| REAP Food Group – |
This is a harvest worth celebrating! We have been sowing the seeds of this moment for a long time: The Dane County Food System Action Plan website, built in partnership with UW-Madison Extension, is LIVE! We invite you to explore it here: Explore the Dane County Food Systems Action Plan website What Went Into It The plan is the result of three years of work across three distinct phases: a year of research and literature review, a year of community engagement, and a year of analysis and writing. The research phase alone drew on dozens of academic studies, government reports, and local data sources spanning agricultural production, land access, food processing and distribution, retail, food waste, emergency food, and more. The goal was to understand not just what is happening in our food system, but why, and what other communities have done about it. Then came the community engagement. The numbers speak for themselves: * 63 total events across Dane County * 3,205 people engaged through surveys and events * 15 different municipalities represented * Over 1,500 post-it responses * Over 750 survey responses across multiple surveys * 12 presentations and town halls We funded community members to host their own engagement sessions. We sent Community Navigators to farmers markets, festivals, and neighborhood gatherings. We worked alongside everyday citizens across the county researchers, nonprofit leaders, government staff, and food system practitioners, because expertise matters, and the best plans are built at the intersection of lived experience and institutional knowledge. What came out of all of that shaped everything that followed. What the Plan Says Three core tensions define the structural challenges of our food system, and they are worth naming plainly. Our county is surrounded by extraordinary farmland, yet over 72,000 residents struggle to reliably access enough food. Institutions across our region are eager to source locally, yet most can’t find enough local product and end up turning to national distributors instead. Our food system has deep community roots, yet consolidation across the food system is steadily moving decisions about shelf space, pricing, and sourcing further from our community with every passing year. These tensions shaped seven interconnected goals: Collaboration, Production, Access, Infrastructure, Efficiency, Resilience, and Prosperity. Each goal includes concrete strategies and actions that organizations, government agencies, businesses, and individuals can take to move our food system in the right direction. This is a roadmap, and many of the organizations named in it are already using it to align their work, build new partnerships, and make the case for investment. What You Can Do A plan is only as powerful as the community that carries it forward. Here is how you can be part of what comes next. Read it. The website is designed to be accessible to everyone, not just policy wonks. Whether you are a voter, a shopper, a farmer, a parent, or a neighbor who cares about this community, there is something in this plan that speaks to you. Visit dane.extension.wisc.edu/dcfsap and spend some time with it. Share it. Send it to an elected official, a school board member, a business owner, or a friend. The more people who engage with this plan, the more power it has to drive real change. Support the organizations doing the work. Many of the goals and strategies in this plan are already being carried out by organizations across our region, including REAP. Your support helps keep that work moving. 💚 Donate to our Summer Appeal — this kind of long-term, systems-level work depends on sustained investment from people who believe in it, especially as federal funding for food systems work continues to shrink. Three years of sowing. We hope you’ll help us reap. With gratitude, Noah and the REAP team Sowing collectivism, Reaping community It’s the last month of our Summer Appeal! From June through August 2026, we’re fundraising to support our mission, and the work that we do behind-the-scenes to reap the benefits of a stronger local food system. Support our Appeal here. |
