“We do everything plant-based and show that you can have healthy food that tastes good.” A Table in the Wilderness has served low-income communities in the Oklahoma City Metro Area since 2017 through plant-based cooking demonstrations and food distribution. From libraries to senior living facilities and churches, founders Laurel and Lamar Mauldin meet people where they are to share the physical, spiritual, and environmental benefits of a plant-based lifestyle, with an emphasis on preventing and reversing diabetes.

A Table in the Wilderness works specifically to make plant-based foods nutritional, accessible and affordable to all. In 2019, the organization hosted a community plant-based Thanksgiving dinner and will continue to spread its message through grocery tours and its mobile Health Question Van.

Since 2015, the Black Vegetarian Society of Maryland's (BVSMD) mission has been to educate the public, particularly African American and Latinx communities, on the benefits of a plant-based diet. Led by Naijha Wright-Brown, the organization focuses on building community around healthy, accessible, and sustainable food by meeting people where they are on their journey and assisting them, non-judgmentally, with their ongoing efforts toward plant-based eating.

BVSMD operates a variety of initiatives, including Maryland Vegan Restaurant Week, Musical Meatless Monday, Vegan Soulfest, Keep It Fresh Fest, the Baltimore Hip Hop Green Dinner (in partnership with Hip Hop is Green), and year-round cooking demonstrations and workshops.During COVID-19, the organization has shifted to social media and live-streaming, and will be implementing virtual campaigns to maintain its connections across the community and continue to foster greater adoption of plant-based eating in Maryland’s Black and Latinx communities. 

(Fiscal Sponsor:
Southern Illinois Community Foundation)

Carbondale Spring is a grassroots project to transform Carbondale, IL in the face of the social, ecological, and economic challenges of our time. An initiative of Carbondale Spring, the Food Autonomy Project’s mission is to create an environmentally sustainable food safety net to meet the nutritional needs of local people facing food insecurity. The initiative is rooted in the most vulnerable areas of the town and draws on the memory of local food production practices by paying individuals to grow food for their neighbors, educating the community about environmental challenges and health, and sharing skills for growing and preservation. 

During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative created a community farm, began to grow food in two pre-existing community gardens, set up a teaching garden planted by local children, established weekly meetings to discuss the needs of the gardens, hired more than a dozen local gardeners, and coordinated a wide array of volunteers. This is only the beginning for Carbondale Spring on its path to become a community at the leading edge of sustainability.

Founded just north of the nation’s capital in Montgomery County, Maryland, the Charles Koiner Conservancy (CKC) is a nonprofit land trust established in 2018 for the purposes of protecting and managing urban farms that inspire the next generation of sustainable food innovators in the DC metro region. The organization emerged out of a need to preserve a historic and iconic urban farm in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland – Koiner Farm – which was operated by lifelong Montgomery County farmer Charles Koiner.

CKC empowers the next generation of food innovators through STEM-focused field trips and 12-week internships at the neighborhood farm, through which students forge a powerful connection with the local food economy. Curricular focus areas include soil health, wildlife corridors, drip irrigation, farm-based produce sales, planting, harvesting, and seed-saving. Funds from Eat the Change Impact will support this educational programming, which also emphasizes broader themes of climate-conscious eating, biodiversity, and innovative practices within organic agriculture.

Located in LeDroit Park in Washington DC, Common Good City Farm is a place where community members can source fresh food, see sustainable urban agriculture in action, and gain exposure to concepts and skills to lead healthy lives. The organization’s mission is to create a vibrant, informed, and well-nourished community through urban farming. CGCF actively engages with all members of our diverse community and creates opportunities for connections on its farm, while emphasizing intensive vegetable production and modeling best practices in sustainable urban agriculture.

In response to COVID-19, Common Good City Farm has retooled its services and is now serving as a hub for the collection of produce donations and working with community partners to distribute produce across DC to ensure access to healthy and sustainable foods.

Photo credit to Shawn Bruce.

Fiscal Sponsor:
Rio Grande Community Development Corporation

The Cooperative Catalyst of New Mexico works to empower communities and individuals to create local wealth by catalyzing, fostering, and helping develop local cooperatives.

The organization works with communities to conduct needs assessments, identify and engage ecosystem partners to meet priority needs, develop and deliver advanced training, and offer technical assistance to clients. Funds from Eat the Change Impact will support expanded work with Indigenous agricultural cooperatives, supporting and encouraging Indigenous communities' critical efforts to engage in regenerative farming practices and develop local food systems.

Crossroads Community Food Network is building a healthier, more inclusive food system in the Takoma/Langley Crossroads, a primarily immigrant and low-income community just north of Washington, DC, with residents from dozens of countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, Mexico, India, Ethiopia, and Nigeria.

Crossroads supports a broad network of food growers, makers, and consumers. At the heart of these efforts lies the Crossroads Farmers Market, which supports local farmers and employs an innovative SNAP matching program that makes it easier for community members to bring home healthy food. Crossroads also provides microenterprise training and a community kitchen for food entrepreneurs and brings culturally responsive, farm-to-fork programming to local schools with high Free and Reduced-price Meals (FARMS) participation, as well as to the market, kitchen, and other community sites. By connecting and empowering those who grow, make, and eat healthy food, Crossroads supports an underserved community in attaining food equity and self-sufficiency.

Eat the Change Impact’s Changemaker grant is supporting Crossroads' Healthy Eating program, which serves middle- and elementary-school students in classrooms and educational gardens and allows children to develop a connection to their food and see themselves as change agents in the creation of sustainable communities and food systems.

The Cumberland County Food Security Council (CCFSC) works to initiate and facilitate collaborative action toward a just, resilient, and sustainable food system that ensures equitable access for all people to enough healthy food. Specifically, CCFSC works from the belief that adequate, nutritious food is a human right and that long-term solutions to hunger must address climate change and the root causes of racial, economic, and environmental injustice.

Eat the Change Impact is supporting CCFSC’s Gleaning Initiative, which mobilizes volunteers to harvest excess produce from farms and gardens to donate to the Cumberland County community – jointly tackling challenges of food waste and food insecurity. CCFSC is working to expand the Gleaning Initiative to improve local food access and create educational opportunities for the public on the importance of food rescue through expanded educational field trips, processing events, and cold storage capacity.

DC Greens is a nonprofit organization working to advance food justice and health equity in the nation's capital. In Washington DC, there are stark disparities in access to healthy food. Residents in DC's Ward 8 are predominantly Black and have lower incomes, while residents in DC's Ward 3 are mostly white and more affluent, and Ward 8 only has one grocery store compared to Ward 3's nine grocery stores. Consequently, Ward 8 has a diabetes rate that is five times that of Ward 3 and a life expectancy that is 17 years shorter. Recognizing that these disparities in food access and health outcomes are the result of systemic racism, DC Greens works to shift the food system in the long term by increasing food access, improving food education, and advocating for different food policies.

Eat the Change is supporting DC Greens’ food-as-medicine work, which aims to shift local and national policy toward investment in produce prescriptions as a core component of preventive health care. The Produce Rx program puts money in patients’ pockets to buy fruits and vegetables, shifting diets, purchase behaviors, and health outcomes while securing the market in low-income areas for planet-friendly food.

Fiscal Sponsor:
Acta non Verba Youth Farm

The East Oakland Grocery Cooperative is a newly developing worker-owned grocery cooperative designed to promote human and environmental health and prioritize Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) residents in East Oakland, California. EOGC emerged from Acta non Verba Youth Farm’s involvement with the East Oakland Neighborhoods Initiative, a city-backed equitable community planning process that revealed the need for a community-owned grocery store. The Flatlands of East Oakland, while densely-populated and diverse, are also a USDA-defined “food desert” with only two grocery stores providing fresh produce in a three-mile radius.

In Fall 2019, Acta Non Verba partnered with local organizations and the community to develop a grocery cooperative in East Oakland. The project has now recruited seven founding members to engage in a 12-week training program at Mandela Grocery Cooperative’s West Oakland store in conjunction with Repaired Nations, an organization focused on building wealth and resilience within Black communities.

In a June interview with Berkeleyside, project manager Ayano Jeffers-Fabro explained: “This was something that this community has been voicing for a long, long time. This was just the moment where the energy came together to launch.”

You may have heard of food pantries, but have you ever heard of a “Vegan-try?” Feeding GA Families, created one: a pop-up plant-based food assistance program that has operated since 2017 and focuses on providing fresh produce and healthier food options to those in need. By implementing a client-choice approach, Feeding GA Families reduces the potential for waste and empowers clients to tailor their selections to their tastes and individual health needs.

Feeding GA Families is a food pantry aimed at combating food insecurity in its communities with the assistance of farmers, food banks, grocery stores, small businesses, and volunteers. Founded in 2010, FGF has expanded from feeding the homeless in Atlanta to providing cooked community meals to hosting two weekly food pantries to those in need – always maintaining a focus on its mission “to provide free grocery assistance to Georgia households, in order to reduce food insecurity through an organization of food pantries, feeding programs, food waste reduction and redistribution plans, health and welfare initiatives.”

Fiscal Sponsor:
Earth Island Institute

Food Shift is a Bay Area organization that rescues food that would otherwise be wasted and offering plant-forward meals to those in need during the COVID-19 crisis – benefitting both people and the planet!

In their own words: “Located in California's Bay Area, Food Shift develops practical solutions to reduce wasted food, feed our neighbors, and provide jobs. Since 2012, we have developed models for a just and sustainable food system. We address food waste through food recovery and distribution, recouping that would-be waste to nourish our community, not our landfill. Our operation is a social enterprise that provides training and jobs for people overcoming barriers to employment. With Eat the Change's support, we are filling gaps in the food supply chain caused by the COVID pandemic, to combat rising food waste and food insecurity and provide climate-friendly, plant based meals to our most vulnerable neighbors, including people who are houseless, low-income, disabled, and elderly.”

Washington Youth Garden has operated on the grounds of the U.S. National Arboretum and at nearby Title 1 schools for nearly 50 years, working to nurture curious minds and healthy bodies by connecting youth to food, the land, and each other.

The Garden now operates as the outreach and education arm of the Friends of the National Arboretum. In 2019, the organization served 6,500 primarily low income and minority youth through hands-on educational programs and also reached approximately 60,000 more Arboretum visitors. The Garden’s programs include: Garden Science, multi-year school garden development partnerships; Summer Institute for Garden-Based Teaching, a professional development program for teachers; SPROUT, field trips for K-12 students; and Green Ambassadors, a paid agricultural internship for teens. Support from Eat the Change Impact will help the Washington Youth Garden pilot a new curriculum for its food systems field trip, incorporating scientific and ecological understandings of climate-friendly agriculture and eating.

Grow Dat Youth Farm is an education nonprofit which cultivates the leadership potential of New Orleans area young adults, ages 15-24, through tiered leadership programming in the context of organic urban agriculture. Specifically, Grow Dat’s mission is to nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food. Through experiential learning, youth reconnect to the land, explore how sustainable farming supports healthy ecosystems, educate and inspire their peers and neighbors, and build power to create personal and environmental change in their community.

Since 2010, Grow Dat has grown from a garden plot to a 7-acre farm with 3 acres of cultivated fields. Students and volunteers have harvested 200,000 pounds of food, donated 60,000 pounds to individuals and charitable organizations, and educated thousands of additional youth through field trips. The organization’s five leadership programs have provided 400 youth with stipends, leadership and technical skills, and deep knowledge of food systems.

Over the next year, more than 60 young adults will learn about sustainable agriculture, community leadership, and food systems, and 35,000 pounds of food will be grown and distributed to hundreds of residents in New Orleans. All of this will be done with an emphasis on organic agricultural techniques, such as cover-cropping, composting, companion planting, farmscaping and crop rotation to stimulate micro-biological activity and soil health.

Established in 2008, Hawai’i Institute of Pacific Agriculture provides agriculture and nutrition education to students grades P-12, primarily in the Kohala District of Hawai’i County. Its mission of practicing and teaching regenerative agriculture includes farm field trips and in-school workshops, and the organization also works to increase the amount of local food produced and supplied to the Kohala Complex Department of Education.

Funds from Eat the Change will be used to implement a viable supply chain solution for local farm to school initiatives in North Kohala, Hawai’i County, and State of Hawai’i. The 10-acre farm of market gardening and tropical agroforestry will serve as a classroom for education and supply Farm to School in Kohala with local produce. HIP Ag will also help build a network of local farmers in Kohala and work with them to increase their production and access to markets.

Iowa Valley RC&D’s Grow: Johnson County program provides organic produce and serves as an educational farm for the local community. The farm produces 5 acres of organic vegetables, which are donated to 13 local hunger-relief agencies, and the farm’s approach to production also serves as an educational model to train future growers in sustainable practices, such as cover cropping, beneficial insect habitat, and organic pest and weed management. Eat the Change Impact will support Grow’s ability to transition its production of winter squash, tomatoes, peppers, and watermelon to innovative no-till methods. Reducing tillage on the farm is one way the organization is seeking to improve soil health and make the farm ecosystem more resilient.

Founded in 2013, Keep Growing Detroit works to cultivate a food sovereign city where the majority of fruits and vegetables consumed by Detroiters are grown by residents. Keep Growing Detroit supports more than 1,800 urban gardens and farms in the city and provides urban growers with very low-barrier opportunities to sell the fruits and vegetables they grow at local market outlets. KGD also operates a 1.5-acre urban farm where we model and share sustainable agriculture practices. During COVID-19, the organization has been approached by hundreds of new gardens seeking assistance and has ramped up its initiatives in response to the growing need for growing.

By switching to a blend of in-person and online programming, Keep Growing Detroit is capitalizing on the opportunity to expand the reach of its climate-smart messages through webinars and tutorials that highlight sustainable practices, such as perennial food crops, composting, resource conservation, and preparing healthy food in ways that reduce food waste.

Fiscal Sponsor:
Community Partners

The Los Angeles Food Policy Council works to make Southern California a Good Food region for everyone—where food is healthy, affordable, fair and sustainable. From farm to fork and beyond, they organization cultivates a diverse network of changemakers across the food system. Through policy creation and cooperative relationships, LAFPC aim to reduce hunger, improve public health, increase community equity, stimulate local economies, and foster environmental stewardship.
 
Support from Eat the Change Impact will be used to host virtual culturally-relevant cooking classes to support underserved communities with local chefs of color. Plant-based recipes will support families and communities-at-large to creatively access and use their food benefits 

Rooted in Southeastern San Diego, Project New Village exists “to serve as a catalyst for resident-led, community-rooted experiences that BUILD stronger neighborhoods; IMPROVE the neighborhood food supply chain; STIMULATE collective investment in better health and MAXIMIZE the impact of investment to address social inequities.”

The organization’s signature effort is the Good Food District, which grew out of a collective call to action among residents and other stakeholders in Southeastern San Diego to change the physical and social environment to address health disparities. Project New Village has embraced urban farming and community engagement as the primary tools to improve food access, food security, and environmental wellness. Specifically, the organization creates community gardens for growing food, provides farmers markets in food insecure neighborhoods, and promotes educational and interactive and programs focused on food justice throughout Southeastern San Diego. Support from Eat the Change Impact will be used to facilitate community-centered meals and storytelling about food sovereignty and the climate impact of food systems.

SÜPRSEED is an LA organization with the intention “to eradicate food apartheid in America’s major cities by 2040.” The organization is beginning its work in South Central Los Angeles with the development of a subsidized plant-based and organic grocery. Olympia Auset, the organization’s founder and CEO, explains the role of expanding access to climate-friendly foods in addressing broader inequities: “There are a lot of things we feel like we can’t control, but we can control what we put in our mouths, and we need to make sure everyone has equal ability to make those choices. Food is so intimate, it is something we choose every day, and it is the most fundamental form of resistance. If you can create positive change within yourself through your diet and your personal habits, you are in a much better position to create change in the world around you.”

By providing affordable access to healthy food in low-income areas, SÜPRSEED supports increased health and well-being for individuals and the community at large. In addition to developing the grocery store and community space, the organization hosts a variety of events, educational experiences, and food access initiatives promoting wellness and sustainability. Last year, they launched South Central's first ever vegan festival.

At the core of planet-friendly eating is an understanding that what is good for people is good for the planet., Trees That Feed Foundation captures this understanding through its mission to plant fruit trees to feed people, create jobs, and benefit the environment.

Founded in 2008, Trees that Feed Foundation works with partners in 18 developing countries in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa and operates a variety of programs to support sustainable economic development through agroforestry. The organization donates fruit trees, provides food processing equipment, runs school food access programs, and educates farmers and students on the benefits of fruit trees. To date, Trees that Feed has donated more than 200,000 fruit trees, supplied equipment for 12 food processing factories, supplied more than 500,000 meals, and held dozens of training sessions for farmers and agronomists – all toward the ultimate goal of 1 million trees and 10 self-sufficient, environmentally-aware, and nutritionally-independent communities. Funds from Eat the Change Impact will support locally produced breakfast meals and education for schoolchildren in Les Cayes, Haiti.

Fiscal Sponsor:
A Well-Fed World

The inspirational 10,000 Black Vegan Women Movement from By Any Greens Necessary aims to empower 10,000 Black women to go vegan to live longer, healthier lives. By Any Greens Necessary is a project of Tracye McQuirter, MPH, a public health nutritionist who has been plant-based for 33 years. She created By Any Greens Necessary in 2007 to change the health paradigm of African Americans using plant-based nutrition, with a focus on the nation's 24 million Black women. 

African American women experience the highest overall rates of preventable, diet-related chronic diseases: one in two Black women over 20 have some form of heart disease; Black women are more likely to develop diabetes and to experience a stroke; and more than 50% of Black women are obese. In McQuirter’s words: “While the root of these conditions is 400 years of systemic white supremacy and we will continue to work to dismantle this unjust system, we simultaneously have the power to take back control of our health with plant-based nutrition, which can decrease the risk for these chronic diseases by up to 80% or more.” This idea is also captured in McQuirter’s empowering mantra that “It’s not the genes, it’s the greens.”

The California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) was created in 1973 with the mission of advancing organic agriculture for a healthy world, and the organization’s grassroots membership now includes 4,500 certified producers operating in 45 states and three countries. CCOF recently released the Roadmap to an Organic California, which draws on 300 peer-reviewed papers and broad stakeholder engagement to examine the social, economic, and environmental benefits of organic and outline a set of policy recommendations to double organic acreage in California. The solutions are framed in three areas – climate change, health inequity, and economic insecurity – as the benefits of organic demonstrate how planet-friendly eating is not only good for the planet, but also for people and profits.

Support from Eat the Change Impact will help the CCOF Foundation organic farmers with the tools and training necessary to serve as advocates and leaders for organic practices. Farmers see the benefits of organic on soil health – and corresponding improvements like increased biodiversity, water retention and carbon sequestration – firsthand, and are well-positioned to share these experiences with others when provided with the tools and platform to do so.

The Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS) is a native-directed organization of activist scholars whose mission is to advance the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. Since its founding in 1979, CWIS has worked with tribal communities on every continent to preserve native knowledge records, develop laws in favor of indigenous rights, support traditional foods and medicines and educate students and interns about indigenous societies. CWIS is an indigenous-led and informed network, and each proposed educational program, research project, or policy proposal is drafted at the request of, and in collaboration with, the to-be impacted tribe or nation.

Eat the Change Impact will support CWIS’s development of an online educational curriculum about the application of Kálhaculture – food production from the natural environment that balances the relationship between human need and the Earth’s capacity to restore natural life. Many indigenous communities rely on wild plants, but the rise of global greenhouse gas emissions threatens these native foodways and the broader ecosystems and cultures they support. CWIS’s programming will combine education and the dissemination of knowledge with options and recommendations for participants to take action at a local level.

The Factory Farming Awareness Coalition (FFAC) began in the Bay Area in 2014, offering presentations at local schools about the impacts of industrial animal agriculture. The organization has now expanded nationwide and educates diverse populations on the way factory farming affects climate change, resource depletion, animal suffering, worker exploitation, and public health, and engages them in the movement to end factory farming through institutional and cultural change.

Eat the Change Impact will support the expansion of FFAC’s high school and college internship program, which serves students from diverse backgrounds and empowers them with the tools to serve as the next generation of movement leaders for a sustainable, compassionate food system. Interns participate in weekly or bi-weekly online discussions, read and write articles, develop their public speaking skills to give presentations, are trained in the practice of compassionate and effective activism, and advocate for plant-centered menu policies – such as Green Monday or DefaultVeg – in their respective schools and communities. FFAC has recently partnered with the Sunrise Movement, a youth organization that coordinates and leads national climate strikes, to collaborate on curriculum planning and professional development initiatives. 

Food for Climate League is a new organization that is working to create new food and climate narratives that democratize sustainable eating and allow humanity to tackle the climate crisis bite by bite. As a nonprofit research and communications collaborative, Food for Climate League envisions a world in which every eater is a climate hero: empowered with nutritious and delicious foods, a sense of community, and the ability to preserve a shared planet for generations to come. In order to get there, they believe that we need to re-frame what climate-beneficial eating is, make it easy to partake in, and make these habits relevant to all people.

Eve Turow-Paul, Executive Director of Food for Climate League, explained the particular importance of amplifying a more optimistic narrative for the movement: "All too often, climate-related initiatives try to motivate behavior change through statistics, fearmongering, and a focus on the things we shouldn't eat. Because a food-obsessed global culture with a passion for diverse flavors, textures, and nutrient-rich foods has the power to literally save humankind, we need to re-visit this approach.”

La Raza for Liberation is working to change the narrative of the plant-based movement, by providing culturally mindful education and support to people of color who are plant-based, transitioning, or curious through its Veggie Mijas program.

La Raza for Liberation was founded in 2018 to educate communities of color on the important intersections of human, animal, and environmental justice, and to build lasting relationships of solidarity across local and state lines. The Veggie Mijas program formed organically as a local group in New York City, and has since grown into a national collective. It was adopted by La Raza for Liberation in 2019, and now has over a dozen chapters across the United States. Veggie Mijas operates as a network to organize and facilitate safe spaces for dialogue, knowledge, and resource sharing. This work counteracts the current predominance of Euro-centric narratives in the movement around climate-conscious eating, which don’t resonate with people of color who make up the global majority.

A large team of volunteers donate their time and energy to run, maintain, and expand Veggie Mijas. The Changemaker grant will support the expansion of the program; the creation of innovative content about where our food comes from and its environmental impact; and the facilitation of (for now, digital) spaces for education and support, including classes, workshops, and meet ups.

Partnership for a Healthier America has the empowering mission to leverage the power of the private sector to transform the food landscape in pursuit of health equity. When most people think about climate-friendly eating and plant-based diets, they think about what not to eat, but equally important is the celebration of what to eat more of – namely, the amazing variety of edible plants and fungi the earth provides! PHA’s award-winning FNV campaign fills this gap through creative content that promotes the consumption of nutritious fruits and vegetables.

The FNV campaign has recently taken on an expanded role in conjunction with PHA’s Fresh Food Fund – a response to COVID-19 that deploys fresh fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be wasted to communities in-need alongside digital tools and activations to cultivate long-term healthy habits that improve diet quality. Before COVID-19, people of all incomes ate far fewer fruits and vegetables than they needed for the healthiest bodies and minds. Now, access to nutritious food has worsened, especially in disadvantaged communities, and PHA and its partners are working hard to meet increased need. The Fresh Food Fund effort is being amplified through the FNV campaign, which has been recruiting diverse, local voices to serve as campaign ambassadors.

Partnership for a Healthier America was created in 2010 in conjunction with Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Effort. The organization identifies, accelerates, and celebrates voluntary business practices that improve or increase choice or lead to new norms and behavior around food and physical activity. Most important, PHA ensures that commitments made are commitments kept by working with unbiased third parties to monitor and publicly report on the progress its partners are making. 

Fiscal Sponsor:
Sustainable Food Lab

One of the most important components of climate-friendly eating is the reduction of food waste and implementation of food rescue efforts. In the United States, 40% of food is wasted, and COVID-19 shows that crises make that percentage much higher. The Climate Collaborative is working to help companies bring that percentage down and have a large positive impact in the process.

The Climate Collaborative launched in 2017 as a project of OSC2 and SFTA and was created to catalyze bold climate action among natural products companies. The organization brings manufacturers, retailers, brokers, distributors and suppliers together to build existing climate solutions to scale and to find innovative, new ways to help reverse climate change.

Support from Eat the Change Impact will help the Climate Collaborative implement collaborative industry initiatives to reduce food waste through expert training and shared projects for more than 350 motivated, but under-resourced, companies across the food system. The organization has developed in-depth food waste trainings and tools for stakeholders across the food system and will focus on ramping up retailers and other companies' ability to track losses, move from diversion to waste reduction, and building consumer engagement mechanisms on food waste reduction in home.

One of the most exciting aspects about climate-friendly eating is that it is good for both the health of the planet and the people that inhabit it. The Plantrician Project understands this connection well in its work to educate, equip, and empower healthcare practitioners with knowledge about the indisputable benefits of whole-food, plant-based nutrition for the regeneration of human health, healthcare, and the food ecosystem.

The 2019 Global Burden of Disease Report by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation documented that the leading cause of disease and death is what we are and are not eating, yet the medical education system provides little to no training on nutrition. The Plantrician Project fills that gap as the only national organization whose sole focus is to advance plant-based nutrition science in the healthcare community. 

Founded in 2013, the organization envisions a world where all physicians, healthcare providers, and health influencers embrace the dietary paradigm shift to a whole-food, plant-based diet in order to help prevent, suspend, and even reverse much of the diet-related chronic disease plaguing the nation and world. Its key initiatives include: the International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference, the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention/Disease Reversal Digest, PlantbasedDocs.com, a series of quick-start guides, Culinary Rx, and the currently-in-development Regenerative Health Institute. As the organization grows, it intends to increasingly focus on the connection between human health, soil health, and the health of our planet at large.

Rather than emphasizing the food itself, UPSTREAM focuses on the items that hold and surround our food – plates, bowls, cups, silverware, and more – and serves as a leader in the reuse movement.

UPSTREAM sparks innovative solutions to plastic pollution, but for the organization, the real problem is the throw-away culture at its root. As a result, they are building a movement to make throw-away go away by helping entrepreneurs, policymakers, community leaders, and non-profits ideate and accelerate the transition from single-use to reuse. UPSTREAM’s projects are focused on disruptive innovations that accelerate the creation and adoption of reuse systems to save businesses money, get people back to work, protect public health AND the planet at the same time. UPSTREAM believes a world without waste is possible and invites everyone to co-create it with them. The Changemaker grant will support the creation of materials for venues; initiatives to protect health codes & promote reusables; and online innovation labs for reuse solutions.

Plant-based diets represent one of the most powerful ways to reverse climate change, and our final National Changemaker, World Resources Institute’s Cool Food Pledge is working to meet the challenge of feeding 10 billion people by 2050 while reducing agricultural GHG emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. Cool Food is a global platform through which companies, restaurants, universities, hospitals, and cities commit to a science-based pledge for food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, receive support to develop plans to bring about change, and promote their achievements. Cool Food works with major food providers—including companies, restaurants, universities, hospitals, city governments—to help them serve more delicious, healthy, plant-rich, climate-friendly meals.

Since its launch at UN Climate Week in September 2019, Cool Food has grown to include leading organizations such as IKEA, BASF, Morgan Stanley, Harvard University, Bloomberg, and Max Burgers, and its member cohort currently serves 850 million meals per year and growing. Cool Food has completed a baseline assessment of the group’s food-related GHG emissions and created individual behavioral intervention plans with many members. It conducts this work in partnership with many environment- and health-focused NGOs.

World Resources Institute (WRI) is a global research organization founded in 1982. With more than 1,000 experts and staff in 60 countries, the organization turns big ideas into action at the nexus of environment and human well-being, and on behalf of its mission to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth’s environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations.