nine-county region, in rural and urban communities alike. There were more than 100 partners working together who represented the entire spectrum of the food system in our region. Working cross-sector and cross-county, the objective was to address the entrenched and chronic conditions that have perpetuated long-term food inequities and injustices. The highly participatory nature of this project assured that the authenticity of all voices would be evident in the process and final product.

The initiative culminated with a 239-page report that included 144 recommendations that can serve as a cornerstone for future action. A new entity, New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, is being formed to take on the Food Future Western New York (FFWNY) initiative to advance the recommendations to action.  You can view the report here, WNYRFSI Report.

Responding to the consultant led WNYRFSI work, the WNY Foundation will focus its support on the initiative’s community driven projects. Our future funding will show a strong commitment to addressing the need as identified, and to the process being taken up by the food system network of partners. We will begin by prioritizing capacity building and technical assistance, an area where we have more expertise and familiarity. We will provide the necessary resources to build skills, ability and training that will allow under-resourced agencies to develop a new and transformational, values-driven, and culturally reflective food system that directly addresses community needs.

We will continue to play a role in incentivizing others to invest in our regional food system and the recommendations of the regional food system’s report. We will help to drive the leveraging of dollars from inside and outside the region.

Shifting into food system work aligns with several of our goals to include: 1.) supporting systemic change in our regional food system and the realization of a more self-reliant region that will have a significant and positive impact on food security and spur local economic development; 2.) increasing our support for BIPOC and community-led efforts that work to decrease social inequities and reject the disparities of conventional food systems; 3.) advancing our interest to deepen our investment in all 7 counties by better utilizing our ability to serve with an intentional regional lens, and 4.) bringing a more diverse group of partners into our work and building their organization’s capacity to meet the needs in front of them.

With time, our new focused approach will eventually lead us to realizing greater impact and better methods to measure that impact. It will provide us with the opportunity to take a longer-term view on systems change with less distractions and a greater appreciation for the work of our grantees.

For many, this shift may end new or long term established relationships. Where there is no longer an opportunity to support an organization because they are not working within our new priority area, we bear a heaviness for this loss and hope that we can maintain a connection along other lines. For others, there will be an optimistic sense that there is still a future with the WNY Foundation, especially in light of the fact that food systems work intersects with so many other systems: health, education, housing, economic development, and human services. We hope that optimism develops into a desire to build coalitions and collaborations across sectors and encourages innovative solutions to addressing monumental problems in our region. The arts and cultural community play a significant role in lifting up issues and we will look to the sector to help tell the stories of our citizens adversely impacted by a broken food system so that we can incentivize our fellow citizens to get involved and be part of the change that needs to happen.

Whether our paths further merge or diverge, we hope that you will support us in this new approach and open the doors for others to access our resources and help to inform us about our work moving forward. We have much to learn as we embark upon this new journey, and we have a strong desire to share our learnings with everyone across our region so as to lift up any, and all, opportunities that will drive real change that results in a thriving and just Western New York.

Respectfully,

Bernie Tolbert and Beth Gosch

WNY Foundation Board President & Executive Director