Our Strategies
Our work is centered around 4 strategies with a focus on identifying and shifting policies & practices to strengthen our local food system.
Our History
The Del Norte and Tribal Lands (DNATL) Community Food Council (CFC) is a growing group of food producers, foodies and local residents, alongside community partners who are working together to cultivate a local food system that fosters healthy, culturally appropriate food to all families in Del Norte and Tribal Lands.
Established in 2010, the Del Norte and Tribal Lands Community Food Council was born of the Del Norte Building Healthy Communities Initiative funded by the California Endowment, which was a 10 year funding initiative to address health inequities across Del Norte. Since then we have leveraged our TCE funding to expand programs that address all sectors of the food system. We are completing our 13th year of working to create a resilient local food system that provides healthy food for all. The DNATL CFC helped launch and run a nutrition based choice food pantry, a county mobile pantry, a food bank program, and food recovery program before handing over leadership of emergency food distribution to the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods in Fall of 2023. We continue to lead and implement our programs that include convening a county wide food policy council, hosting workshops and events to shift food culture, running a community food forest garden program, managing 4 school gardens, leading county wide emergency food system planning, supporting small scale fish processing & direct marketing development, providing beginning farmer training & land match, organizing local food procurement & aggregation, and developing food system career pathways. |
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Our Achievements
Since our founding in 2010, we have:
- Organized numerous cooking and gardening workshops
- Created local celebrations of Food Day
- Supported school gardens & community gardens
- Promoted local foods, farmers, and farmers markets
- Facilitated Del Norte’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program funding stream
- Brought Market Match funding to Del Norte’s farmers markets
- Helped to expand Del Norte County Unified School District’s Seamless Summer Meals program
- Installed four food forests across the county and tribal lands in collaboration with Tolowa Dee-ni Nation
- Provide food security resources and information
- Convened the Del Norte Food Security Taskforce comprised of over a dozen collaborating organizations, meeting regularly to address food insecurity in the County during Covid-19 Pandemic.
- Supported local fisherman to get locally caught seafood on the plates of Humboldt and Del Norte County residents through a catch to table grant.
- Designed and installed a small fish processing trailer for small scale commercial fishermen in Crescent City Harbor.
- Implemented a multi-producer grocery subscription Harvest Box program, putting over $70,000 in the hands of local food producers.
- Designed and carried summer Food and Farm Academy for five years and Food & Farm Camp for 4 years at the Taa- ‘at-dvn Chee-ne’ Tetlh-tvm’ Food Forest in Crescent City.
- Maintained the County’s only choice-based food pantry; sourcing locally grown food items
- Expanded food bank programming and created a mobile pantry program to serve the far reaches of our county.
- Collaborated with the Office of Emergency Services and partners in Humboldt County to design a resilient regional food system and ensure emergency food preparedness for regional residents.
- Executing a CalRecycle Food Rescue project, currently having recovered and redistributed over 140,000 pounds of food that would otherwise have gone into the landfill.
- Worked with the Nature Rights Council and Yurok Food Sovereignty Division Manager to support and further food security and food sovereignty initiatives for the Yurok Tribe.
