Centering justice in our values, strategies, and actions.
Welcome to the fourth edition of FoodCorps’ annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Report. To review our history of engagement with equity and anti-racism work, we recommend reading our first report, published in 2021. Later reports are also available on our website.
In line with our aspiration of becoming a learning organization, we do not shy away from trying new things—and this year was about trying new approaches to DEI. We implemented a new anti-racism strategy, and adjusted it mid-year when we realized it wasn’t serving us as well as it could. We’re piloting new employee resource groups (ERGs) where staff can connect, collaborate, and dig into anti-racism work in different ways. And we’re shifting other strategies along the way to better reflect our values, all with justice at the center. You’ll learn about all of this in our 2024 DEI Report.
Of course, one report cannot capture all our efforts—or missteps—toward creating the world in which we want to live. But we hope this summary shows a truthful and transparent snapshot of our progress and inspires you to continue following along. We’re grateful for your partnership in this crucial work.
As we reflect on the past year, we are proud to share the strides we have made together in fostering an inclusive work culture at FoodCorps. One of our most significant achievements this year has been the creation of competencies rooted in our organizational values, adult development, and identity development principles. These competencies serve as a foundation for the work ahead, guiding our team members as they navigate their roles within FoodCorps. Additionally, we have carved out intentional time for our staff to engage in learning, which is a critical step toward building an anti-racist learning culture.
Our commitment to anti-racism in action has been central to our updated strategy. This year, we intentionally centered the lived experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals, making it explicit that we intend to address anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism within our organization and our world. Countless studies, across a variety of disciplines, demonstrate that when we intentionally build strategy for the most marginalized voices, the benefits to all voices are profound.
Creating psychological safety for our staff has also been a significant pillar of our strategy. Psychological safety is fundamental to fostering an environment where team members feel empowered to take risks, express their thoughts openly, and engage in meaningful dialogue without fear of retribution. To further support this, we are making substantial investments in the upcoming year, focusing on manager training and coaching spaces to help managers cultivate trust and psychological safety within their teams. These efforts are part of our long-term goal of fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging across the organization.
This year also marked a significant shift in how we approached our DEI and anti-racism commitments through the introduction of co-leadership and the merging of our Equity and People teams. The decision to merge these teams was driven by our belief that cultivating a truly inclusive environment requires more than just policy—it demands a culture where DEI and anti-racist practices are embedded in everything we do. This merger allowed us to leverage the strengths of both teams, ensuring that our organizational culture, systems, and initiatives reflect our core values.
Co-leadership has not been without its challenges. The two of us approach this work from different perspectives, and at times, this has led to challenges in cohesion. However, these differences have also been a source of strength. The diversity of thought and approach has enriched our work, bringing a wider range of perspectives that ultimately support our mission more robustly.
While we are proud of the progress made, we also acknowledge there is still much work to be done. Our journey toward becoming an anti-racist organization is ongoing, and we are committed to the continued growth and development necessary to achieve our goals. We look forward to the road ahead and to seeing how our efforts will continue to evolve in service of our mission.
Thank you for your continued dedication and partnership in this vital work.
In solidarity,
FoodCorps Next, our anti-racism strategy, holds justice at the center. We know that food inequity is rooted in racism, and that we must radically reimagine the systems that uphold it. Here’s how we’re moving such a lofty plan into actionable steps.
FoodCorps Next is built on the principles of humanity, efficacy, and accountability. Together, these values create a culture where we can all learn, grow, and effect change. We ask staff to demonstrate these qualities through new core competencies, designed to disrupt white supremacy and imagine new ways of working together. And these principles also form the basis of our new power-building and movement-building work, which aim to equip people and communities with the tools they need to advocate for their collective well-being.
Midway through the year, we adjusted our equity goals to better honor our values. Shifting our path allowed us to create more thoughtful trajectories for non-Black staff of color and be more responsive to our communities. Our anti-racism strategy has three primary goals, rooted in our organizational values: to cultivate our people to bring their best and most authentic selves to justice work; disrupt and shift our systems to actively dismantle white supremacy; and maximize our impact so that our community partnerships are equitable, collaborative, and sustainable.
How do we put our strategy into practice? We’re prioritizing shifts that will contribute to a more equitable, sustainable organization for the next three years and into the future. We’re now measuring the psychological safety of our staff, aiming to foster a culture where people can express ideas and make mistakes without fear of reprisal. We’re carrying out our programming via collective action with our partner communities, centering the needs of those most impacted by injustice and making decisions collaboratively. And we’re placing even more emphasis on partnership and evaluation, using data-driven tools to measure our success and hold ourselves accountable.
Psychological safety is a shared understanding that individuals can express ideas and concerns, ask questions, and make mistakes without bullying or retribution. When people feel psychologically safe, they are empowered to be their authentic selves and advocate for change without fear of reprisal. We believe psychological safety and racial equity go hand-in-hand.
This year, we began asking our staff questions pertaining to psychological safety in our regular staff wellness surveys. This data will help us understand whether staff feel supported in recognizing, unpacking, and addressing their racial biases, ultimately creating a safer workplace for all. In the words of James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
From the interpersonal to the systemic, white supremacy culture is rooted in anti-Blackness. Centuries of anti-Black oppression are responsible for the racial and social inequities that still permeate communities today. Becoming an anti-racist organization requires us to address anti-Black racism specifically and intentionally. And it’s been well documented that when we center Black people, all people benefit.
That’s why we’ve carved out space in our anti-racism strategy for centering Black lived experiences and amplifying Black voices, which will allow us to disrupt racist systems and structures in more tangible ways. This will entail ongoing training, rigorous policy reviews and revisions, and robust accountability systems that ensure we’re making progress. Together, these strategies will help us to actively dismantle the systemic and individual biases that perpetuate anti-Black racism—in our organization and in our communities.
Black leaders in school nutrition, philanthropy, and other industries gathered at The Joy and Power of Food: A Salon, an event in New York City celebrating the joy and power of food through the Black experience. Attendees were treated to a panel discussion featuring chef Carla Hall and author Natalie Baszile, moderated by FoodCorps’ former President and Co-CEO, Dr. Robert S. Harvey. They discussed the power of food to nourish bodies, connect communities, nurture identity, honor legacy, and build belonging—and what joyful food experiences look like through a Black lens. “For me it’s really about [kids] connecting and seeing their pride in that food so that they share it,” Carla said during the panel. “We need them to share it, and we need those kids to want to be the culinary historians of their family.” See highlights from the event on YouTube.
Charlotte Sampson, a FoodCorps member in Flint, Michigan, and students at Pierce Elementary School celebrated Black History Month this year by making shoebox lunches. The special lesson was inspired by the history of Black travelers during segregation, who were barred from eating in certain restaurants and instead packed meals for their journeys in shoeboxes. Students decorated their shoeboxes with Black historical figures like Madam C.J. Walker, Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington, and Coretta Scott King. “They learned about those Americans,” said Charlotte. “They are taking them home today in their cars, thinking about those ancestors.” Local media even picked up the story, expanding the reach of the activity.
In Oregon’s Umatilla School District, 79% of students identify as Latine. So when FoodCorps Member Rosa Medina set up a cafeteria taste test of pozole, a traditional hearty Mexican stew, she encouraged her students to talk to their families about the dish and share their reviews. The vast majority of students loved the pozole, and Rosa worked with school nutrition staff to add it to the school cafeteria menu. “Students always thank me when they see me in the lunch line. They’re happy that a part of their culture has been added,” Rosa said. “Looking back on eight-year-old me as a Mexican immigrant in 1990, it would have brought me comfort to have someone that looked like me or food that made me feel included.”
This April, FoodCorps attended the African American Mayors Association (AAMA) conference in Atlanta, where Black mayors from across the country gathered to collaborate and connect. This marked the kickoff of FoodCorps’ Movement Building Series, a sequence of events over the spring, summer, and fall where we joined with fellow advocates to build support for food justice. FoodCorps hosted a fireside chat for attendees featuring the Honorable Mayor Tishaura O. Jones of St. Louis, Missouri, and our former President and Co-CEO, Dr. Robert S. Harvey, as panelists. We also honored Mayor Errick D. Simmons of Greenville, Mississippi, with FoodCorps’ inaugural Child Well-Being Champion Award for his work expanding food education and food access for children and families. Read more about the AAMA conference on our blog.
For the past several years, staff at FoodCorps have gathered in employee resource groups (ERGs) and affinity spaces, where they connect with colleagues who share lived experiences. But these spaces weren’t meeting the needs of all staff, and so we revisited our strategy. This year, we’re creating more individualized spaces for BIPOC staff to dig into their unique racial identities and backgrounds. And for our White Folks Working Toward Anti-Racism ERG, the year will bring a new model for working together, focusing on small group coaching spaces rooted in accountability and trust.
As of July, FoodCorps is no longer differentiating employee pay based on geography and cost of living. This investment is rooted in our orientation as a justice organization. We are choosing to disrupt the historical pattern of economic investment that privileges white, gentrified cities (and the people who choose to live in them), and to instead lift up cities that are predominantly inhabited by people of color. We’re hopeful that this change will allow for greater flexibility in supporting staff to live in a community that best meets their needs and allows them to be well.
It’s important to us to maintain a staff and corps that reflect the communities where we partner. Here’s how the people who make up FoodCorps describe themselves.
BIPOC leaders make up half (six out of 12) of our Board of Directors. And this year, we reimagined the role of DEI when it comes to how our Board operates, collaborates, and makes decisions. A new charter for the Board DEI Committee outlines each member’s individual responsibilities when it comes to equity and anti-racism, and other Board committees will be held accountable to incorporate DEI more consistently.
When choosing FoodCorps AmeriCorps members, we prioritize candidates who are eager to teach in their local communities. Why? It’s important to us that members can empathize with their students’ lived experiences in order to create a sense of belonging for those students. But after conversations with different teams, we found our measure of “local” was too rigid. It didn’t account for the types of communities candidates had grown up in, the languages they grew up around or spoke at home, and their cultural upbringing—things we asked about in the interview process, but didn’t capture when measuring “local” connections.
In the coming year, we’ll begin seeking candidates to teach in their homeplace, which incorporates geography, community demographics, and cultural upbringing. This new metric will continue to help us avoid saviorism in the selection process and ensure that our members can have long-term, sustainable impacts in their communities. We’ll collect information about homeplace from current AmeriCorps members, and incorporate these factors into the interview process for future cohorts.
As we look to the new program year and beyond, we remain committed to centering justice as we pursue our 2030 goal. The coming year will bring greater investments in our local partnerships, resourcing our corps members to continue leading in their communities, and focusing more than ever on operationalizing our anti-racism strategy. We’re excited for what’s ahead, and we hope you’ll stay engaged too.
We’re grateful to the following organizations and people for supporting us along our racial equity journey: Nita Baum, Kelli Doss, The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, The Momentum Collaborative, Beth Zemsky, Trans Affirming Consulting and Training, Elevating Equity, Talila “TL” Lewis, Tiffany McClain, Kenya Collins, the Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson, and the National Equity Project.
In the past year, these leaders from outside FoodCorps have been especially crucial in supporting our anti-racism journey:
Virgie Tovar guided staff and corps members in understanding the racist roots of fatphobia and honoring diverse bodies, food traditions, and health experiences.
Laura Brewer led a crucial workshop for white staff on holding whiteness responsibly, healing from white dominant culture, and resisting white supremacy, as well as a core training for our leadership team on control and power.
We’re grateful to our supporters for following along with us on our equity journey. Here are some ways you can stay engaged with this work all year long.
Drop us a line at deireport@foodcorps.org to share your thoughts, comments, or questions about our work.
Visit our Anti-Racism in Action page to learn more about our DEI efforts.
Visit The Skillet, our home for news, stories, and resources, to find educational materials you can bring to your school or community.
Champion equity in your community through food in schools. Learn more about national service with FoodCorps and join our email list to be notified of key application dates.
