May 26, 2026:
Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy
At the Centre for Local Prosperity, we’ve been thinking a lot about what Community Wealth Building actually looks like in practice. We often talk about keeping wealth local, strengthening community ownership, rethinking procurement, and building more resilient economies. However, it’s also important to ask what this actually means in a real place, with real people, under real pressure, across communities and sectors that often don’t have the opportunity to engage with each other.
That’s why we’re exploring food first.
Food touches everything. It touches household budgets, local businesses, farms and fisheries, schools, hospitals, transportation, culture, climate, and care. It’s one of the clearest ways to see whether an economy is working for people, or whether too much value, control, and decision-making power is flowing somewhere else. It’s a way to gauge whether systems are designed for the public good, or for the benefit of the few.
Over the past several months, CLP has been digging into these questions through a regional project focused on relocalization, food systems, and a just transition across the territories of Atlantic Canada.
This work is supported through Atlantic Action’s Beyond the Choir Fund, and it’s become CLP’s first deep dive into applying Community Wealth Building to a specific regional system: food.
Local Voices, Regional Networks
This work is being carried out in partnership with the Atlantic Food Action Coalition, a developing regional network focused on strengthening relationships and shared action across food systems in Atlantic Canada. Part of this project is helping us understand whether, and how, AFAC might serve as a useful regional tool for advancing community-rooted food systems. We’re trying not to assume the answer in advance. Instead, we’re listening for what people actually need from a coalition, where regional coordination could help, and where community-led work needs room to move on its own terms.
Our goal isn’t to produce another report that just sits on a shelf, but to listen carefully, especially to those whose voices often get skipped, to identify shared patterns, and to build tools that can inform both policy and community organizing across Atlantic Canada.
Our goal isn’t to produce another report that just sits on a shelf, but to listen carefully, especially to those whose voices often get skipped, to identify shared patterns, and to build tools that can inform both policy and community organizing across Atlantic Canada.
So far, the work has involved more than 25 early sensemaking and groundtruthing conversations with key careholders across the region. Those conversations helped shape a qualitative research framework, which has since been turned into two practical tools: a listening conversation guide, now being used in one-on-one conversations across more than 10 food system sectors, and an online survey available in English and French.
To date, more than 60 one-on-one listening conversations have taken place, with a goal of reaching roughly 150. These conversations include farmers, fishers, processors, distributors, independent retailers, food security organizations, Indigenous organizations, community groups, researchers, policy people, and others whose work is tied to food systems in different ways.
We’re also inviting people across the region to fill out and share the online survey: https://bit.ly/atlanticfoodsurvey
The survey is open to anyone connected to food in Atlantic Canada, whether through work, community, business, culture, policy, or simply as someone who eats and cares about where food comes from.
The survey is open to anyone connected to food in Atlantic Canada, whether through work, community, business, culture, policy, or simply as someone who eats and cares about where food comes from.
At the same time, we’ve begun synthesizing what we’re hearing alongside a growing body of research, including well over 100 peer-reviewed articles and grey literature reports.
A few patterns are already becoming clear. First and foremost, we’re seeing that people want stronger, more future-proof food systems. While that part hasn’t been surprising, it’s the consistency of what people mean by “stronger” that’s been striking.
Community-Rooted Food Systems
Across communities, sectors, and scales, people are talking about food systems that are more accountable to place. They want more people eating more food from local and regional sources. They want food infrastructure back in their communities. They want farmers, fishers, processors, and food businesses to be viable and accessible for the next generation. They want emergency food work and food banks to be less necessary, even while recognizing how urgently it’s needed right now. They want institutions to buy more local food. They want communities to have more say over the systems that feed them. They want governments to have more ambitious and binding buy local targets.
In other words, people may use different language to describe what they want, but many are pointing toward a similar horizon.
This has led us to start using the term “community-rooted food systems.” We’re using this language carefully. Food sovereignty remains essential, especially in its distinct traditions: Indigenous food sovereignty, Black food sovereignty, and the food sovereignty work rooted in movements like La Via Campesina and the National Farmers Union.
But as people navigate overlapping pressures around affordability, climate, labour, infrastructure, and supply chains, “food sovereignty” isn’t the only thing people are reaching for. Some people are talking about food security. Others are talking about affordability, availability, self-sufficiency, local procurement, market access, land, infrastructure, cultural foodways, labour, or climate resilience.
Community-rooted food systems gives us a broader frame from which to engage with this work. It creates room for food security and food sovereignty to sit together without pretending they’re the same thing.
Food security is about whether people can reliably access enough good, culturally appropriate food. Food sovereignty is about who has power, agency, land, governance, and control in the food system.
Community Wealth Building asks whether food systems create, capture, and circulate wealth locally. Relocalization explores what infrastructure, relationships, and markets need to exist closer to home. Just transition asks who benefits as things change, who carries the risk, and who gets a say.
Seeing the Food System Clearly
Taken together, these frameworks and questions help us see the food system more clearly.
And things are changing. Input costs are changing. Energy prices are changing. Weather patterns are changing. Trade relationships are changing. Public budgets are changing. Community needs are changing.
Given that this project is supported through the Beyond the Choir Fund, we’re also paying close attention to where food systems connect with energy, climate, affordability, and fossil fuel phase-out.
Food systems depend heavily on fuel, electricity, transportation, refrigeration, fertilizer, plastics, and long-distance supply chains. If those systems are going to change, the question isn’t just about how quickly changes will occur, but whether communities, workers, producers, and households have the power and support they need to shape that transition.
Folks are no longer questioning whether transition is coming. It already is. The real questions are: who will shape it, who will benefit from it, and who will be left carrying the costs?
That’s where Community Wealth Building becomes especially useful. It helps us move beyond broad concern and into practical questions about ownership, procurement, land, finance, labour, culture, and infrastructure. It helps us ask whether public and community resources are building long-term local capacity, or simply patching holes in extractive systems that keep leaking value.
When a region lacks processing, storage, aggregation, funding, transportation, or procurement pathways, local food can’t easily reach local people.
When farmers and producers face shrinking margins while households face rising food insecurity, telling producers to simply charge less or consumers to simply buy “more local” doesn’t solve the problem.
When food systems depend on workers, including migrant workers, whose labour is essential but too often made precarious through poor housing, limited mobility, weak protections, and temporary status, it reminds us that community-rooted food systems can’t be built on disposable labour.
When community fridges, food banks, and mutual aid networks are increasingly overwhelmed, it tells us something structural is wrong.
When food businesses depend on distant supply chains because local infrastructure has been allowed to disappear, that’s a systems failure.
At CLP, we believe that challenges and systems failures point to opportunities in waiting. Across Atlantic Canada, there are people already building something different.
Community greenhouses. Food hubs. Farmers’ markets. Traditional and country food initiatives. Cooperative businesses and infrastructure. Community kitchens. Local procurement pilot initiatives. Independent retailers trying to source differently. Food security organizations that want to move from emergency response toward long-term systems change. Farmers and fishers trying to keep more value in their communities. Governments and public institutions beginning to ask what their purchasing power could do. The list goes on.
The task now is to understand what these efforts have in common, what keeps getting in the way, and what kinds of policy and community action could help them grow.
That’s why this project is moving toward two major outputs.
- The first is a set of proposed pillars for community-rooted food systems in Atlantic Canada. These will help name the shared values, priorities, and systems conditions that are emerging from conversations across the region.
- The second is a roadmap for relocalization and community-rooted food systems. That roadmap will be designed as a practical tool for policy and organizing. It will speak to all four levels of government, including Indigenous, municipal, provincial, and federal, while also supporting communities, coalitions, and organizations working on the ground.
We’re still in the listening phase. This is important because we don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t want to assume consensus where it doesn’t exist. We don’t want to flatten important differences between sectors, communities, and traditions.
But we’re hearing enough to see what’s taking shape. There’s a real appetite for food systems that are more local, more fair, more resilient, and more accountable to the people who depend on them. What comes next is the work of building a framework that captures those shared visions and a roadmap to get to that just food future.
If you haven’t yet filled out the survey, we’d be grateful if you did. And if you’re connected to others who care about food systems in Atlantic Canada, please feel free to share it through your networks: https://bit.ly/atlanticfoodsurvey
This work is about listening first, and the goal is to turn what we hear into shared language, stronger relationships, practical policy, and community-rooted action.