Healthy Community Food Systems

Healthy Community Food Systems is a small nonprofit based in far Southwest Colorado working on local, regional, and national food systems issues. As a partner of the Southwest Marketing Network (SWMN), and as coordinator of the Network, we work throughout the Four Corners states of AZ, CO, NM, UT, and WY with many partners. The SWMN focus is on helping small-scale, alternative, and Native producers and their communities with alternative marketing and community food system development. See the SWMN website for more: http://www.swmarketingnetwork.org/

Mission: To help communities build healthy sustainable food systems through effective systems planning and development.

Need Statement: In many communities there are several innovative projects underway to help rebuild a community food system, but typically they are not fully coordinated, planned in a strategic sequence, nor integrated into a whole-system view of community sustainability. As a result, efficient use of community resources, synergies with other community development projects, and overall sustainability are often compromised.

Goal: To provide communities with whole systems models as well as the strategic planning and implementation tools needed for effective development of healthy sustainable community food systems.

Climate work from this organization

Addressing Climate Change with Local Food

Local food is a powerful tool for improving health, local economies, social justice, and the environment—especially climate. It is one of the most positive, effective, and enjoyable ways of addressing climate change, and can readily engage all people in your community in this effort.

What Can You Do?

Map, Monitor, & Adapt Your Local Foodshed

Your Local Foodshed

We suggest you think of your local foodshed as 1) the area that you should look to first for your food and 2) the area you should feel most responsible for in terms of its overall health and ability to maintain sustainable food production.

Beyond Resilience

In order to... Read more

Member Highlight - Healthy Community Food Systems

Healthy Community Food Systems is a Southwest Colorado based organization. What are the biggest climate challenges your area of the country is experiencing?

We in the Four Corners region are quite familiar with year-to-year variability in precipitation and... Read more

Wild School Gardens

“Wild School Gardens” are those where kids have the chance to observe and learn about biodiversity, both wild and domestic, and how it provides ecosystem services that healthy food production depends upon. Understanding the interrelationships... Read more

Climate Friendly Food Systems Booklet

A key interest of HCFS is climate change: both reducing the impact of food systems on climate (mitigation) and helping reduce the vulnerability of food systems to climate disruptions (adaptation). See our Climate-Friendly Food Systems booklet... Read more

Connecting the Dots between Food and Climate in your Community

HCFS was a part of a grant to La Plata County, run by the local resource efficiency group called 4Core, on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We produced a report on a climate friendly food system, available here.
... Read more