About the HEAL Food Alliance

The HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance was born out of the knowledge that no single individual, organization, or sector can transform systems in isolation. We believe that true transformation requires diverse skills, roles, and resources— and, it requires organizing together for real change.

After an extensive landscape assessment and series of strategy conversations led by HEAL’s founding director, the alliance was born, anchored by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, Real Food Challenge, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. These anchor organizations engaged leaders with experience and expertise in co-crafting the 10-plank “Platform for Real Food”, and in 2017 HEAL launched publicly with this platform as our strategic compass.

Today, HEAL is a national multi-sector, multi-racial coalition of 55 organizations. We are led by our members, who represent over 2 million rural and urban farmers, ranchers, fishers, farm and food chain workers, indigenous groups, scientists, public health advocates, policy experts, community organizers, and activists.

Together, these groups are building a movement to transform our food and farm systems from the current extractive economic model towards community control, care for the land, local economies, meaningful labor, and healthful communities nationwide, while supporting the sovereignty of all living beings.

HEAL’s mission is to build our collective power to create food and farm systems that are healthy for our families, accessible, and affordable for all communities, and fair to the working people who grow, distribute, prepare, and serve our food—while protecting the air, water, and land we all depend on.

Food is our most intimate and powerful connection to each other, to our cultures, and to the earth, and to transform our food system is to take one giant step towards healing our bodies, our economy, and our environment.

Crafted by 50 organizations representing rural and urban farmers, fisherfolk, farm and food chain workers, rural and urban communities, scientists, public health advocates, environmentalists, and indigenous groups, HEAL’s Platform for Real Food serves as a call to action and a political compass for transformation.

Concentration of market and political power in the hands of few agri-food companies

The corporate-driven shift towards deregulation, consolidation, and union-busting, accelerated in the 1980s forced hundreds of thousands of families off their farms. The large operations in their stead now profit enormous corporations.

These companies have become one of the most powerful lobbies in state capitals and in Washington (spending $173.5 million in just one year to lobby Congress). As such, food and agriculture policy, whether in the Farm Bill, global trade deals, or state environmental regulations, has been shaped by what is good for their bottom line, not by what is good for people’s health, rural communities’ wealth or what would avert catastrophic climate change.

Our food and farming systems bear strong the imprint of chattel slavery and colonization. At the end of the Civil War and the beginning of emancipation, the plan to provide each freed family with 40 acres and a mule collapsed under a deficit of political courage, and the only government sponsored land redistribution was from indigenous people to White settlers under the Homestead Act.

Today, these decisions are reflected in who owns farms, and who works them. The descendants of those historically denied land now face enormous wealth gaps and the highest per capita food insecurity in the nation. This model of agriculture was spread across the United States, extracting land and labor and creating crises like the Dust Bowl of the 1920s, and rampant soil depletion across the country.

Our Platform for Real Food is grounded in the conviction that food system transformation is inseparable from the ongoing work to dismantle racism and the mythologies that hold profit as more valuable than people or the planet.

This dream will succeed because it must: it will succeed because we have shifted decision- making from corporate headquarters to the community; it will succeed because we have redefined “progress” and reinvented an economy that works for the many.

A majority of the photos on our website have been lovingly taken and shared by Rion Moon and Jam Rose. You can learn more about them here.