Seattle Good Business Network, Food Justice Collaborative, and Cascadia Produce invite you to Nourishing Local Connections: A Listening Session. The purpose of this event is to bring together organizations and businesses engaged in food system and food security work to provide feedback to government agencies and elected officials in attendance about what their programs need for support in terms of funding and agency programming going forward.

WA State Department of Agriculture’s Director of Food Systems Initiatives, Katie Rains, will provide an overview of food system and food security funding and programs offered by the Department over the past 5 years and share policy requests that are under consideration for the 2025 legislative session. As part of an ongoing effort to build effective, collaborative networks and ongoing community engagement to support a shared cross-sector vision for Washington’s Food System in the years to come, she and other WSDA staff will stay to listen and learn from community partners about your experiences, needs, and hopes for the future of Washington’s food system.

We invite broad food system stakeholders, including hunger relief agencies, food producers, food businesses, distributors, and those most impacted by these programs to attend and offer feedback about your priorities for the future. There will be multiple ways for you to present your feedback:

• A survey to get a broad understanding of support needs. We ask both attendees and those unable to attend to complete this survey by 7/23.
  
  
• A town hall-style comment period, where each organization or business will have 2 minutes to provide testimony to their programming, experiences, and needs following the presentation. We cannot guarantee all attendees who wish to provide comment will be able to at the event, but we have prioritized this time to allow as many as possible are able to. We will reach out separately to those interested with additional guidance. You can indicate your interest when you complete your ticket registration.
  
  
• We will also accept video comments that will be available to attendees after the event. If time allows, we may play your video during the in-person comment period. Please let us know if you'd like to provide a video comment at the end of the survey or by emailing goodfood@seattlegood.org.

To ensure we're able to accommodate as many organizations as possible, we request that you limit your attendance to 2 people per organization or office. 

For those who are unable to attend the event in person, we will be live-streaming and recording for later viewing. If you would like to attend virtually, please register for a virtual ticket, and we will send out a Zoom link ahead of the event.

For questions, please contact our organizing team at goodfood@seattlegood.org.

***Note on timing: doors will open at 1:30 to allow folks to come in and get settled. Programming will begin promptly at 2pm.

Thank you to Public Health – Seattle & King County for making this event possible with grant support.